No Cruachan climb today / House wanted!

Earlier today I pulled out of climbing Ben Cruachan, a fundraiser for the Oban Mountain Rescue Team: it's pouring with rain and very, very windy.
Also, I'm having to digest the ill-timed news that my landlady (and her husband) want to come back to Kilmore almost immediately. I do have two months notice, but it's a real blow to have to up sticks and find somewhere else barely a year after I moved here.

Not a very happy camper just now, but it'll pass and I'll manage somehow.

Any input re house for rent (possibility to buy at a later stage) is more than welcome: I'm looking for a 3 bedroom property in very quiet area of Oban +/- 5 mile radius.
Kindly add a comment to this post giving your contact details and I'll get back to you without publishing the comment.

A big day... – in memoriam Margaret Kay

Hiya again

The morning sun burns off the frost (28 Nov 2009)

Today has been a day full of activity, adventure, people, new experiences, new places – the kind of day that makes me feel alive. Some of you may find me tactless in view of what this post is mostly about – remembering someone who died not long ago. But I know she would understand: it is in the face of death that life becomes most vibrant, most precious, most intense.

Jackdaws gather at dusk (Lynnside, Oban, 29 Nov 2009)

Why was today such a full day?
I'm back from a trip to Perth, the town in the eponymous Shire in the eastern parts of Scotland. If you look at a map, Perth and Oban are more or less on the same latitude, but the land over there feels very different indeed – much flatter, with a huge sky. In between our two towns lie some formidable mountains. Today there was snow on the ground in patches, and mounds of dirty snow where the snowplough had cleared the road earlier this morning.

Snow on the ground near St. Fillians

I travelled to Perth to spend a few hours in the company of family and friends of someone who made my first 18 months here in Oban even more special than they have already been.
We celebrated Margaret's life in a beautiful humanistic ceremony that was full of tears and laughter and colour, colour especially.
Margaret died a week ago today, at the great age of 91 years and seven months, which in my book makes her nearly 92. Margaret was an extraordinary woman and she would have enjoyed the kind of day I have just had. Sadly, I never knew her in the fullness of her life, when she managed a house full of children and a big vegetable garden, or later, when she went off on archaeological digs all over Scotland.
While I don't agree that death doesn't make a difference, I do agree that those we love will never die completely because they live on in our hearts. And we can go on having conversations with them, and if we listen very carefully they may even answer – or we answer for them, because as we imagine talking to them, we change infinitesimally, and that enables us to see things just that bit differently.
It is to Margaret Kay's memory – and to her wonderful family – that I dedicate these images of snow on the ground near St. Fillians, and from between Crianlarich and Tyndrum, …
… from Tyndrum itself (where I love to stop at the Real Food Café), …… from between Tyndrum and Dalmally, where the road rushes down the glen almost in parallel to the stream, and the train, and where my heart soars with the joy of coming home …
… and of dusky but snowy Ben Cruachan and some hills of from Glen Lonan:

I know Margaret would have loved the colours, and the mood – and I hope you will, too.

Oban: autumn sunshine, first frost

Hiya

After the severe rains about a week ago, we had the first proper frost on Oct 30:
The same day, the evening was really pretty:The next day and the next and today have been really gorgeous as well. The lovely weather has given me a chance to test my lawnmower -- it still works!
In my enthusiasm I cut the grass this afternoon, leaving the clipped stuff on the green for a change so the wee beasties in the ground have something to munch on, and the birds too, maybe.
One of my neighbours, upon seeing the cut grass, shook his head and asked, "Are ye minded to murder yer lawn?"
Well, no, but I very nearly murdered my lawnmower: the sticky cut grass blocked the blade. Eh, one lives and learns...
But before I got stuck into my"grass" in the afternoon (the drying green consists of more weeds, ground elder, I think, and buttercup and stuff like that than actual grass, so I hesitate to call it a lawn), I went for a wee cycle ride across and over and up to Pulpit Hill:
Ben Cruachan on the horizon, with a dusting of snow; view from Pulpit Hill, Oban.
And I ended up having a bowl of minestrone at the Piazza, the lovely Italian place on the North Pier. And this was the view Oban presented in the midday sun:By four pm the sun was sinking fast but bathing the town in a warm glow:More some other time. Cheerioh and slàinte! (= "health" in Gaelic).