Xena in the woods

Thankfully I slept much better last night - I took some herbal sleeping tablets which helped. I did wake up but managed to get back to sleep again and feel like a new person today. I hope that tonight will be as good a night as that. I don't like taking any form of medication, homeopathic or not, I am of the 'my-body-is-my-temple' school of thought and hate any form of drugs being pumped into my system. When my children were born, all three were via C-sections and even then I did not take pain medication once I got home out of hospital. But I was so desperate last night that the herbal tablets were used. 

Today, another grey day - (is this our new normal?) we had a lovely walk with Xena in the woods where I took this photo, before rushing off to the Surrey Photographic Association competition. As I said yesterday I entered images into this comp with not much thought as many of my prints that I wanted to enter were being used in other club competitions.

My image of the 'San mother and children' has been doing really well for me in club competitions and national comps so I entered it here as a PDI (projected digital image) as I did not have the print. I was not expecting to do well today so blow me down when I came home with not one but two medals tonight. The judging is quickfire judging (no critique) with a panel of three judges scoring each image out of 5, so the highest score you can receive is 15 ( 3 X 5 ) and technically the lowest is 3 ( 3 X 1).  Usually the scores start at about 9 or 10 and go upwards, but today the judging was extremely harsh with most of the scores sitting around 9. I was amazed to win top score in the open category with my San mother image and the win the judges award in the nature category with my fox image (see attached). I was pretty chuffed!

Gavin had very kindly made supper (his famous spag bol) so when I got home I dad have to worry about cooking dinner. What a treat!