What's happened recently?

It took a request from a reader of my blog to remind me that I have not updated recently, and I was surprised to see it was January the last time- I thought it was more recent than that!

I have been working at my old company for odd days per week as a consultant after my retirement last year. I always said I was available for work if they wanted me to, for up to two years after retiring. (This would mean up until the "normal" retirement date)

Some work was done in December after returning from a China holiday, and this was picked up again at the end of January.
I did not want to go back to five days a week and 9 to 5 working, but was happy to do up to three days in any one week. (and no paperwork or politics to deal with!)

So far this has worked OK, some of it has been spent in the building working at a laboratory bench and I was let out for a few days to support some project work in France, near Bordeaux.

As a 16 year old,  I had vacationed nearby with my parents, but was left in charge of my brother and two other boys of friends of the family, whilst both sets of parents went in to Bordeaux for the day (basically to get away from us) and I was personally disappointed not to see the city then- Some 48 years later, I got to see the city!

It is a very pleasant setting on the river Gironde. A lot of old warehouses have been demolished on the river frontage and this has opened up a great vista for the citizens of Bordeaux. They were wine warehouses for storage prior to shipping out to other cities/countries. Now more transport is direct the warehouses are no longer needed.

Today I was able to act as a mentor to a "colleague" from Hong Kong as we worked on the lab bench on a project, so that was a pleasant task.

Our latest granddaughter had her first birthday, so both sets of grandparents and an Aunt/Uncle with cousins, descended on the family, to find that the birthday girl was unwell and she went back to bed for most of the day. She did revive for present opening and cutting the cake, which was made by hand by her mother in the "Hello Kitty"style as shown in the photograph below.

Once this was done the energy level dropped again and she went back to sleep, but has recovered well in the meantime.

We have redecorated a bedroom that used to have a small window in one wall, but this was filled in when the house was extended on that side, and had a neat rectangular plastered area in the middle of the wallpaper! It was about time as we had left it a year before tackling the job.

In an earlier blog I put a photo of a mosaic piece I was doing, but not finished. This is now complete and shown below. I ended up wax polishing the marble part of the mosaic, with stone wax kindly supplied by Lawrence Payne of Roman Mosaic Workshops                                                                http://www.romanmosaicworkshops.com/default.html 
 as I realised that the grouting had taken the shine off the stone.

I also treated myself to a new DSLR camera- we have a camcorder that also takes still shots, but unfortunately a fault has developed which makes it unreliable and co-incidentally E's digital compact also developed a fault so a new one was obtained for her as well.

This new DSLR takes pictures at an amazing 18 mega pixels so the level of detail in the pictures is amazing- I am still getting used to it, so have been out and about taking pictures under different conditions. Luckily as it is a Canon camera and I previously owned, and still have,an old Canon film camera, the lenses I had, fitted the new camera, and do work, but need a bit of fiddling with in between shots, so will supplement the standard lens until I can trade them in for a more up to date one.
The Cake picture above was taken using the new camera.

Our dog, Rosie,  had her second birthday, and in our house we always celebrate this with a cake (according to Blue peter it should be a savoury one) which we can all eat- the dog has a slice cut up on a plate and we have a piece as well. This is our fourth family dog, and each one has had a cake on their birthday. Below piccie of her relaxing after eating!

Sasha lived for 14 years, Matt for 11 years and Homer for at least 10 years with us (and up to two years before we rescued him) and Rosie is the latest. All have been rescue dogs. Homer was the only one without a known history as he was picked up from the side of a motorway in Scotland, and the other three were to much for the owners to cope with, had not been mistreated and turned out to be lovely family pets.
A bit of a gallop through the last few months and I have probably missed some things out which I will remember later!

More of China holiday

More pictures from China

Speed of the Maglev train from Shanghai centre to Pudong airport. Max speed 431km/h (267.5 mph)- this journey took just over 7 mins. Once the maximum speed is reached the train starts to slow down again . The train going the other way and this one pass each other at about 340km/h each, approx 680km/h (423 mph) closing speed and there is a momentary shake of the carriage and a whumping noise. There is a competion to win money for the first person to photograph the front of the approaching train whilst on the other train - a bit mission impossible I think.

Vertigo inducing view down the inside of the tallest tower in Shanghai-the Jin Mao tower,  the top 35 floors (of 88) are a Hilton hotel. and all the rooms are on the outside of the building leaving an atrium in the middle- if you look carefully, you can see the reception at the bottom.

As well as the normal black and white Panda, the Chengdu sanctuary has red pandas- they are much more active, and smaller than the Giant Pandas.

This was a group (probably office) outing spotted in the park near the Little Wild Goose Pagoda in Guillin. They were dancing to music and we stopped and watched them for a while, then they asked us to join in a circular dance, where we all linked hands and danced around and around, much to the hilarity of the Chinese dancers.(we were exhausted and they just carried on after we left!)

Also at the Little Wild Goose pagoda in Guillin- we were given an elementary Tai-Chi lesson.

Cormarant with neck tied to stop it swallowing fish- taken at night on the Li River in Guillin - the traditional cormarant fishing is now mainly for tourists but some does still go on. The fish that were caught when we watched, about four of them, would be given to the cormarants for their evening meal later.

Silk worms eating mulberry leaves. They grow rapidly and are fully grown at about 25 days or so. They basically eat, sleep and grow.

Silk worm cocoons being sorted- some of them are double cocoons and this is the most expensive silk- two silk worms spinning near each other join up to make a bigger cocoon.

A semi automatic silk spinning mill- the coccons are kept in hot water and the strands from 8 cocoons are combined to make one silk thread and wound on to a bobbin.