2007 — 19 Apr: Is that an orchid, "petal"?

It remains to be seen, "sunshine"! (How do you like my Alan Plater dialogue? Oh, never mind.)

The grass is green, the sun has riz, the bird is on the wing, etc etc. Time for another dose of the great outdoors — I need to squeeze as much in as I can before the pollen factor kicks into high gear and outdoor life becomes a red-eyed sniffly misery, even with my new sun hat. Plus, it's time for brekkie. And the new (or, if I'm honest, the latest) toy has just arrived (08:26, not bad, heh?). Can you believe it: Christa has nipped out for one of her walks and locked me in!

One feels like such a paranoid fool when that happens, doesn't one?

Going round in circles department

Many years ago (1971 to be precise) during my aero-engineering apprenticeship I somehow inherited a magnificent Sperry-Rand electrical gyro-compass¹ and I wrote to its makers who, very kindly, send me a beautifully typeset operating manual free of charge. There the matter — literally — remained, except that it followed me faithfully from house to house just waiting until its time was ripe. Its time is now ripe.

It seems to me that there could be no better place to install it than in my friend's Charlee, rather than having one of these more reliable, namby-pamby soulless GPS devices. I have therefore passed it along and am amused to relate the initial reaction (which came in the form of an email with Subject: Sperry Good):

11.5v 400 ~ 3 AC so I shall raid Mrs Maplin's box as long as we can find extension cable long enough to undertake significant journeys if you get my drift.
This, I believe, contributed to delay in development of the Hoovercraft which used to yank out its wall plug between Cowes and Calshot. Drift in a [Charlee] Pembleton is normally logged by examination of brown line referred to as a Kek Vector on a washable chart.
It is quite normal for passenger to produce much more discernible data, especially with a female pilot.

Peter Lee

It was a good day out, literally shooting the breeze, and taking in a sausage sandwich and a welcome pot of Assam at Lillie Langtree's² tea-room in Stockbridge, but I regard only one of the 24 pictures I took as being worthy of longer-term storage. I must learn not to rely so heavily on the magical auto-focus, particularly when using the telephoto zoom. However, you can be the judge — at least I got one of the damned orchids! The orange-tipped butterflies were, sadly, much too quick on the hoof.

Two close-ups (large file warning) available here. The second image is the one I will be keeping.

I could spit... department

Then Nicole Caputo in the graphics design department (I assume) of Basic Books casually comes up with this lovely design:

Thank you Mr Amazon, by the way.

Day 167

Footnotes

¹ I suspect it may have been one of the (few) items salvaged from an ancient Aeronca that my Big Bro helped build. I had precisely one flight in that before (on its next flight) it was pranged through some power lines, killing the passenger and nastily damaging the pilot. I digress.
² Yes, that Lillie Langtry, the one-time mistress of Queen Victoria's son "Bertie" (the future Edward VII). He once complained to her "I've spent enough on you to build a battleship" to which her reply was "And you've spent enough in me to float one".