The First Walk around Fortrose

I would describe today with two words: blustery and BBC. This morning I went on a walk down the beach to the point, where there is a wee lighthouse overlooking the Moray Firth. It was very cloudy, but the sky wasn't just plain grey. There were these incredible, subtle layers that even my clever camera couldn't catch, and they just made me want to paint and actually paint well. There were plenty of noisy waves clamoring for attention, making the water look all dark and moody.

 Here is my Granny's cute little house. I just love it. It's cozy and slightly eclectic with all kinds of paintings on every wall, including a couple of mine from middle school art class. My room has a lovely view of Aunty Bunty's garden. It has huge windows and lets in plenty of sunlight, so in the day we don't even need lights. She has a grandfather clock that was built in 1775. Yes, that's right. It's older than the United States.

These are gorse bushes. I love them. They're so sunny and beautiful, but they're also really tough and can withstand all kinds of weather.They really perk up the countryside. If I wanted to be a flower (not that I really do) I would want to be like a gorse. In reality, I'm probably more like a dandelion or something, but a girl can dream, right? That's the thought-provoking take-home question for today. If you were a flower, what would you be? Just think about it. 

I loved these sea gulls. They just glided on the wind, and this particular gull hung in midair in the same exact spot for at least half a minute. When I got to the point, the dolphins were out. Yes. I saw dolphins. It was hard to see them at first because their fins blended into the waves, but once you kind of trained your eye, they were easy to spot. There were a bunch of people there, and the majority of them had fancy cameras with foot-long lenses and tripods and all sorts of gadgets. I felt really silly trying to take a picture of those dolphins with my dinky little camera.

This was probably the best idea in the world. What a perfect place for a chair. I sat here (the cushion was a little damp...) for about ten minutes, being buffeted about (a very British word) by the wind. If you look at the grass, you can tell how hard the wind was blowing. When I got back home, I faintly resembled Aslan. You remember the bit where I mentioned BBC? Well, that basically describes the rest of my day. I sat down with Rebecca, who had just come home from work (at a nice little hotel in the village), and we watched Ever After. Then we had dinner. Can I just say, Scottish sausages are empyrean. This is my word of the day, by the way. It means "belonging to or deriving from the highest part of heaven." I learned it from a book I'm reading called The Man Who Was Thursday by the English wordsmith G.K. Chesterton. If you like incredibly wordy prose, anarchism, or rogue elephants, then I would highly recommend it. Anyways, Scottish sausages. Then ice cream and a bit of carrot cake that we bought yesterday, followed immediately by more BBC, Dr. Who and Top Gear in particular. I think I will end this post with one of Chesterton's many masterful observations: "He walked on the Embankment once under a dark red sunset. The red river reflected the red sky, and they both reflected his anger. The sky, indeed, was so swarthy, and the light on the river so relatively lurid, that the water almost seemed of fiercer flame than the sunset it mirrored. It looked like a stream of literal fire winding under the vast caverns of a subterranean country."
And one more: "I don't often have the luck to have a dream like this. It is new to me for a nightmare to lead to a lobster. It is commonly the other way."