Sunny pleasures

Yesterday I started thinking at last about my trip to Spain. I renewed my EHIC+ travel insurance policy for the year and printed off my EasyJet boarding pass I was I little annoyed some fifteen hours later to receive a nagging email from EasyJet urging me to check in on-line. Confusing to say the least, but as EasyJet in the drive for better efficiency move exclusively to on-line check-in, so that all you need to do is drop off your bags when you arrive at the airport, there are bound to be teething troubles. This time I've opted to take only hand luggage with me, as last summer in Spain I found that I didn't need nearly as much as I took with me, as it was so easy to wash and dry clothes. So, I've had a practice run at packing what I need already. Now that the weather is more consistently warm and sunny, the trip to far hotter Spain looks more like the work it is and not just an excuse to escape from the British climate.

Before dining out at Stefanos with Clare and Owain, I spent the afternoon in the CBS office, making sure that communication from afar will be hassle free. Since Ashley's hard disk crisis last year, Skype hadn't been  re-installed on his computer, so that needed to be fixed. We'd used it when I was working in Costa Azahar, but not when I was in Sicily and it had just been forgotten. It's silly really not to use it when we're calling each other from offices, not least because of the ease with which exchange of documents can be effected while a conversation is going on, and then discussed. Must try harder to use more common sense. There was also the list of chronic debtors to be revised prior to taking recovery action - thankfully dad debt is small now compared toa couple of years ago, but we'd be better off with little or none.

This morning we enjoyed our sunny garden, uploaded Clare's Arizona photos to the web, and after lunch outdoors, went to Dyffryn Gardens to have tea, walk around the arboretum and sample the virtues of the Leica's wide angle lens in my new Lumix DMC-LX5 in shooting close-ups of leaves and flowers in the bright afternoon light. Here's three examples:

I love the way the sunlight shines through the leaves in the one above, and how it makes the flowers glow in the one below.

And the one below makes me think of something extra-terrestrial, from the world of sci-fi.

I was struck by the volume and birdsong out there in the Vale, in comparison with our neighbourhood, which is definitely down on numbers of garden birds this year. And while other parts of the country are complaining at the dearth of buttercups, there are vast fields of grass, gold and green.