February 29th at last!

Thank goodness the main body of winter is now behind up and we can look forward to some better weather, over on the forum we're running a monthly competition on the theme of spring bursts out, for which I haven't yet produced an entry, but since it runs for the whole month of March, I don't have to do it in a rush. Over on Ephotozine my last few efforts have not gained many votes, nonetheless I have been enjoying posting on almost a daily basis. Here's one of my latest postings.

Which got a modest nine votes. It started out when I took a picture of a burning match, then asked myself why would anyone hold a match for long enough for it to burn down? It was then the they came up with the idea of a burglar examining something he is about to steal, so I opened my painting of the Mona Lisa, created a new layer over it that contained the picture of the burning match, then erased the background to reveal the painting beneath.

The title was obvious " thief in the night"

1st Feb 2008: arctic Weather hits us

The day started well enough mild and with bright sunshine, we decided to go for a drive and have lunch in Castleton at the tea room , but ran into a blizzrd on top of Bakey Ridge.
Lunch was great, with the snow still falling heavily I felt it would be safe to head across to Whitby rather than risk the gales and Blizzard on Blakey Ridge onto to get stuck half way up the 1 in 4 hill out of Lealholm!
Fortunately I still had the Spikes Spiders in the boot, so had to set to kneeling in teh blizzard to build the spacers and adapters onto the wheel nuts before the snow chains could be used.
Eventually I succeeded, and we drove up the hill passing a stuck lorry, and covered the remaining miles to the coast road up hill and down dales with absolutely no difficulty at all.
The Spikes Spiders were absolutley Brilliant!

Once we reached the main road I had to take the spikes spiders off again, to conserve the chain, as they are not the designed to be run for long distances.
I was very impressed with the efficiency of the system on the snow, and felt that it was very unlikely that we would ever get bogged down, unless the snow was extremely deep.
We then ran into heavy slow moving traffic and it took 3 hours to get as far as Bridlington, where we shopped at the Morrison's and had some tea. From here on there was no snow, so we made good time the rest of the distance home.