Tuesday 3 January 2012: Somewhere on the Beaufort Scale

Wind-blown spray (spindrift?) on Loch Restil, at the top of the Rest and Be Thankful. It was quite hard standing in the breeze to take this photo.

It's been a heck of a couple of days: yesterday, we left the Highlands in a couple of inches of snow - the heater fan in my car is kapputt, so the only way to stop the screen misting up is to drive around with the windows dropped, which, when the outside temperature is 1-2ºC, necessitates wearing a fashionable furry hatski and fuzzy jacket over one's knees... Comments about fashion-sense are hereby not invited.

Last night, we were bumbling around in the lounge when it suddenly got dark for a couple of seconds and the landline mains transformer blew with a huge bang, followed by a fair rumble of thunder - quite possibly a lightning strike direct on the house, or very nearby indeed. Further consequences include it having blown every ethernet port I had connected by cat5 cable - my hyper-expensive Draytek router (which, fortunately, I also loathed) and the onboard nic in the server box; the ethernet port in the macbook pro was already kapputt. Otherwise, all the surge-protection worked - the important bits are fine (I've already learnt not to trust Belkin crap for this - proper APC all the way now).

This morning, the power went out properly just as I set off with Dog; so I took the hint and the day off and went shopping in Glasgow. After a couple of hours trying to remember how to set the server BIOS to boot off the right drive, the universe is now powered by Netgear, and all is back to rights for a proper return to work tomorrow.

(Two images of the spray, stacked together; two images of the road stacked together; both stacks blended with selective masking to remove a couple of cars before the usual Darktable processing odyssey.)

• DMC-GH2:
• 1/160":
• ISO 160

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