Shelter

It was a day of sunshine and showers thunderstorms, on which I appeared to have become an actual rain god or something: every time I looked out of the window and saw light in the garden, grabbed the camera and went outside, it promptly began raining again. Every time.

Of the two invertebrates I spotted on the quince tree, one was wetter than the other. The damp one on the left of shot is a female Andrena haemorrhoa - unhelpfully known as the Early mining-bee, when in my garden it's actually not a particularly early emerger. The dryer one on the right, having bagged the shelter of a quince bud, is a male Syrphus hoverfly - I can't tell you more than that, because even though I managed two nice, clear photos, the hoverfly chaps on Facebook still couldn't identify it to species level.

I don't want to big myself up - this isn't digging coal, when all said and done - but I feel I have to point out that this branch was being wildly blown back and forth and up and down, and getting a shot with reasonable focus on both insects and the bud took a bit of doing. Just saying.

This evening I've being singing Rossini - which takes a bit of doing too. We've sung the Petite Messe Solennelle before, so at least I'm only re-learning it rather than starting from scratch, but the fugal passages are fiendish, and if you get lost they seem to go on for hours. It's great fun though, and I'm already looking forward to performing it again.