I want one!

Christmas is approaching. I have already seen a decorated christmas tree in one of the Edinburgh's hotels! I am beginning to put together my list for the Santa. The number one goes to this.

Fonts

I remember my friend Monica taking pictures of various letters and signs when we were studying in Paris. Some of these fonts were really beautiful, especially vintage ones like this one I came across in Haddington's High Street. Btw, I still have trouble remembering that Polish apteka is actually Chemists in English as I keep on refering to it with it's French-like version 'pharmacy', to Simon's annoyance.

So this one is especilly for you, Monica!

Sell your own kids

I have mentioned earlier, spending a lot of money on not being able to go on holiday but for the price of mounting Simon's prints we could have had two weeks of holiday... with kids!

Anyway -they look gorgeous in a thick museum board mounts.

Last minutes of sunshine

Autumn is inevitably settling in. I went out today in a woollen scarf and my new wet weather boots. As usual I came accross some people just in their tshirts and shorts but some goosepimples on their calves just proved that the Summer is over. If it actually ever ventured that far North on the Gulfstream. Another umbrella got broken today but I proudly paraded with it, not taking care of a slight wobbling of the construction. It was still protecting me faithfully from a permanent drizzle.

Images actually come from several days ago when we peeled ourselves from in front of our computers and hours of image-adjusting and ventured out to have a lunch made of a baked potatoe, bought from a cafe in Royal Mile called Always Sunday (you bet, when you do freelancing!). Due to last days of the Festival there were no seats available inside so we ate our lanch sitting on the steps of the back entrance to the St Giles Cathedral. It was a last sunny day of September - it has been raining ever since.

I had a lovely two hours chat with my friend Monika from Krakow. We were discussing how Annie Leibovitz is going to pay back her debts. The deadline was yesterday, I think!

Fireworks!

The Festival officially finished last night and we had a chance to watch spectacular fireworks above the Castle (though we could not hear the music well from the place where we were standing in the street). My heart goes to all the dogs in the area who must have been in quite a state after 4 tonnes of explosives went into the skies above Edinburgh.

Under the Bridges

We had a dreadful couple of days with Chinese water torture in our very own flat (well, rented of course but we like it a lot). Though there are some good sides to this story - our wallpapered ceiling looks much better now than it did when we moved in (the gap from a previous flood has stretched and flattened itself after the current one) and we had a good excuse to go to South Queensferry for a couple of hours when it ceased raining in the afternoon.

In my opinion the best way to get to this little town on the seaside is to go by doubledecker (no. X43 or 43) sitting on the top floor of the bus of course. When it moves up and down through the countryside you can see the red Forth Rail Bridge emerging from time to time, like some sort of an ancient creature. The Bridge was opened in March 1890 and since then has required regular painting of its steel structure - a saying about this perpetual need of painting it became a feature in the English language, so that when they finish at one end the other end already starts peeling and a procedure starts all over again. Children are still teased that the trains go up and over the spans of the bridge like a giant rollercoaster.

The last image from this set has been taken from a train while crossing the Rail Bridge. The train DOES not do the rollercoaster thing, I do assure you.

Wet

It has been raining two days non stop now and this morning we woke up again to the sound of drops banging on the window outside.However, this time there were also drops falling from the ceiling. Inside. We have no idea what might have happen up there, in our top floor neighbours' flat. All we know that the flood was over after 20 minutes of dripping and our ceiling looks like that now: