Looking for dragonflies

This morning I wanted to go out on a walk towards Lubenham, then go up to the canal and see if I could find any dragonflies. I thought there might be some around the small pond near the footpath from Lubenham to the canal. But Clare and Brian both went out so I had to stay home and look after granny. But luckily Clare came back and said she'd stay in until Brian got back, so I could go out.

It was nice weather, blue skies with a bit of cloud, although there was a bit of wind making exposure merges harder. I took a 360° pano at the top of the hill on the way to Lubenham, but unfortunately I forgot to bring my shutter release cable so I had to press the shutter with my hand, which meant the pics wouldn't align accurately for exposure merging.

When I got to Lubenham I went up the first road to the right, and took a photo of the trees going over the track:
Obviously, this shot had to be exposure merged, and it also had to be taken at quite high ISO (400) to get a reasonable shutter speed for hand-holding. For some reason I thought that if I wanted to use the tripod to take the photo, I would have to change the head from the Nodal Ninja to the Markins M10, obviously I wouldn't have needed to though since it's a potrait composition, so I took it handheld.

At the top of the track I turned right and went along the edge of the field, and spotted a view I thought would make a nice photo in the afternoon. In the morning the sun was shining on it from the wrong direction and making it all hazy. I took a photo to remind to go back there in the afternoon sometime:
I carried on and after a couple of fields came to the field with the pond in it. The field had lines of mown grass, and I heard some grasshoppers in the long grass at the edge of the field. I had a look and they weren't meadow grasshoppers. I took a couple of pics for ID purposes, but didn't get any close-ups or anything, they kept jumping about all the time and hiding in the long grass, so were too difficult to photograph properly.

The pond was nearly all in shadow, and is also quite small. I didn't see any dragonflies/mayflies etc. around. Further on in the next field there were quite a few dandelions and there were Small Tortoiseshell butterflies, what looked like Eristalis sp. hoverflies, and other insects drinking from the flowers.I took a few quick pics of a small Tortoiseshell on a dandelion, but didn't bother trying to get any good pics since I didn't have much macro stuff with me (could have used 18-70 + close-up filter + onboard flash).

I carried on up to the canal, then walked back along the canal towards Harborough. There was an old couple walking quite slowly that I got stuck behind.
Then I turned off the canal down the jitty and carried on home.

When I got home it was about 11.30am, so I copied all the pics to my comp and the gps file (I checked that tracklog recording was on when I switched it on and it was). I started sorting/processing the pics.

After lunch I finished processing the pics from the walk, and that took all afternoon.

After dinner I went on the pinternet, checking dpreview, hotukdeals and my email. Finished watching 'Boys from the blackstuff', then went to bed.

Food
Breakfast: Lemon marmalade toast sandwich; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Mature Cheddar cheese with garden salad sandwich; packet of Chilli flavour Doritos; slice of cherry madeira cake; Rocky; cup o' tea.
Dinner: 2x sausages; baked beans; mashed potato; brown sauce. Pudding was strawberry & vanilla yoghurt. Coffee.
Supper: Lemon marmalade toast sandwich; cup o' tea.