Then look down and admire nature

I love that the dried pod casing is still lying inside the flower

but then I just had to pick it out and take another photo

After crawling around the flower bed looking up I felt it was only right I look down. This poppy amazes me as the plant flowered earlier this year and now I have a new one - spectacular. I love the colour and the fleeting nature of poppies - one puff of wind and they're gone.

Look up and what do you see

Sunflowers and blue sky... bliss!

You can just spot a neighbour's rook here which shows the weird angle I was at

"Look up" was something I said to my kids all the time when they were growing up and it is now a bit of a mantra for us all whether we are walking in a city or the country as there is always so much to see. This morning I looked out my window to see bright blue sky having just read this challenge. I went out to our garden and decided to take a picture of my very large sunflowers against the sky. To take these photos I was squatting in the flower bed and looked very undignified especially as still had pj's on as when the moment takes you, you just have to look up.

My fence is 6 foot tall so this shows how big the sunflowers are getting.

Prima flowers giveaway...flower pics and back to school

Check out this blog for a great idea and giveaway.

I go back to school tomorrow for two days of in service training. I am often asked by people what we do on these days - usually friends who work who have to take extra days off work to cover child care on these days. A local Glasgow dj on Radio Clyde maintains we all drink cheap German wine (yuck) and play Twister. If only we had as much fun as that! Usually it involves us sitting on the plastic uncomfortable dining room chairs watching endless power point presentations full of statistics and acronyms. Anyone secretly filming our behaviour would be appalled at out lack of attention, doodling (I do this a lot and quite often sketch ideas for layouts), talking and generally behaving like our worst pupils. Why?  We we all think we could do it better, have heard it all before and so on. I have to say I really do love my job and enjoy teaching my pupils - what I don't enjoy is the endless paper and electronic trail (we do everything twice it seems) and administrative load that just gets bigger and squeezes the fun out of the job. I went to work yesterday (not an official day) and dragged Lens Guy with me as chief muscle man and drawing pin sticker. Why? Because it was decided our classrooms should be painted over the holidays so the last week of term we were told to take everything off the walls and shelves ready for painting. I needed to go in yesterday to put everything back on the shelves and put my posters etc up. If you know my scrapping style you can imagine my room - it is bright, cheerful and full of stuff. I will try and take a pic of the shiny new room at the start of the year - it might not be so pretty later in the year.

Another friend of mine thought it was highly amusing and didn't think he could come up with another job where staff would be expected to clear walls and furniture before painting and then put it all back again - he wanted to know why there wasn't a special team to do this. I think it all comes down to money which in the endless round of cuts is not there. I know I need to go to the supermarket and buy more pens, pencils, coloured pens and pencils and other bits and bobs as the department just hasn't got the money for this kind of thing and I like to visual stuff with my pupils.

Enough - I am obviously just going into decline at the thought of working which is mad as I am so lucky to have these seemingly endless holidays and having worked for many years in the private sector and had 20 days a year holiday I know I am lucky.

Hipstamatic pics and garden firsts

Here are the pics. I love the fact they are imperfect and unexpected. With these ones I used the "shake" function before each pic to make them even more random. It gives the pics a very surreal feel. The garden firsts are my first sunflowers out in the garden and my first bunch of sweet peas picked and grown in garden.

Progress on the muddy slope

This week the sinuous railway sleeper wall is beginning to appear. Lens Guy is still painting railway sleepers spruce green and at some point this summer I may be able to plant some pot bound plants like the poppy.