This week Ben decided to upgrade his computer thanks to his lovely folks’ birthday present and his quartely bonus. He got a good deal for all the bits and bobs online – 4 gigs of ram, a pretty decent graphics card, dual core processor and some other stuff I can’t remember.

I woke up on Saturday to an empty bed as it turned out that a very excited Ben had been up since seven, waiting anxiously for the postman. The morning came and went but still no delivery Poor Ben, he had to wait until 5:00 to play with his new toy. It was quite a fiddle to put it together as some parts wouldn’t click in properly but he did a great job . I watched him start to build it, with the vague hope that I may learn something, but ended up getting bored very quickly and went off to watch some trash on the t.v.

Well it’s Sunday afternoon and he’s been tinkering away with it most of the weekend, bless him I think it’s properly up and running now and most importantly able to play games! Woot! It will be interesting to see how they all play now. Im sure I will have computer jealousy lol although the good news is that I can have Ben’s old cast off which is better than mine.

Today we headed out early on a gloriously sunny morning to Glasgow Botanic Gardens to see the orchid show that I’d been excited about for ages. Ben was probably not so excited at the prospect of looking at table after table of orchids, but bless him, was happy to indulge me.

We headed straight for the famous Kibble Palace where the show was being held and I was very impressed with the restoration of the 19th century glass-work. It has been completely redesigned in shape and they have repaired old the old ironwork and retained the curved glass framework. It certainly has a unique character which is especially felt in the humongous spherical domed centre. It doesn’t look so big from the outside but when you’re in there it takes ages to walk around! Under this huge dome is where the national collection of Australian tree ferns is housed, some of which are enormous specimens.

Around the periphery of the dome is where all the orchid nurseries were supposed to be. What a site you must think!! An endless circle of glorious orchids! Wrong Unfortunately it was a bit of a wash out as only two nurseries had come along. David Stead the Scottish grower had a nice display of vandas and quite a few phals, dendrobiums & brassias for sale but nothing there tempted me. Ratcliffe nursery had some unusual varieties of phals and paphs and I felt that at last, now was the time to try my luck with the tricky slipper orchids. There were unusual orangey-red slippers in flower that I nearly succumbed to but it didn’t have a very appealing leafy habit. The gorgeous deep purple Black Jack types were there as well but it seems that every enthusiast has one of those. No for me, nothing beats a golden yellow slipper. I think it’s because I have a memory of my Dad showing me a picture of a slipper orchid for the first time, one with yellow lip with purple wings. I was going to go with the golden Paphiopedilum armeniacum until Mariano said it was very tricky to grow and I would get the same look and better results with a hybrid. So I bought a primulinum X armeniacum Gold Dollar which is quite small but a good specimen. I look forward to watching it grow and just hope I can encourage it to one day flower It is even more special than my other orchids as we bought it in memory of our little hamster, Tinker, who sadly died in August. I’ll treasure it as I treasured him.

I really enjoyed seeing Mariano’s display of carnivorous plants in one of the glasshouse’s smaller wings. I remember him telling us at one of the orchid meetings that he had to put it together in a very short space of time but the results are still fantastic.  He sourced lots of moss and dead wood and truly made it feel like he had picked up part of the plant’s natural landscape and moved it to Kibble. Another interesting fact about it is that it is the only carnivorous plant collection that isn’t grown behind glass. I’m sorry to say that I missed getting a picture of it which is a shame.

We went for a tootle around the rest of the botanics which didn’t take too long as it’s not as big as Edinburgh botanics. Sadly it’s also not as impressive after visiting Edinburgh either. Don’t get me wrong, it’s lovely but it’s like walking through a nice park. There weren’t any notable plants that caught my eye except for maybe a baby swamp cypress which I wish had turned colour. We had fun with some very friendly squirrels who almost jumped into my lap! The trees were also showing off their beautiful autumnal colours which always makes me smile.

We topped it off with a yummy lunch in quirky church that had been converted into a pub. So although the show wasn’t as good as anticipated we had lovely morning and both of us got what we wanted….. I got a lovely orchid in memory of Tinker and Ben got a mammoth bacon and egg buttie at the end of it.  Bonus for all

There was a turtle and the turtle was called Todd! He swam through space and ate all the space flies and had neon tube lighting on his shell. The funky lights attracted an attractive female, let’s call her Mable and they made the turtle love. Out came all the turtle babies, and they made up all the planets and moons.

Today we at last started a walk that we’ve been meaning to do for ages … the Pentland Hills. There’s various walks you can do including some really tough ones but we decided to attempt an easyish one as our general fitness can only be described as somewhat soft and flimsy lol.

It was a lovely clear bright day as we headed out to _______ . The start of the climb took us up through some fields full of the whitest sheep I’ve ever seen! There was lots of shedded wool everywhere and Ben had to stop me from making an old man beard, telling me I’d catch fleas hehe.

About half an hour into the walk it became a bit heavy-going, trudging in a constant up-hill direction as we headed up one of the Pentland’s lowest peaks. The bushes and trees fell away to very open landscape which usually,  I wouldn’t enjoy so much, however the long grass was quite attractive in it’s autumnal golden glory. What wasn’t quite so nice was the howling wind which blowed a gale into our ears. Remind me next time to take hats lol! Yet it was certainly worth it to look back over the views of south lothian and reminded me why people enjoy hillwalking so much.

Now here I admit we did cheat a bit and cut the 3 hour walk down a bit as a big black cloud seemed to be rolling in ahead of us. We cut across country thanks to some excellent orienteering by the Ben and found the path going back to base. Going off the path a bit, scared a local hare who jumped out in front of us and sprinted off around the hill. We also found a memorable huddle of very lonely weather-beaten trees which had grown contorted in the wind. Definitely a hill where a coven of witches would meet I think!!

The way back to the car took us through lots of bracken and was thankfully a bit more sheltered. Then it was back through more squelchy sheep fields. All in all, a good walk but definitely left  us thinking that  we need to improve our fitness levels. Shame we didn’t remember that later on when we stuffed ourselves silly at tea time lol!