2007 — 25 September: cool and clear Tuesday
Time now (07:14) and a slightly later daily radiation session today — plus the consultant wants to see us this morning.1 Otherwise, the mix as yesterday. Breakfast in bed and the Guardian crossword for starters. (For Her, that is.) And time to try my new "Frosted wheats" cereal!
The sun clearly reveals the dust on my screen! But, even allowing for the fact that they couldn't initially kick-start their newly-serviced linear accelerator into action (!) we're still back in excellent time to be able to offer coffee and cakes to our ambulance crew. This is good. And now the green (garden waste) collection has been and gone so it's time to wheel out the green bin and my first stash of accumulated magazines for tomorrow's pick-up. I can see a bit more of the study carpet already. Turns out it's blue. Who knew?
Plus Christa refused any topup morphine before this morning's session on the radiation couch (even though She was on it longer than "normal" 'cos of the machine's reluctance to start). This is double plus good.
Double plus even gooder... department
The tiny portable DVD player I bought for Christa for use in bed has been delivered, its firmware upgraded (I suspect that was the bit that made it multi-region2 capable), its electrical supply plumbed in via a previously long-forgotten power strip at the back nestling among the cobwebs (and her bedside alarm clock reset — She'll never notice, honest!) and rather a lot of the dust (etc., the "etc." included one med tablet, the pen we recently misplaced, and a paper clip) behind the bedside table has been Dysoned into oblivion.
She is now watching, and regularly laughing at, the excellent Richard Curtis romantic comedy Love actually which, you may remember, very nearly made a rock god out of Bill Nighy:
The player is an Optronix OP-PD-070 with a perfectly adequate 7" screen that seems capable of playing just about any silver disk. Less than £60 from Play.com. Contrast this with the first DVD player I bought, back in 1998. A US-voltage Pioneer 606D (at around £450 from memory) with a simple handset "hack" to turn it from pure Region 1 to pure Region 2 (or whatever). The hack was enabled by a single blob of solder across a link which then enabled the software to be that bit more capable.