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Quick one tonight! At lunchtime today I didn’t have time to take a photo, and then we have a youth group meeting this evening. I thought I’d pop out into the garden and see if I could get any good flower shots!

I think this is my favourite one. This is a sedum, which is just coming into flower now (they tend to come out in September, late summer / early autumn kind of time) and is looking very good. I do quite like the flower close-up shots, as you may have been able to tell!

Anyway, that’s it for this brief post, I’m off to start getting some dinner ready…

Today’s photo is another “lunchtime walk” jobbie. (Like I said, there are going to be a lot of these…) This is taken from the lock just up the river from where Tuesday’s picture was taken.

There is a little waterfall the other side of the lock which may well feature in a photo at some point soon.

Anyway, this photo was taken from a little stage just downstream from the lock (presumably where people can moor their boats while they open the lock). I quite like the symmetry in the photo – I wasn’t going to use this one but there is something I like about the way the water almost perfectly mirrors the sky and the river bank.

My photo today was – again – taken at lunchtime. There are a few little paths near where I work, this is one of them.

You can’t see it in the preview, but on the post there’s a little direction arrow indicating the walk. I like this because it’s absolutely pointless – you can only walk in one direction there! I wasn’t massively happy with any of the photos I took today to be honest, but I think that’s the purpose of this exercise!

I will also mention the car. I might have said something last week about the clutch needing to be replaced. Anyway, it went into the garage today and the clutch is now replaced. It feels a heck of a lot lighter and smoother now – I can see why it needed replacing!

Also… I feel pretty stupid admitting this, but I’ll say anyway because it might actually be useful to someone. When I took the car in for a service last week, I asked them to look into a potential problem: it seemed that the engine was revving when it shouldn’t be, i.e. when I put my foot down it would rev up and then drop back down again. I initially thought this was due to the engine – maybe the turbo was kicking in too early or something like that!

It turns out that it was the clutch slipping. I didn’t really know what that meant when they told me at the garage, but I Googled the symptoms the other night and it turns out that the engine revving up is one of the symptoms. The clutch was also getting pretty heavy – when I drove someone else’s VW Beetle earlier this year and then went back to the Saab, it felt like I had to put a lot of effort in to depress the clutch!

So having the clutch replaced fixed the imaginary issue with the engine. Just thought I’d say in case someone else is having issues with the engine revving when it shouldn’t… it might be the clutch slipping!

If you’ve been following my Twitter for a while you will probably have seen photos of the Chelmer before. I often walk down there at lunchtime. I think rivers are just about my favourite subject matter for photographs, particularly on a sunny day. There’s just something beautiful about them, the reflection of the trees rippling gently in the water. If you click through to my Flickr fleed you’ll find a few more photos there. This was my favourite, just about, but it was difficult to choose (not because I’m a good photographer, but because I’m bad – I always take a few photos, and they all look about the same to me. I wish I was more artistic. Still.)

I should warn you that I will probably return here several times for photographs – possibly even this week! So I apologise in advance if you get a bit bored. I’ll try and make it interesting.

Anyway, it’s time for a quick holiday update! Some of it I’ve mentioned in the photo updates. Last week we were off, but we were at home. We spent some of the time looking for curtains! – next month we are going to spend a bit of time redecorating out front room. We’re going to replace our blinds with curtains – we think it will look a bit more ‘homey’!

I also booked up a couple of college open days. I’ve been thinking about theological colleges for next year, so in November we’re going to look at a couple of different ones! Exciting stuff.

On Wednesday we went to Walton on the Naze, which we hadn’t been to before. We did a nice walk around the seafront and along the Naze. It was a good day for walking, not too hot, and we managed to do it before it started raining! Result.

On Friday we went to the cinema to see Scott Pilgrim vs The World. It was awesome! Brilliant film – I definitely want to see it again. Probably not at the cinema, not at the price they’re charging at the Odeon in Colchester (daylight robbery, I tell you!) but I’ll hopefully get the blu-ray when it comes out.

Um, I think to be honest there’s not much else to say. We saw Sarah a couple of times and watched some “Flight of the Conchords” and “Starter for Ten” (because it’s got Benedict Cumberbatch in, who is very funny although a much different character from Sherlock). I’ve already talked about what we did on Monday.

So there you have it: that, in a nutshell, is the second half of our holiday: didn’t do loads but it was relaxing! I feel much better for the rest – beforehand I really needed some time off! Felt much better at work today because of it.

We went out to Fordham today to have lunch with AJ and Jen. We walked from their house over to the Shoulder of Mutton and had a very nice lunch. Phil had sausages and mash, while I had a cheeseburger with chips. Good honest bank holiday food!

This picture was taken on the way back, not far from the pub. I think it manages to capture the wide open spaces quite well, and there’s something I like about the colours.

I should say, though – the original picture didn’t look quite as good: I forgot our proper camera so this was taken on my phone. The camera isn’t bad but usually has a bit too much blue in the photo. I tidied up the photo using the ‘Auto Adjust’ colour setting on Paint.NET, which seems to work pretty well. The colours are now nice and vibrant.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy. I’m quite enjoying this challenge so far, although it does mean I have to remember to actually take the camera!

All for now, for the time being.

Today we went round to see Jo for a bit. Evie (Phil’s god-daughter) was being very cute, as 15 month olds are, and I think this is the best photo I took.

When I say “best”, I also mean best in the sense that the others were a bit blurry! So this was the best of the usable photos.

Not a classic, but… isn’t she cute?

I’m afraid today’s picture isn’t very inspiring! I had a few ideas, but unfortunately it was a bit too dark and grey to execute them. Also, it started raining.

This photo epitomises what it’s been like this August: too wet to really use our outdoor table and chairs! I’m afraid it’s not such a pleasant picture as yesterday’s, but if this photo challenge is meant to describe what life is like on a day-to-day basis, this one is quite accurate for now ;)

I popped out earlier today to Castle Park to take some new photos for this photo challenge. You can see the results on my photostream, the one here is probably my favourite.

My second favourite is probably this one, not really sure why! It was a good day for photos today – the sun seemed to be at just the right kind of angle. Beautiful day, just after the rain so everything is fresh.

Anyway, hope you enjoy! I just hope I can keep this up for a year… we will see!

A couple of weeks ago I completed my first “fanvid”. In case you don’t know what a “fanvid” is, it’s basically a fan-made video created using clips of a programme (in this case, Ashes to Ashes) with a backing song. It’s basically a mashup, and it’s probably best just to watch some examples. Some of my favourites, done by my friends, are Anne-Marie’s Mad World / Life on Mars video, and Sarah’s Even Angels Fall / Sherlock video.

Anyway, I got really into the last series of Ashes to Ashes. The idea for the video had been brewing for a long time but I finally got round to doing it recently.

You can see it here. Note that this may give away a few things if you haven’t seen Ashes to Ashes series 3, so – you have been warned!

Well, I’ve done a new photo! Hope you like it. It’s a horrible day outside – grey and raining pretty hard!

So I decided to take a picture of some sheet music instead. I’m a musician (well, I like to pretend to be a musician at least), so sheet music is something which I find fascinating. The translation of the music on the page to what you actually hear! I’ll give ten points to anyone who can tell me what this piece of music is, but for those of you who don’t want to guess the answer will be at the bottom of this post. Anyway, I hope you like it.

On a related musical theme – some of you may know Phil and I often listen to Absolute Radio. Last year they started up a new show with exclusively 90s music, and just recently they’ve started up a whole new station which plays exclusively 90s music!

This makes me feel a bit old. Throughout my whole university life, 80s music was the old kind of music which we used to consider “a bit old but fun to dance to”. You know, you’d go out to cheesy tunes on a Friday night, and you could guarantee that they’d play a lot of 80s music. They’d play quite a few 90s songs as well, but that didn’t really have its own genre – it was just cheesy.

Well, now 90s music has its own genre, apparently. (I suppose genre is the wrong word but I can’t think of a better one at the moment). This is slightly scary, because 90s music was the stuff that I grew up with. When 90s music was just sort of lumped in with all the rest of the current music, I felt quite comfortable. Now, 90s music is given its own section, you know, just for those of us who are getting old enough to be nostalgic about how much better music was in the 90s…

I don’t know why, there is just something quite scary about that for me! 1999 doesn’t feel all that long ago for me (I still listen to some CDs I bought back then), and yet it was 10-11 years. I recently turned 27, which isn’t really old by most people’s standards, but ten years ago I would have thought that was pretty old.

C’est la vie. Life continues inexorably. It’s just one of those things that we all have to come to terms with sooner or later. Just don’t get me started about students starting at university this year who were born in 1992. 1992, for goodness’ sake! *Phill rants off into the sunset, or the rainset to be more accurate…*

The piece of sheet music I photographed was Chopin’s Valse Brillante, op. 34 no. 2