Oak Gall.

I seem to be starting off a lot of journals with words similar to, "I spent a large portion of today," well today it was sorting ornaments, while tomorrow will be the packing of the same. On Monday, Said Nephew will be arriving in a removal van with a few relatives from whom he has called in favours, and taking all the portable property away for safe storage until the negotiations for ownership are completed; we are not a quarrelsome family, so I'm confident that good relationships will be maintained throughout. They will have their work cut out, so my intention is to try and lighten the load a little, it remains to be seen how well I succeed.

After that it was a visit to see The Old Lady, despite arriving late, and falling asleep, (it is warm there) we managed to hang five pictures on the wall while only taking one down; there are now only another seven to go up.

The blip is of a gall on an acorn, though there are two acorns on this stem, I doubt if the healthy one would have survived; it won't now as I removed them to do a little dissection, an act that revealled that the growth is actually the deformed acorn and not an appendage to it, and that there is a sticky secretion which is attracting various debris that appears to include: fluff, fungus and even a bit of cobweb as well as many assorted particles of dirt. I had expected to find a little maggot inside, but of that there was no trace, maybe it was too small to see. There were dozens (maybe hundreds) of these galls on this little oak and, although I am aware the oak is host to thousands of species of pest, I've never seen any like this before. The tree appears to be quite healthy in spite of its parasite load while its neighbours seem to be quite unaffected.