Fun with swans

Cygnus olor

Pretty tired after the trip to London but I still went out for a wee bit to take my lovely new (to me) present to myself (see my upload details below). :-D It is really amazing. So fast and smooth and the viewfinder is really big and bright. And the focus lock works properly which is brilliant as it will really help with birds. The frame rate is stupendous. It actually has a s"slow" and a "fast" rate but when I tried the slow I thought I must have made a mistake and set it to fast. Until I tried fast.. It will take me a while to learn how to use it properly but I'll get there. I love it already! I even found myself dreaming about it last night!

I had an episode of sleep paralysis two nights ago. When you go to sleep, your body sort of paralyses itself to stop you falling out of your tree in your sleep. Sometimes you partially wake up whilst still paralysed and this can be very frightening as it can feel like there is someone with you. Mine came in the form of feeling someone sitting down on the bed next to me on my left hand side. I knew this was nonsense as I was sleeping on the left hand side of the bed (left-sleeping husband stayed at home this trip). So, I knew everything was fine and it was only sleep paralysis. But I still got really angry with the Thing sitting next to me and decided to beat it up. I have read that you can get yourself out of your paralysis by moving your fingers first so I was wriggling my fingers like mad so I could punch the Thing. It wasn't really working so I was getting frustrated and tried to shout at it instead which made me wonder if the people in the room next to me could hear my going "ARGH" in my sleep. I eventually gave in, the Thing went unpunched and I went back to sleep.

I am still amused at how my brain could have been both "sceptic" and "believer" at exactly the same time! I guess that is why I am a Fortean and therefore somewhere in the middle of those two. :-) I am also amused that my instinct was to give the terrifying Night Hag of legend a good shoeing.

Dramatic trip then.