This and that and more of this

The beautiful weather continued till today, when it was mainly dull with a chillyish wind. On Friday, as usual, the children came in the afternoon and they played with the pebble fountain. 

One day we climbed Corstorphine Hill, enjoying the signs of spring 

and the views over the city. 

It's been so dry! Look at the dust-bowl paths. 

This is a translation into Lowland Scots of a poem about a snow leopard (or snow ghost, as the poet says here) which was in the paper on Saturday. I understand every word but use very few of them, so I imagine my children don't understand every word. Look, "plootering" - I used "ploutering", which is a variant spelling, in a blog post the other day. I should make a conscious effort to use more of these words, such as "stravaig", which means - oh, it's hard to find an English equivalent. It means wandering around but with an element of strutting - but more aimlessly and less confidently than strutting implies. And "cranreuch", which means so cold that it makes you shrivel away. A lot of the words are just Scots versions of the Anglo-Saxon or Norse words which have developed differently in standard English, so "wame" means stomach or womb - womb here, in its comforting sense - and "Ma whalpin wis byornar" means that his birth (whelping) was extraordinary - beyond ordinary.

Oh, the cherry blossom, or gean flooers. 

I don't know a Scots word for daffodils but aren't they pretty? Most daffodils are over now but these in the Botanics are particularly late-flowering. 

But here are the grandweans at the Botanics yesterday. They were pretending to film for their imaginary YouTube channel. Grandlad made Grandlass do several takes, coming round a bush doing a piece to camera. They took it very seriously. There was no actual camera but you can see him holding up his imaginary one while she comes into shot. 

We met a very friendly squirrel who probably hoped that we had some nuts for him. Or her. Unfortunately we didn't. 

Here's his/her friend, sitting on a sprouting gunnera.

Granddaughter likes to choose her own clothes these days. I don't personally feel that her pink top goes with her scarlet shorts, but didn't say so. Grandson, according to Son-in-Law, has even less interest in clothes than SIL does, and puts on what he's given without comment. 

Today - tadada! - I actually had some friends round for coffee - first a group of four and then later one friend. We were going to sit in the garden, abiding by the rules, but in fact it wasn't sunny today and was rather cold so we sat in the sitting room with the patio door open. Sort of like a gazebo, we reasoned. We've all been vaccinated and sat at least two metres apart from one another. It was very nice indeed to catch up with the news!

I'm nearing the end of the quilting of the ice cream quilt and once it's bound I must get back to the archives. And visit a charity shop with the stuff we've piled up in a bedroom. Clutter - hate it!