Some Pretty Close Up Bugs

So yesterday I was revising in the garden and Dad was gardening and he spotted all these cute red bugs! Apparently its mating season, but I've saved the blushes of my mum by not putting up the ones where they are actually doing it! :p
My camera has a "super macro" mode which lets me take pictures this close up. Its my favourite thing in the world! I do it ALL the time!

Now back to the revision!

Check out the wedding photos in the previous post

check out the previous post for all the wedding pictures!

This is just to make you laugh when I should be revising...

Worlds tallest man and matching dog*

*this is not the worlds tallest man, its my friend Pidge. And its not his dog either... lol

An Easter Wedding

Apparently y'all are missing me! That's very sweet! So I thought I would update you all on what I've been doing.

I was at Chris's for Easter and we went to our friends Chris and Ruth's wedding! It was at the church on Easter Monday, and the reception afterwards was at Rushpool Hall, a beautiful old country house converted into a hotel, about 40 minutes drive from Guisborough.

Me, Chris and Nick

Nick, Peter and Debbie
Chris and Ruth


The cake, made by the mother of the groom
The back of the dress
Chris and Chris
Julia (the cheif bridesmaid) and Peter, her other half.
Chris and me

It was great day. Chris and I were singing in the choir for the service so we got a different view than one often does. The old rector Philip and the new rector Graham were both doing parts of the service. The choice of hymns was excellent - All Things Bright and Beautiful was nowhere to be seen! The signing of the registers took place in the main part of the church, before the prayers and the final hymn, so the choir got to sing an extra two short anthems. After the service the choir processed out in front of the bride and groom and formed a guard of honour for them outside the church. A photo was taken with the choir, then we hung around for ages while the photographers were working inside with the couple, then we hung around some more when the came out and took pictures in front of the door, at the gate to the Priory next door, and in front of the car.

Chris's dad Peter drove us all to the reception, where we hung around for even longer waiting for all the photographs to be done with.

The dinner was really good. Starter was vegetable soup or a filo pastry basket with cheese and mushroom sauce, then the main course was a three-meat carvery, with the biggest Yorkshire puddings I have seen in my life and loads of piggies in blankets. Dessert was treacle sponge or profiteroles.

After the meal were the speeches. The father of the bride, the groom and the best man all said their bit. Ste, who was the best man, was totally hilarious, definately the best best-man speech I've ever heard or read! He began with a short anecdote about how Chris, the groom, had been doing very well in Craft/Tech at school, until the day he'd put a power drill through the classroom wall!! Then he told us about a memorable choir hike where Chris had sat down on a rock, not far from the end, and proclaimed, dramatically "I'm not going any further, you all go on, leave me here!" and had promptly been given a piggy back by the assistant organist. He then explained how when the two of them were at high school together, neither of them had a girlfriend. He could understand it in his own case, he said, but he was confused how it happened to Chris, a 16-year-old lad with his own mode of transport and a penchant for drilling things...

Needless to say, we were in fits of laughter, Chris's poor mum couldn't even speak for five minutes!

After that we all got chucked out of the dining room for it to be tidied and reorganised for the evening reception. A lot of folks went home to get changed, but we had planned to stay, and sat in the comfy chairs around the bar chattering.

A lot of people from the choir were there in the evening, so there were plenty folk to talk to, and there was a DJ, who played old school swing dancing music, as well as some more modern stuff, and my own Chris (i.e. not the groom) was even prevailed upon to dance more than once! There was a buffet, and the cake was cut and shared around - it had been made by the groom's mum Christine and it was really really good! We dragged ourselves home between 11 and 12, full and happy but totally exhausted!

Hmm... Falafels

Turns out I'm not a huge fan of chickpeas, so I didn't really enjoy the falafels I made last night.
They look pretty good, they just taste rather bland, and then the little flavour that the chickpeas actually had was kinda icky. They would probably be fine smothered in sauce - the soup I made on Wednesday went so thick over night I could stir in some rice and mushrooms and have a curry. I do like lentils though, I can see myself doing more with them. I'm certainly not put off the concept of vegetarianism, but need to try a little harder to find out what I like. Really I just wish I could afford the meat!

Not much exciting going on this week. Watched quite a few slushy films - Pride and Prejudice, The Wedding Planner, and The Prince and Me. All wonderfully romantic. Although you do wonder sometimes how people manage to fall so violently in love when it appears they hardly know each other! Having said that, I may be a little guilty of it myself...

Vegetarianism

I decided this weekend that I was going to go back to being a vegetarian most of the time. Why? Beans and pulses are cheaper than meat! I'm not of course going to be a real vegetarian - if a meat option is as cheap as/better value than the vegetarian option then I'll be right in there!.
To be honest, I was being mostly vegetarian before, just not in too healthy a way - I mostly ate bread and pasta, with dairy and eggs for protein.

But I was at home this weekend and looking through some recipe magazines that mum had, and there were some really nice-looking things in the vegetarian one, and they were all so much cheaper than the meat recipes in the other ones. Some of them are even "super foods" with more vitamins and minerals than I can count on one hand!! It's lower in fat, especially saturated fat (although dairy stuff isn't) and can still have plenty of protein.

So my menu this week? Home made tuna patties (tuna is cheap! and its fish, so its fine), sweet potato and red lentil soup, felafels, a Frankensteins burger (on Free Food Tuesday) and steak, courtesy of my mum, at the weekend.

Love it :)

Pretty Flowers and Pancakes

Things I love about Spring: all the lovely flowers growing. Pancake day.
I thought I would write a post about them both.

Every time I walk through the Meadows and George Square these days there are more crocuses springing up.
The purple ones are my favourite! I'm loving the super-macro function on my camera, which lets you take close up photos like these. The colours are so good, and I love playing with all the different colour and exposure settings, just to see how they turn out. I also really like the way most of the shot is out of focus, like in this one. And then all the tiny details of the veins and stuff that you can see in the petals.
It rained last night, just a light shower, but enough to make me all wet and to make my hair go curly, on the way to the library. It was worth it though, because this morning everywhere was covered with flowers and it was sooo lovely!


The other great thing about spring is of course Pancake Day! Its traditional in the UK to make pancakes on Shrove Tuesday, to use up perishables, like eggs, milk and butter, before the fasting period of Lent. These days people don't really fast in the same way much, because the church isn't so important to them, its more about giving up chocolate or smoking or something. But we still like to make the pancakes because they're yummy!

This was my first Pancake Day that I haven't been at home, and I nearly didn't make any, but then I saw people talking about it on Twitter all day and it made me pretty hungry for them, so I went to Tesco's on the way home.
We didn't have a mixing bowl, so I used a lunch box, and we don't have a measuring jug or scales either, so I was guessing really.
I used 6 rounded dessert spoons of self-raising flour, 1 teaspoon of baking powder, 1 and a half dessert spoons of sugar, and 1 egg, and some milk. Seived everything together, added the egg, then kept putting in a little milk at a time, stirring with a fork, until it made batter that looked like my mum's! I greased the frying pan with some oil on some kitchen paper.
They were pretty good. The first few were rather brown because the pan was too hot, and a little soft in the middle because I made them too thick, but I got the hang of it eventually! Also, I think I should use a spoon next time, rather than a fork, because they made a lot of bubbles. Or maybe they're supposed to. Comments please?

The last two really tiny ones were meant to be heart-shaped but I'm not sure that really comes across... Marsailidh really liked them, which made me pleased because before she said that she didn't like pancakes :D

Love this word cloud I had made of my Tweets on twitter :)
I find it quite funny that the unique tinyurl code for my psychology project comes up as a word (down on the right hand side). Do you use twitter? I'm hiccup42 there as well :)

Kisses From God?

So yesterday, I was having a really crappy day. I'd been home to get something to eat, and I'm going through the meadows on my way back to the library and what do I see? Crocuses!
Spring appears to have sprung! And I was just delighted, they were so cheerful, these sprouting flowers amongst the muddy debris of winter.

Their colours were simply gorgeous! Bright yellows, rich purples and pale lilacs, its was really beautiful.
Then when I got into George Square I saw that the daffodils had sprouted too, although they weren't flowering yet, and it all just made me so delighted, with all this amazing new stuff when a week ago it was miserable and cold and wet. Snow is great but its got nothing on Spring!
It reminded me of a book I'd read a while ago called Captivating. It was a Christian book, and the woman writing it talked about kisses from God. I never really got how great those were until today. I was miserable about my photos and there were these gorgeous new subjects all fresh in their beauty for my eagerly awaiting lens! Every flash of colour, every fresh green stalk was another loving kiss.
And the other photos? Yeah I'm sad, but I'd rather have flowers than snow. And the other ones of my friends - we were just messing about at the pub really, it was nothing special. It wasn't something that we would only ever do once. I'll never have the same photos again, but in a couple months time I'll have so many more that I won't even remember that I'd lost these ones!

So Happy Spring everyone! And I hope you get some kisses from God too! :)

P.S. Still looking for Questionnaire Participants!

http://tinyurl.com/c3cfp9
ta

Really Really Sad

I was going to post a lovely blog entry with lots of photos of the snow there was a couple weeks ago. I just transferred all my photos of the last like 3 weeks from my camera directly onto my USB drive, because my university drive wasn't big enough. Then my big fat idiot brain deletes them all from the camera. Then I go to reorganise the photos in the folder on the drive and discover that every single one of them is corrupted and won't open. I hate my life.

Here is the link to my questionnaire
http://capisci.org.uk/Y2limes/index.php?sid=64156&lang=en
But I just got a text from Chris to say that it isn't actually working properly. Maybe its just him - you could give it a go anyway

Having the worst day like EVER

Psychology Project

Hey everyone,

Not much interesting to share recently. I'm working on a project for my psychology report, and haven't been doing much else. I can't tell you too much about it because I will want you all to participate. Its an online questionnaire and some games to play, and I will post a link when it is ready. I would really appreciate your participation, we're trying to get the largest and most varied group that we possibly can.

Thanks in advance.