Tuesday 18 December

A beautiful day, which started very cold after an overnight low of -4C / 24F. The frost did not lift until 11 am, and was quick to return as soon as the sun set. I just checked the latest reading, and found that the temperature had jumped from -2C to +4C between 7 and 8pm, with a southeasterly breeze springing up. This heralds the transition to a wild day tomorrow, contrasting with the absolute flat calm we had today. We had 19 hours of NO WIND. Don't believe me? Look at the pics below.

Quite a lot of my internet contacts use a photo-sharing site called Instagram. As of January 16th, 2013, it will give itself the right to sell its users' photographs, without giving the users a penny (or a cent, depending where you are reading this from). Instagram was recently acquired by Facebook, a site that is none too particular about its users' interests either. Want to know more? Read this article on the BBC website.



A few nocturnal pics from last night as well

Monday 17 December

A beautiful sunny December day, which ended in a hard frost. There was very little wind, and the sunset, at 3.35pm, was stunning. Apart from Christmas cards I have also taken delivery of a handful of postcrossing cards, from Hungary, Ukraine, Germany and Holland. I'm not sending out huge numbers of postcrossing cards, partly on account of the cost of stamps.

Today, it became known that the cost for a legal case involving Storas Uist (the community body that owns the estate encompassing South Uist) is £200,000, a sum that Storas will have to cough up. The legal costs are also those of their opponent in court. It should be born in mind that land is sacrosanct in these parts, and people are prepared to go to extremes to defend their rights - or what they perceive to be their rights. The sadness of this particular case is that it is the community that (indirectly) will be paying for this; on the other hand, £200k can easily be recouped by selling 40-50 plots of house building land, making hardly any dent in the land assets of Storas Uist. Even worse, a petition had circulated the island in 2010, pleading for the case to be settled amicably.