Staying dry but having fun

It has been a bit of damp week although I have been outside for exercise apart from observing the change in the season as we are moving more into Spring proper so I did do a bit of photography this week although it needed to be indoors.

This was one of those I took of a group of flowers illuminated by natural sunlight using the Tamron 90mm Macro lens using a wide aperture to keep a shallow depth of field between the group of flowers I wanted and the remainder.
That kind of control about how one controls a pictorial composition was why I wanted a digital system camera.
That wasn't the only wet day activity either.

While staying dry I recently bought a book by an author I loved during ones boyhood but had not read before in its first edition.
The Family at Red-Roofs is a family story about the Jackson's, four children between nine and seventeen and their mom and dad who living in cramped conditions were able to rent a bigger property that needed some work doing on it.
They acquire a domestic helper called Jennie and all seems well until their mother is taken will needing surgery and quiet respite just at the time gets a once in the lifetime offer to go to America to work for his company and has left.
Worse still it transpires a ship he was one was hit head one by another with few survivors so Jennie has more to deal with after receiving a letter from his company, the children's mother is too delicate to be told and in an age lacking social insurance, it appears they may become penniless. 
Molly and Peter have to find jobs as the oldest even though both before this tragic news of his assumed death would of been studying for careers in Teaching and being a Doctor respectively. Even Michael aged 11 does clock repairs to bring money in.
Molly's former school friend Prudence, a stuck up daughter of a monied family falls on hard times and so needs to stay with them that means for the first time in her life she actually has to work.
What really happened to the children's dad transpires: He was saved but was so traumatized by the incident, he'd forgotten who he was but as luck would have it a photograph of the four children of his floated and is publicized in the national press. 
Dad and children in time are reunited and mother recovers just in time so she didn't need to be told of his disappearance and presumed death.
The story is genuinely heartbreaking in places, the presumption all is going well from moving to a better house soon moves to that of the actual loss of a breadwinner parent and severe illness of their mother and of sacrificing potential careers to deal with pressing needs.
What is good about it is it shows the children maturing, showing resilience that they'll need as adults and upon his return after all, their father sees the fruit of his efforts fathering them in their ability to cope under pressure.