Bicycle photo

Very kind of you Alison to ask to see the bicycle photo. It's not perfect by any means but the background is suitably blurred and the cyclist is fairly clear. The idea is to give the effect of movement.

Photography class

I am back from a day in London doing a photography class. When I woke up this morning at 7 and realized that I had to get up, I was cursisng myself. I was wrong. It turned out to be an excellent day. I'm finding aperture and fstop very confusing but I'm a little farther ahead than I was this time yesterday and; more importantly, I have the desire to go out to practice what I think I may have learned. We went out onto the streets of London and practiced panning shots, etc. How cool is that. I won't post the pictures I took because there are 137. Most are rubbish but a few not too bad. I think one panning shot of a bicycle is okay. Anyway, a good day was had by me.

Rachel's Birthday

It was Rachel's birthday on Monday so we had a little tea party at the farm. I took a cake and there were presents and cards. The best card was from Chloe (see picture).






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Home

I have been back in Oxford ten days now and very glad to be home. The trip was excellent but it is always nice to be in one's own bed. The weather here suits me. I left LA in temp of 109F and got off the plane at Heathrow to 59F. What a relief. I went to Brighton my first weekend to see the girls and Harry. They are all wonderful. Harry loves his suitcase on wheels (see Alison's blog). I have started two evening classes; one on Critical Reading which I'm enjoying and one on Meditation which I love. Otherwise it is the usual round of family, friends and neighbours and that suits me. I had gotten away from the dinner party thing but I'm going to get back into that again. I like to cook and I like to see people. The days get shorter and the clocks go back in three weeks. It suits me. Judith and I will be putting the garden to sleep for winter. Because I have several large trees, this involves a lot of raking and composting of leaves. But then there is a break of several months and that's good too. I was going to post some pictures from Brighton but I seem to have permanently deleted them from the Big Mac. I was having trouble with it and I thought that possibly having 10,000 pictures on it might be the cause of the slowdown. Apparently not but by the time I had it sorted, I had precipitously dumped my photos. Ugh. Most of them are backed up on a hard drive so all is not lost. Adam is having a sleepover with me tonight. I'm glad to have bought the MacNugget because I have something to write on while he is playing games on the Big Mac. He and the Gee family are going to London tomorrow to get Chloe settled in for a week of work experience. She will spend Monday to Friday working at a PR firm in central London, staying with her godfather in Hampstead. I thought I felt old when my baby turned 40 in September but this is worse. She is a grandchild and not even my oldest grandchild. Oh well.

Catch Up 2

On the day before I left Burbank, I invited the Hacking/Jacoys and Darcy and Joe for Sunday lunch. Here are a few pictures.



Olivia has started dressing for Halloween already. She plans on being a witch but she is obsessed with the Wizard of Oz so I couldn't resist a Dorothy wig.





Daddy reads a bedtime story to his little girl.