First midges and Amazonian quirks

In keeping with our usual weather, today was chillier than the last couple of days, the sun was barely apparent, and it rained, slightly and intermittently, from early afternoon. Knowing this was coming, and that therefore I'd not be tempted to loiter in the garden, I had all sorts of ideas about what I might accomplish (like the ironing waiting to be done since we returned from Madeira ...) but did hardly any of them (the ironing is untouched.) Instead I fell asleep again when I should have been getting up, I loitered over breakfast reading The Early Line, and then Himself demanded to check that the insurance for our forthcoming holiday was all in order and I hadn't yet organised the paperwork and ... I did get a few things into a bag for tomorrow, and I had a couple of phone calls, but then it was lunchtime. 

We went for a walk along the far side of Loch Eck later, when I discovered that if I walked steadfastly and on the level (as opposed to the ditch, or the wrong side of the camber) my strangely painful knee didn't click alarmingly and felt relatively ok. We marvelled at the great new piles of felled tree-trunks, casualties from Benmore Gardens' suffering in Storm Eowyn, and we marvelled also at the persistence of the felled tree in the photo, now in full leaf despite its horizontal position, and at the fact that the tree next to it is unscathed. 

My extra photo - which is an odd shape and may not work properly - shows the record of a book purchase I made on Amazon last week. I was loaned Eve: Her Story by Penelope Farmer some time ago, and enjoyed it so much I wanted to buy a copy, either for myself or to give to someone. Despite my looking it up correctly, and the recognisable cover coming up in the "used" category (it seems to be no longer available new) the title was given as Scipio: Her story. The mind boggles as to why the name of a Roman general who made his name fighting Carthage should replace the name of the very Eve from the Garden of Eden; the book duly arrived and is the same edition as the one I borrowed so it's a mystery. Any ideas? (By the way, if you're at all interested in having a sort of feminist view of life in the Garden and interaction with the Serpent - a very attractive character as opposed to the troublesome archangels - it'd be worth trying to get your hands on a copy...)

And lastly, but very importantly: I encountered the first midges of the year as the afternoon drew to a close. And I think it was something slightly larger than a midge that I swallowed while walking and talking at the same time...