Giving up the day job

Last day working with a Young Carer group. Idyllic, took them to a beach on Skye. Now to knuckle down & complete some of the project mountain.

selling me wares

buy yor lovely prints here, 2 for a pound... well £15 each actually.  First table of the summer for me, went well. good.

Bonfire

apologies for a few days break, been busy & away. catching up now. Hate to waste resources but no means of using or chipping huge piles of sticks, branches & wood in garden so Bonfire it is, will have to do another burn of two to get rid of it all. Nights are getting lighter, love the crackle & warmth of a real fire, a kind of magic. ..but theres still a cuckoo calling out there at 10.30pm !

Given to Fly

Took the Young Carers group out on a treasure hunt walk, very lovely, very pollen-y. Still cold here despite the sunshine & green buds bursting.

loch

Eddie with my picture.

Those of you who know me might have noticed that I am a bit of a complete Pearl Jam fan-girl. I didnt particularily grown up with them, they were over there doing there thing, and I was out there struggling on in the wilds, often with little in the way of music, means to play music or people to introduce me to music. But then came the internet, and decades to catch up on. Pearl Jam became my allies, my sound track through tough times, Eddie became a role model for someone who can go through a world of blackness & then channel it into a creative force, still hanging onto to life and love, open about it, dealing with it, helping others, with rage and attitude. There is a lyric for everything thats happened to us. Seeing them play for the first time last year with my youngest daughter, london 02, second row mosh pit crush, was an incredible cathartic emotional experience, we both cried a lot...and screamed. and I had a moment with Eddie during the song Alive... a song in particular which has meant a lot and kind of summed up the feeling at a time, when...well... Alive its an important song for Pearl Jam, and for me personally.
So the PJ fan club runs competitions, this one was for up to 3 entrys, on board paintings about PJ songs. The one above is the song 'Given to Fly' which is about not giving up, taking the hardship & " he still gives his love he just gives it away, the keys to the locks on the chains he saw everywhere ". I thought it was pretty crude, that there board is hard to paint on.The 3 winners were announced a while back, but I was just So happy to think that I'd given something back for the music & that maybe Eddie had seen it, its connecting across the barrier of fame & distance. But then today I got this photo in the post, with a letter saying this had been one of his top ten favorites. WOW. emotional.  I think whats important for me is that anything is possible, that one isn't stuck on one side of the fence, we can be who we want to be, get our work out there, make those connections, the barriers can be got around.
 Right next stop, going surfing with the boys, selling the movie rights, and having a holiday some time... okay okay maybe not everything is possible.

Nairn beach

a great family walk along Nairn Beach.

Harleys

Forest

explored a new bit of forest this evening found a lovely dark dense patch, what you can't really see in the top photo is how mad that little square of light in all the darkness was. Birds singing, what a lovely peaceful place.

dinosaur!

look what I saw on the beach this morning - it might not be a dinosaur though. Otter takes out a Heron ? I've seen it before. Day was I'd have brought this home, I think the spine put me off...

forest walk.

down by the river

geese circling, trees, water, otter run, ducks, seagulls, flowers.

thorns & bogs

There is an old enclosure behind this wee ruin, the forest has become so tangled with windblown trees, and what was a track 40+ odd years ago is now completely overgrown with gorse, bog & bramble, so we were forced to retreat from the forest. photo taken from other side of fence. I'll have to explore from another direction next time.

may day (evening )