2008 — 29 June: Sunday
Tonight's picture? Christa started growing tomatoes almost as soon as she got her hands on our new garden...
Christa and her Old Windsor tomato plants
She had remarkably green digits! G'night, at 00:13.
Meanwhile...
While Mr Brendel tinkles away on the joanna I can report (at 08:26) that the crockpot is freshly-stuffed and set to "stun". (My word, parsnips don't keep very well for very long, do they? One of the two I bought yesterday was already a bit too "iffy" [read "whiffy"] for my liking after its overnight stay on the dining room table.) But I now have a breathing space to prepare a packed lunch and down some brekkie before being whisked (or whisking, I'm not quite certain yet) down to the coast for today's little mens sana in corpore sano keep-fit jaunt.
Attitude...
I read a lovely little item a couple of days ago...
Life is all about choices. When you cut away all the junk, every situation is a choice. You choose how you react to situations. You choose how people will affect your mood. You choose to be in a good or bad mood. The bottom line : It's your choice how you live life.
Try reconciling that very positive attitude to the godawful gloominess with respect to "old age" being peddled in The Observer by Simon Garfield today!
It's 09:31. Brekkie is loaded. Lunch is packed. I have a minidisc lined up ready to capture Posy Simmonds on "Desert Island Discs". The sun is shining. It's going to be a good day.
This restored a smile. Specially the bit about "spillage" which I'd noted some time ago. Nothing new under the Guardian I guess:
Since 2000 Labour has suggested bribing, or actually offered people cash (or vouchers, or electronic goods), to, among other things, go to school, lose weight, stop smoking, travel by bicycle, read to their children, achieve good grades, eat healthily, study maths, return to work, behave well, save money and recycle. One need hardly add that its plans to avoid urinal 'spillage' will involve a lot more than engraved flies. Policymakers are already debating whether men would respond better to £1 a time or a scheme that gives you an Xbox360 for every spillage-free month.
Right — nearly time (09:59) for the "off". Better get dressed!
Back, admittedly to an empty house, but one with a nice-smelling hot crockpot busily doing its unattended cooking thing. Thanks for the cuppa tea, Peter in Marchwood, by the way. It was a nice walk along the edge of Lepe country park, and even parallel to the water for one stretch. Pollen not too bad. Glorious weather, too, with welcome breezes. It's now 18:45, there's a nice bit of Ornette Coleman on the Freak Zone (BBC 6Music) and I'm about to unleash the contents of said crockpot on my tastebuds. Before I do, however...
Shot of the day
February before last, I finally went digital in the camera department. I'm very glad I did so, as I consequently have some nice high resolution digital pictures of Christa to remember her by that I can add to the many 35mm slides from much earlier times. But (I admit) for twenty years or more, I'd drifted right away from photography as a hobby. Today, I remembered what I'd liked about photography "as a lad" — the (occasional) feeling you got, having pressed the shutter release, that you've just taken a nice shot:
I suppose, given that this is the 2,746th picture on the Canon, the hit rate isn't too impressive!
This looks promising...
... though (not for the first time) I have to wonder how a film can cost $180,000,000 to make:
In "Wall-E," a mega-corporation called Buy n' Large has transported Earth's populace to luxury space ships, where the obese human race moves around in robotic loungers, drinking super-size soft drinks, placated by television and robot servants. Environmental disaster; corporate takeover; a global psychological coma: "Wall-E" starts to seem like "An Inconvenient Cartoon."
There's a review by AO Scott here.