Full (moon) Weekend.

Saturday rolled around and the sun was shining. Unusually, though, we had a party to go to in the late afternoon, so we weren't able to dawdle just quite as much as usual. It was a shame because the sun was shining brightly and a new week had brought a new selection of butterflies for us to chase. I laughed at Peter when he first started butterfly hunting, but it's engrossing - and needs a lot of time and patience. And skillz.

Classic butterfly shot.

Highlight of the day was hearing an extended rustle in the long grasses on the Aberlady nature reserve. I thought maybe I'd get lucky and see a mouse - but the rustler turned out to be a beautiful little toad. His warts are quite obvious in the photos but actually he was so little he looked smooth. He seemed to like his new vantage point sitting on Peter's hand and was in no hurry to get away.

So fast forward - we caught a train and went to a party in Bridge of Allan and I drank more in a few hours than I have in the last 6 months and ate two kinds of cake. Just passing the time you know. We got the 10 O'clock train home and I tried to take pictures of the moon out the window. 

Saturday night was in full swing by that time though and I nearly made a new friend with a big gash in his forehead at Stirling Station. I had to withdraw eye contact radically in order not to further encourage that particular connection. The train filled up with teenage girls with nearly no clothes on and young tattoed gentlemen. The train staff reminded people gently that drinking on the train was to stop after 9pm, but they only said it over the tannoy. I don't blame them. Nothing much happened though. Most people got off at Polmont, presumably to go back to the young offender's unit for the night.

Oh dear I've turned into a grumpy older person. I don't know what happens. Your aura gets bigger and your desire for other people to be in it gets smaller. I was probably already progressing to the hungover stage and I felt encroached on by city night-life  and its drunken denizens. I would rather have been out on the nature reserve at Aberlady, communing with the toad under the golden summer moon.

None of this was helped by Peter - who drank a lot more than me - deciding to tell me all about some program he'd seen "by mistake" where a man chooses from a selection of  naked ladies who are revealed slowly from the bottom up. When he has his preferences whittled down to two ladies, he is also asked to remove his clothes and the ladies are asked to give their opinion on his willy. Peter, who had warmed to his topic, opined on several occasions that it was "The end of civilisation."

He was at that stage of drunkenness, where, when I expressed the opinion that if he didn't like it he could have put the telly off, he took this as a sign that I hadn't properly understood and started to explain the whole thing to me again. Oh holy crap.

So anyway. Fast forwards to today. I woke up and got up very late for me. I was afraid as I went to bed that the heat and my hangover would keep me awake, but I needn't have worried because I slept deeply and woke up late.  

I really wanted to get back out to Gullane and pick up where we'd left off the day before, but this time without a time limit - but the weather forecast had radically worsened and it looked like it might be a long trip to go and run around in the rain. So we settled on running locally. I thought we could do my Arthur's Seat 10 miler.

I usually try to do this at some kind of pace and set off with that intention - but Peter and I both had our cameras with us and when we got to the Queen's Park there were swallows darting about the grass. I had only brought my waterproof camera, which can't cope with a gloomy day or any kind of distance, so I found trying to take pictures of the swallows pretty fruitless. We moved on.

It wasn't as rainy as the forecast had predicted and both of us were enjoying being out. The rain there was had discouraged 'visitors' so the park was pretty empty for a Sunday in summer. There was a lot of stopping to take photos, and all thoughts of 'pace' were gone. I saw some kind of a weaselly thing and in my excitement put my Garmin off and forgot to put it on again, so I lost about half a mile. We had taken meal worms in the hope of finding our friend the robin that had come to see us on a park bench several weeks ago, but sadly, although there were lots of bird noises, nobody wanted to come and eat our worms. Oh well. Popularity has a way of fluctuating.

And now I am feeling hungovery again and must go and sort things out. The weekends go past too fast.