Swamped, marooned, ...

Hello again!

The weather up here in Oban has been absolutely spectacular over the past few days: pleasant, breezy, sunny, with nary a wee beastie bothering anyone. Mind you, as soon as the wind dies down, the wee buggers attack: flies in the daytime, droning crazily about the rooms and crashing mindlessly into the windowpanes that are so dirty in this place it's a wonder the flies still thinks there's nothing; midgies at dusk, that look like nothing but get into your hair before you know it and it feels like the fleas our cat brought home one hot summer back in the sixties and the whole family had to get sprayed with a nasty-smelling white powder -- I was fascinated watching the black dots jump about on the white bedsheets, mind. But that's kids for ye!

Feels like I'm beginning to catch a bit of the local tone in my mind, even though I've not had much chance of a good natter with anyone these last few days. If it weren't for Tom, "my" builder (he's a man of many parts, is Tom, and a wonder to behold), who comes in as often as he can and is hoping to beat the removal men to it -- my wee room that's going to be my bedroom/study has changed dramatically over the last few days but is still a day's work away from being finished, and that's being optimistic, but I don't want to go into panic mode just yet; I'll do that when the furniture van stands outside the house and the paint in the room is still wet -- where was I? Ah yes, if it weren't for Tom and a very pleasant plumber with as Scottish a name as they come, I'd have had almost nobody to talk to in the past few days. Fair marooned I have been, fair swamped with work. To the point where I'm putting in double and triple shifts and had to dash out to the shops and back, hardly even looking at the blue sea beyond the rooftops of the Oban seafront, but still very happy and conscious it's there, and enjoying the warm sun on the bare skin on my arms, and the heat of the sun on my back as I walked home, "the nice way round", along the Road at the foot of the steep cliff, and then off to the right into another little road lined with pretty terraced houses and carefully tended front gardens full of colour, and onwards, homewards.
But I'm counting the days -- two it is now -- when I can lay my hands on my bike and go off to explore further afield, and do my shopping faster and more easily. I won't do as the lad did two days ago, crashing into the kerb with his small bike because he was holding on to a square of plywood that was wider than his handlebars, almost as wide as he was tall -- no way should he have been transporting that wood by himself, let alone sitting on that bike going downhill! I'll admit I didn't dare look out the window (which is a difficult thing to do at the best of times, these being the old-fashioned, complicated sash windows of yore) for fear I'd jinx him and he'd have a real accident, not just a bit of a skip and hop and crash of wood on tarmac.
But I digress.
What I really wanted to do today was post some of my own art photos -- I've been doing so much hard work on texts by other people on art by other people, I feel a bout of creativity coming on:


Three guesses what these photos actually are. – Yes!
Three cheers to the winner. The walls of my wee room in its various incarnations, showing off Tom's handiwork a bit, very much a work in progress, mind, but a true work of applied art -- wouldn't you think? I have to hone my skills as an interior photographer, so more pix later.

Before I go, an attempt at photographing a moonrise over Soroba, not long ago, about 4AM -- I was just going to bed.
And yes, I promise, I'll go to bed soon now. Just four more shorts to translate, read through and ship off. They have to be with the client in the morning or else...
Nite, nite!