a winter bouquet and a bad blogger mood!

 I have to tell you that - despite my new year's 'wish' to laugh more and moan less - today I have to moan about two things in particular.

 But first I'll show you a winter bouquet ....  

at this time of year, there isn't enough happening in the garden here to make beautiful bouquets from scratch, but there's plenty to use as 'padding' for a few bought flowers.

 Yesterday at my local florist  I found a small bunch of tiny white rose stems and another small bunch of fantastic old fashioned double roses.  Alone they would have looked a little glum, but I knew that in the garden the ivy was covered with its black winter berries, and I have a huge winter verbena in fragrant bloom

I arranged the whole lot in a dark metal container filled with florists foam and placed it in the light of a lamp on top of the piano.  I know that the roses won't last for many days, but the ensemble  brightens my dining room this winter weekend.

 And now to my moan ......

 My little blog is being unreasonably targeted  besieged by spam mail and it is beginning to annoy me way too much.  Most days Blogger detects about 150 spam mails, left as comments on the blog, with links to all sorts of strange sites and of course signed anonymous. sigh ....

Despite the Blogger protection, some of this spam still gets through, and all the anon comments drop into my spam mail box then have to be cleared out ....

life is just too short for this sort of rubbish ...

so today I beg your patience, as I activate the word verification on my comment box.  This will allow real people to leave comments, even under 'anonymous' or 'unknown', but should stop the spam.

I plan to leave this in place for a while then take it out again and see if they've gone away .... hmmm...

And finally, my second moan of the day is directed at the person who is copy/pasting my blog content onto their blog.   A word of explanation for my regular readers : complete blog posts from MFCH are being stolen and reposted on another blog, including pictures, giveaways, news on our cottage etc!!

"I'm not revealing your blog name here, I don't see why I should give you any free publicity, but my  message to you is clear :  Neither Blogger, nor myself, nor any of the other four blogs you are scraping are happy with what you are doing!

You have been reported to Blogger so I guess your days are counted, but really?!   What you are doing can't even be fun.  Your blog would be way more successful with its own original content"

I found out about this plagiarism because another affected blogger kindly got in touch with me.   If you want to understand more about how this works and what you can do to fight back, then I recommend you read this excellent article over at Between Naps on the Porch.

And on that irate note my friends, I leave you with pictures of my bouquet 

and my best wishes for this January weekend.