There's got to be a suitable collective noun for such an unruly collection of outdoors socks.
This website suggests that it's either "an odd number", "a stink" or "an oddnumber", but none of them fit the bill for my stash.
Other terms suggested to me so far are "a plethora", "a foot-fall" and the one I like best so far - "a march". If you've any others, feel free to let me know.
FWIW, here's my stash after I'd culled the duffers:
For me, the last two months of every year tend to be a bit fickle when it comes to getting in some hill-time. Factor in a bunch of birthdays, the inevitable Christmas shopping, the trips out to deliver pressies and the staying in to accept them, and there's precious little time left for getting away. It's not as if I can snatch the odd half-day or just bugger off one evening, overnight in the hills and then return the next morning - living in England's rotting industrial heartland means that any decent mountains are many hours of driving away, so any venture has to be long enough to provide a good return on the investment.
This year I'm taking a different approach - I've booked a weekend away, the rest of life will just have to STFU and fit in around it. Coniston beckons, a few of us have answered the call. Hopefully we'll find the right conditions to christen my new snooshows, maybe we'll even tick off a few more Wainwrights, but if we don't it'll be fun all the same.
Of course, while I'm away, somebody else will have the job of tidying up those loose ends. Here's a quick snapshot of the cause of the disorder:
Even though the two-week claim period hasn't yet expired, we couldn't continue looking after her without giving her a name. That process in itself was an ordeal - we'd made a long-list and couldn't agree, so we whittled it down to a short-list and still couldn't agree.
Eventually we put the names in a hat and Anna drew out the winning entry (which just happened to be the name that she put in... hmm...). Even now, we can't agree - the name is Elvy... or is it LV? Of course, now that the mog's been named it'll be hard if we have to let her go, despite her infuriating habit of chewing through my boot-laces and draw-cords!
Here, have a few more pics:
This little furry fiend had been hanging around the Close for at least four days and nights, hiding from fireworks and trying to scrounge titbits. Yesterday we relented, caught it* and took it in for the night. I've never seen a cat so hungry - it had no problems snatching the feeding-fork from my hands in order to glean the last morsels of food from it.
The local cat rescue folk have had a good look at her and have pronounced her to be about 10-weeks old and healthy... the vet considers her to be just over 8-weeks old and full of worms.
Anyway, it looks like we've been adopted by her. If she's not claimed in the next two weeks I suppose we'll be keeping her.
* We tempted it from a garden by offering it some cat-food, but during the grabbing operation it decided to have a damned good bite of my finger instead. This kitten does look cute and cuddly, but I can vouch for the fact that it has teeth like well-honed daggers - they went in all the way until they were grinding on the bone, and it didn't want to let go. If we keep it, I reckon we'll be giving it the understated name "Nipper".
Sorry this is a bit late but I'm playing catch-up here.
Saturday night was forecast reasonably clear so I grabbed the chance to point the baby R-C scope skywards to see what it could do. Although this scope is built primarily for imaging, I wanted to try some visual observing first to see how it compared to the 8" Newt.
I'd been told that aside from the reduced light-grasp due to the reduced aperture, the contrast would be reduced due to the relative size of the secondary obstruction. Well, I believed that until I looked at Jupiter's clearly-defined belts through the 8mm eyepiece. It looked good, and there were no issues with holding the planet and its moons in focus at the same time. I had a look at some Messier objects through various eyepieces and was similarly impressed.
After that I removed the eyepiece and put the webcam in at prime focus and went back to Jupiter and its moons. The scope has a larger native magnification than the Newt, so it was hard to gauge the differences, but it was certainly no worse, I reckon it'll make a fair grab 'n go planetary webcamming scope.
Finally I set it up with the D50 at prime focus and took some guided long exposures of a few objects - M1 (The Crab Nebula), Comet 103P/Hartley again, M33 (The Triangulum Galaxy) again, M67 (an open cluster in the constellation Cancer) and M74 (a face-on spiral galaxy in the constellation Pisces). Hartley was really motoring - in the pic the comet's elongation gives an indication of how far it was moving during each 300s exposure.
The data for the last two was dumped due to it being affected by high-level thin clouds, but I processed the rest and got some reasonable results bearing in mind the small amount of data that was used. I'm sufficiently encouraged by these to plan ahead for a decently-long session with M33 when the skies eventually clear here, I reckon I could get much better results with more data at better settings. It that works, I'll go for M74 which is supposed to be the most difficult Messier object for amateur astronomers to observe.
Anyway, the pics are as follows:
103P/Hartley, currently in the constellation Auriga.
Subs: 10 light @ 300s, darks, flats, ISO200.
D50 and AT2FF on the 6" R-C, guided with PHD.
M33 (aka NGC 598), a spiral galaxy in the constellation Triangulum.
Subs: 12 light @ 300s, darks, flats, ISO200.
D50 and AT2FF on the 6" R-C, guided with PHD.
M1 (aka NGC 1952), The Crab Nebula in the constellation Taurus.
Subs: 12 light @ 300s, darks, flats, ISO200.
D50 and AT2FF on the 6" R-C, guided with PHD.
By the time I'd finished taking flat-frames, packed away and locked up, it was getting light. I was knackered but happy. For such a small scope, the baby R-C has proved to be good and I'm glad that I bought it.
It rained nearly all night and the Saturday morning was looking grim. The only folk determined to go out and hit the fell-tops were members of a group of charity walkers who we'd been talking with the previous evening and who were attempting a one-day ten-peak fund-raising epic from Gatesgarth Farm to Stool End. By the time we were up and about they were long gone. We chatted with one of their support crew who said that they'd left loads of excess supplies in the kitchen for us, so we dipped in and chose a few items and left the rest for those that came after. I've just visited their JustGiving page and it says that they had to abandon their challenge due to bad weather, in a sad way that justifies our decision to keep our kids off the fells that day.
A final look at the hostel
After another fine breakfast we packed the cars and headed up to Newlands Hause just in case anybody had a change of heart and fancied a quick jaunt up High Snockrigg, but there were no takers so we took a few pics and headed into Keswick for a mooch around:
Moss Force
Keskadale
We opted for an hour or so at The Bond Museum - this turned out to be much better than we'd expected. Click the following pic to open more pics in the lightbox:
Gotta get me one of these
After that we did a bit of gift-shopping, had a tea-break and browsed the wares on display at the market, but the draw of the clackysticks on offer at The Outdoor Warehouse in Windermere was too strong. We left Keswick and, after stopping for a picnic lunch at a spot overlooking Thirlmere, we hauled into the shop's car-park and headed in to do the deed. From then on we were homeward bound.
