2008 — 30 Mar: Sunday
I knew it was too good to be true. Even though my water supplier apologised1 it set me thinking about applying for a water meter. Now that there's just me rattling around in this house, I used Southern Water's little web-based ready reckoner and it suggests my annual bill2 could come down to less than £200 from its present outrageous £625 — "I'll have me some of that", I thought. Sadly, Southern Water also runs a piece of rubbish software called IIS. It's timed out four times on me (even this late at night — it's shortly after midnight) thus blocking progress on my path to watery Nirvana:
The link they offer to the declaration you make that you've read and understand the implications of changed electrical earthing is broken too. Nice one. (Yet I'm willing to bet the Chairman's take-home pay is a nice fat multiple of my pensioner's pittance.) It's not just Cleopatra who got bitten by an ASP! It's not very professional to expose your application server error messages directly to your customers, is it? Or have the rules changed since I left the industry? (Still, one of my online banks does exactly the same sort of thing. Two guesses as to what server software they run, too.)
Fingers crossed
If the BBC weather chaps can be believed, we may yet fit in an unsoaked walk though it had better be along well-drained roads rather than up muddy fields. Report to follow. Plus, let's hope the change from GMT doesn't stop me loading the crockpot with its next batch of goodies before I set out. Better get some sleep, I suppose. G'night.
It's a bright summer's day!
Did you spot it? The first poetic licence of the year? Well, it's 09:34, the sun is shining, the newly-stuffed crockpot is doing its heaty thing, and brekkie is on its way down even as I type. (I find multi-tasking marginally easier than President Gerald Ford was said to.) The next several hours will be a walk, possibly in the vicinity of Sparsholt, if all goes according to plan. After that, who knows? Beyond a short ferrying task to Eastleigh airport tomorrow in the early morning. And a retirement lunch at Keats on Tuesday for John S.
Just time to make a hasty sandwich or two... Gotta dash. But this is fun:
We've all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since Dante's Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility.
Couldn't agree more, I think.
Now, who said that?
Twitchers alert!
A delightful walk in and around Sparsholt and Crawley, lunch at about the half way point with many ducks while we sat on a sunny bench by a large village duckpond, and then what do you suppose led to this wry expression? Click the pic:
I could be untruthful and blame the sort of lady who pulled out right in front of me from her pub's car park in an enormous BMW Chelsea tractor (and then waved her thanks for letting myself be carved up in what struck us both as a particularly condescending manner), but the mundane truth is that I lost a brief battle with gravity on a particularly muddy patch of lane. Instead of splodging through it and tolerating a mild degree of low-level splatter, I foolishly opted for an ungainly pirouette and failed the execution very comprehensively.
I must say, it's not every day I return home in different trousers from those I set off in, (which irresistibly reminds me of the wonderful "Mrs Weber's Diary" [1979] by Posy Simmonds,3 and this neat little excerpt from an unfortunate incident at Josh's party)...
... but4 it's been one such day today. The original pair are off for a spin in Mike's washing machine while I do what I can to tackle the woolly jumper and socks myself.