2008 — 16 Mar: Sunday showers
It's 00:58 and all it seems to have done for the last several hours is pour with rain. Peter and I watched Inside Man yesterday evening as he hadn't seen it. Christa and I must have watched it seven or eight months ago, I guess. I'm instructed to wake him at 10:00 so I'd better get my head down, I suppose. I've actually been updating some more of my tedious database lists for the web; it's nearly a year since I touched some of these, so it constitutes a twitch in the direction of Planet Normal for me.
Big Bro commented on the Jasmine tea... He knew the name of the local currency (bhat baht, apparently), which is more than I did. I note with some bemusement that this is just about my 500th daily jotting (although I did stop for a couple of days back in September at Christa's request). Where the heck does the time go? Weird. And I'm delighted to say nice things about Network Magic as I've effortlessly got my PCs talking to each other and sharing the printer (though not yet the scanner). All without exposure outside our little domain, I believe. And in just under five minutes. I shall have to buy the Mac add-on at this rate.
Now that I've finished putting Humpty Dumpty back together again, it's way past time for another picture of my beautiful Christa. This one dates back to 24th March (and not 11th August as I originally said) last year:
Christa in her garden potting area, 24 March 2007
Hi, noon!
I've been up and about for three hours or so. Junior got his orange juice bang on 10:00 and is now en route back to his Battersea flat. I'm finding it very useful indeed to have the two PCs so co-operatively sharing data, I must say. The next set of manoeuvres entails unwrapping the two 500GB drives and pondering anew whether to hang them both onto the Slug as network attached storage or whether to divvy them up between the two PCs at this end of the study. With enough network magic, it occurs to me that their physical location is largely irrelevant.
Gay whirl
It's — crikey! — 15:40 already. I've spoken to Aunty Ivy and dear Mama. The former was a lot more rewarding than the latter. I've reheated and wolfed down a portion of yesterday's crockpottery (very nice too, even if I say so). Emailed a brace of my favourite female cousins. So far successfully put off moving stuff around in Junior's room to gain access to the little Slug. Noted the detection and appearance of the iMac on my network, though with nothing I can do with it from the Windows end. I have yet to poke at it more natively, as it were. Always change only one variable at a time is my motto.
I have a social engagement in Winchester this evening. It involves, inter alia, the stuffing of my face, the feasting of my eyes, and some further experimentation with mind-altering video equipment. And a new Nikon to be inspected. Heavens to Betsy! Dear Mama has just rung back, admitting that she was guilty of a terminological inexactitude when she'd told me she hadn't had a letter from Big Bro. (This, I already knew, but let's not agonise unduly.)
Baloo's back
Without Christa, I'm reduced to the same plight as Baloo the Bear when it comes to scratching the bit of your back that you can't reach, or not without dislocating your shoulder. (It was partly thanks to her dislocating shoulder, by the way, that Christa and I ended up married!) She had somewhat loose ligaments, and had already been warned by a doctor in Germany that she would eventually need an operation to fix her left shoulder. He tried to get her to have one before she set off for her new job at Royal Holloway College, in fact. Being Christa, she simply ignored him as she had, on more than one very painful-sounding occasion, managed to get her shoulder back into its socket. But in the summer of 1974, as we were (literally) lying together in the evening sunshine in Windsor Great Park, she suddenly rolled over and started yelping.
I thought at first she'd leaned against a patch of thistles. Not so; the poor girl's shoulder had popped out of its socket. This was the first time I regretted not being able to drive (not that I would have been insured for her car at the time, but that wouldn't have deterred me1 for more than a second or so). We left her car parked where it was and walked (not too far) to the local hospital's A&E2 department. There (for the first time) I heard her yell with pain while I was being interviewed by a PC Plod who, until he was set right by the Junior doctor, was firmly convinced I was a thug who had just committed some dreadful violence on the poor girl.
Anyway, the upshot was that she was scheduled for surgery within a month or so (during the University summer break) and was forbidden by the medicos to even think of returning to Germany before the operation. This gave me all the time needed to finish convincing her to stay with me in the UK and get married rather than return to do the one-year post-grad certificate she needed to become a more senior teacher in the German school3 system.
Freaks are wonderful
Stuart Maconie, who now hosts the BBC 6Music "Freak Zone" programme, has just (17:05) started playing some excellent Philip Glass music. I have to confess that Christa was somewhat less fond of this composer than I am! She did like the trio of films by Godrey Reggio, with scores by Glass, well enough, though. Or told me she did...