SID 32 My Garden Needs Me

Sunday: I woke to the third consecutive dry day of full sun. Day one with a cold North Wind was a full warm clothing day but yesterday was very pleasant and almost warmish. Today looks even better. It's meant that the garden which has had two years of less work than it required, now has my undivided attention: 7 hours of it yesterday. So I apologise for my temporary occasional skirmishes into Blogland (usually during a mealtime). This weather won't last for ever and I'm making the most of it.

YOUR GARDEN NEEDS YOU

SID 28 A Feast of Monarchs

Ten years ago today I was preparing to get ready to leave my New Zealand life for my annual 6 months in Scotland. Before that, though, I had a visit to make to Pauline in Northland. We stayed with a friend of hers near Warkworth. I had posted about Monarch Butterflies on my New Zealand blog many times but what I saw on that visit was special. In these trying times the beauty of nature looms large in my thoughts.

SID 25 A Penny Farthing Diversion

Sometime last year I sent a card to a friend in New Zealand. He is an engineer and a cyclist and he and his wife both have electric bikes. During Art Deco Weekend in Napier one usually sees some penny farthing bikes being ridden. So the card I sent had this picture with a challenge to electrify a penny farthing. Over the next four ot five exchanges of letters I received his suggestions.

This morning I woke to a golden orb shining out of a bright blue sky. "What happened to the horrible weather forecast?" I thought. Ah well. Two hours later at 9 o'clock there wasn't even a hill opposite to be seen through the rain and mist. It's blowing a hoolie too. C'est la vie.

Anyway to provide a little light relief I decided to share the modified penny farthings with you. I, for one, won't be in the garden today.

SID 18 Busy Skies

Gaz, C and B are on their was home. As I write this they are above the Indian Ocean just over half way between Melbourne and Kuala Lumpur. It is one of the wonders of modern science that I can open my phone and find out where a plane is on a live map. Anyone who often picks up people from planes knows how unreliable airport sites are with their arrival and departure information. However, if I can see that a flight is in the middle of The Minch on it's way to Stornoway then I know exactly when to leave home so that I will be at the airport at the correct time.

So I shall track their progress across the globe until they land in Glasgow and are safe and sound on Scottish soil. 

When I took the screenshot to the right they were half way across the Australian outback. Their plane is the little red one with the route shown. 

However what really struck me was that with every airline apparently closed down what are all these planes doing in the sky? 

Lots of them will be cargo planes but lots will not. I thought the numbers flying over China and the Far East in particular was particularly interesting . I know from Marcheline that the skies over the US are almost empty. Which made me realise that if there are that many planes when the skies are 'empty' how many are there usually. Actually looking at the pictures now (10:04) London airport looks quite busy and the Frankfurt to Los Angeles flight is somewhere above me. It suddenly brought it home to me that if this is the 'empty skies' level of aircraft pollution what is the 'normal' level. Somehow my academic knowledge had not computed with my perceived knowledge. In short there is one helluva lot of planes up there and, therefore, one helluva lot of pollution.