Just odds and ends
This week: Just odds and ends; Recording memories;
Once again I awoke this week to a sepia haze on the northern horizon and the faint but distinct smell of smoke.
Burning materials produce different but distinct aromas. There is the acrid smell of burning plastic, charcoal doesn’t have a smell, but the drops of fat from searing meat means the smell of a barbecue is also unmistakable.
Likewise a forest fire has an unmistakable aroma, even from a long way off. The fire I could smell was around the tourist town of Omiš and had been burning since the previous evening.
Our Canadair water bombers cannot fly at night, so while tourists were being evacuated from the town and being taken to Split, Fire and Rescue resources were being moved along the Adriatic Highway to support the local Vatrogasci.
The fire was brought under control by Friday afternoon, but not before it had burnt homes and vehicles, and injuring more than 30 people.
Because of the number of fires in Dalmatia, the Croatian Air Force had relocated Canadair CL-415 and Air Tractor water bombers to the airport on Brač from their base in Zadar.
The Brač Airport does handle international flights but is not as busy as Split, so having the Canadair’s there to refuel and resupply makes sense, because they are then very close to where the major fires have been this week.
We have had another scorching week, with daytime temperatures of 38°C and for the first time this year, and night time temperatures which have not dropped below 25°. Just unpleasantly hot!
The early weeks of August are always hot, but this year because of the four previous heatwaves, there is no moisture in the ground and after our wet winter, a mass of tinder dry fuel is in the forests. The forests are major fires, just waiting to happen.
On Saturday the fire is out but the destruction is everywhere.
One person has sadly died, 11 are in intensive care in Split and 30 more still in hospital.
Just odds and ends
The only time to work outside is between dawn and 08:00. Between those times, the outside temperature is comfortable.
By eight o’clock this week, the temperature has often been 32°C with high humidity. I have not done any project work at all and just done some repairs and maintenance.
At least an hour every morning is taken up with carrying water to various trees and shrubs, which are under severe stress. I have given up on most of my Citrus trees because I simply cannot sustain using thousands of litres of precious water, to keep trees alive.
We had a meeting of the Monday Breakfast Club this week, so I needed to prepare my contribution.
Being hot, even at breakfast time, I decided on an old favourite, a cheese and tomato quiche. I made the pastry base on Sunday and then left it in the refrigerator overnight, so it was nice and cold on Monday morning.
Monday dawned hot and sunny again and being an early riser, I had the pastry in the oven for “blind baking” at 6.30. Once the base had been cooked, I added the other ingredients, the tomatoes, cheese and beaten eggs and baked for an hour while I irrigated.
It came out perfect and I think was enjoyed by all.
Talking to one near neighbour, they were telling me that they are thinking about refurbishing their old water cisterns to make sure that in future, they have drinking water.
I have three similar cisterns, created according to the date stone on one, in 1909 with dynamite. They are empty because I use the water they collect in winter, for irrigation.
So there is a recognition that there is climate emergency, but no consensus on what should be done.
With a very small chance of a thunderstorm on Tuesday morning next week, I was looking at moving the logs from the east orchard into my winter wood storage area.
I must be honest, I’ve not been round to check on this part of my property for probably six or eight weeks.
I was surprised that the stump of another Nettle Tree, which I thought I had fettled in the spring has managed to sprout and the young branches were blocking the path.
For a second time this year, I cut back all the new shoots and treated them with a brushwood killer.
This old tree is tight up against a building’s wall and needs to be removed, but its location makes that difficult. It is hard to even get a chain saw in to cut the remaining trunk back, so trying to kill the roots is the only real way.
The Nettle Tree I cut down in the spring and then treated with brushwood killer has not sprouted again.
I also treated a number of bramble briars as well.
While I am trying and failing to keep a number of really nice plants and shrubs alive, there are others which self seed and grow despite my efforts to prevent them from doing so!
Plums and figs are ripe and I have been picking the fruit. These are the middle season plums and I didn’t have enough to make it worth while to preserve them for the winter. So they have been eaten as fresh fruit instead.
I have another two plum trees where the fruit are not quite ripe yet. On those trees there will be enough plums to make some into preserves.
Down in the Top Orchard, I have been watering my Persimmon tree. I noticed that the leaves were showing signs of stress and young fruit were starting to shrivel.
Persimmons are not harvested until late October, so at this stage of the fruit growth, they shouldn’t be under stress, but there is little I can do about it.
The days are getting noticeably shorter, which is one reason I do not like the month of August.
With our sunrise now at 06:00 and sunset at 20:00, there are just 14 hours of sunshine, an hour and twenty minutes less than the middle of June.
I really don’t like the longer evenings…
Recording memories
The heat this week has been extreme again.
Saturday has cooled a little. It is “only” 33°C, down from the 36°C to 39°C of earlier in the week, however it doesn’t feel any cooler. Night time lows this week have not dropped below 25°C.
This means that much of my day has been spent inside, working on various computer projects.
Sitting next to a window, where because of the pressure differential on the different sides of my building, there is usually a breeze, has made indoor work less unpleasant.
A few readers will be aware that I manage several on-line groups, the majority relating to police history. So I am often in conversation with colleagues in different parts of the world about out mutual interests.
At the start of the month, someone posted a photograph of an Edinburgh City Police “Dr WHO” box, which as well as the flashing lamp, has a WWII Air Raid siren mounted on the roof.
I remarked that when the siren was running, the noise inside the police box would be unbearable.
A colleague who had used the box AND one Sunday morning had started the siren running, confirmed my thoughts.
He then went on to add that he belongs to a real world group who meet regularly in Perth, to remember the jolly japes and tall tales of times past. He remarked that this was eminently more preferable to meeting at funerals!
I agreed. For years I have tried to encourage oral history projects, to record exactly these snippets of social history, by those who were there, whilst they are still able to do so.
As a result of this interaction, one thought I had was to imagine a young person looking at a photo album and asking a grandparent “What did you used to do?” revealing a story of hard work, love of a job, and changing times.
But how do you turn a concept into a real world project?
I had an image in mind, but needed to create it, so needed some of my software.
Apart from Windows, the software I have used the longest is CorelDRAW. This is software I first bought in 1989 when it came on five floppy discs. Over the years I have upgraded regularly and have used the various elements of the software as it developed.
It is a professional set of programmes for graphic design, photo editing and scanning. However when I tried to use it this week, I kept getting load errors.
After removing the programme and reinstalling it, it still wouldn’t work. I contacted Corel Tech Support who informed me that because I bought my copy in January 2024, it was now no longer supported and I needed to buy the 2026 version.
When you contact Tech Support, you usually wait at least a day to get responses, so my interactions were over several afternoons.
I wasn’t prepared to pay another €350, two years after my last upgrade, so looked around for an alternative. I found an open source programme called Inkscape so downloaded and installed it. It worked straight away.
The next problem was to create the image I wanted. I worked for some time to get the right photographs into the album, but was happy with the result.
On Friday I used the image I had created in one of my groups and invited colleagues to reminisce on their years of service.
It worked because as of Saturday afternoon, there have been almost 100 posts with photographs and comments. This was exactly what I had in mind.
Whilst there have been no voice notes (yet), my plan is to make this a weekly feature so that colleagues can record their memories about their years of service.
Over time I will include some of the photographs I have taken, like this one.
However this is not about me, it is about all the individuals who have given decades of service to the public, at a time when it was valued and respected. NCG