Just a perfect day

It sometimes takes very little to make me happy. What I wanted from today was to do largely nothing, to go to the dump, to do a spot of local birding with my camera, and to take some photos of the kids. That's me, rock and roll. I didn't want to drive a long way to see a bird - it would have needed to have been spectacular and close. And lo and behold the day passed exactly as I intended, which unfortunately makes for a very boring blog post indeed. Such is life, and with a few semi-serious topics covered recently, there has been a distinct lack of colour. This I intend to rectify right now.

But first the kids. I started writing this in 2009, and I'm coming up to five years of bashing it out. This means that back then they were pretty small, but look at them now! My eldest is about to turn ten, I can scarcely believe it. I took this photo on Wanstead Flats this afternoon when we went out and had a run around. No binoculars involved! Though a tripod did come as I wanted to take a proper photograph of them.....I know this is highly self-indulgent, but just look at them! Twenty-five years ago, when I was a spotty oik, you could have had simply amazing odds on this outcome.



That was this afternoon. Prior to this was a very satisfying trip to the tip. I had been in the loft to find a cardboard box in which to package one of those speakers I flogged on Ebay (£226 thank you very much Mr. I'll-take-them-off-your-hands-for-£150!). When I was up there I stubbed my toe on what turned out to be an old computer monitor, you know, a big square one of the sort that don't exist any more. Next to that was an old TV, again large and square. Then I found a keyboard and mouse from about 1995, and a heap of original cardboard packaging for stuff that had gone years ago. Before I knew it I was heaving all this crap down the ladder and into the car, such that this morning there was no alternative but to drive it to the tip, where a man who was clearly not from round here nearly didn't let me in as he didn't know where Wanstead was and if it was part of Redbridge or not.

After a lot of strenuous heaving, I was left with two items in the car - a large lens and a tripod. Good thing I didn't get carried away and chuck them into the electricals skip....Instead I took them to Wanstead Park, where I spent a happy hour or so determining that 800mm and a 1.4x converter are a pretty useful pairing when there is no heat in the air. Nothing particularly special on Heronry, but bar an hour last weekend I'd not fired off a frame off all week, and I don't want to stagnate. Here's a few from the session - lovely light early afternoon as you can see, and still some autumn colour.