Summer? What Summer?

I know we're a hardy race, but really, this years summer 'dreich-ness' is starting to wear a bit thin! Temperatures are often in the single digits at breakfast and there hasn't yet been a decent spell of warm and sunny weather.

See me, I'm grumpy.

Alright that's enough of that. Work has been behaving itself, got a lovely project at Tarland finished well in time for the summer hols. Great fun this job; mountain biking client, cracking wee hill, good ASDUG, exciting design and the team firing on all cylinders. I love working with Chris and his gang, they're all amazing digger drivers (obviously) but more importantly they're all keen and very handy bike riders. It makes a huge difference to me to have operators that really get into what we're building and want to ride it as they build it to make sure it works right. 

Happy digger drivers

Our next build is after the school hols and is back up at Fochabers where we were in the late winter / early Spring. Another pump track / jump run / feature rich skills trail type thing. Chris and gang on the diggers and rakes (!) Looking forward to it. 

Meanwhile in the background I am still busy with consultancy on a big job, which if all goes well will be quite an interesting build! 

Photographing houses continues to get busier, so much so that I've invested heavily into Canon tilt / shift lenses (google it) which meant a new body (6D) and a steep learning curve. I love my workhorse Olympus, but there's no doubt about it, if you're serious about developing in architectural photography, you gotta go with shift lenses. Geek bit over.

Me at work pic

A very strange thing happened a few weeks ago when Mrs Cycletherapy entered us into the local 'shop to the top' bike race to the top of Cairngorm. A 'fun' event, so we decided to do it on a borrowed tandem. However, I cannot cycle up a hill in a 'fun' manner, the need to hurt is too deeply engrained... 

I think we enjoyed it, the social afterwards was great craic. 

Me and the missus having fun

So, final images processed and uploaded, invoices sent, out of office email notice put up and holidays proper start tomorrow, We're off to the Outer Hebrides and just to be on the safe side we've packed everything from shorts and flipflops to duvet jackets and thick wetsuits! No 3G, no wifi, just us, the kids and whatever the weather throws at us....