2008 — 10 July: Thursday
Heavens to Betsy, it's suddenly 00:21 — time flies when you're dallying with Mrs Google. Tonight's picture of Christa:
Christa in our courting days, 1974
This was in Windsor Great Park, early on one summer evening in mid-1974. Magic times. G'night at 00:36 or so.
Where's the rain?
No sign of it at 09:20 and the first cuppa tastes grand. Googlemail tells me there's a toy on its way, too. So I need to time my supply trail run carefully if I'm to avoid another trip down to the Fareham City Link depot. Still, at least I know where it is. And their website has just been updated to suggest tomorrow is the delivery date, so I can relax and shop — as it were — at my leisure. (I only ordered said toy last night, by the way. Cyberspace has a lot to answer for.) A tiny clue:
It marks my second attempt to get a decent digital video signal (via hdmi) off my standard definition DVDs and out into my scaler for pixel perfection (or something). The earlier Helios was just a little too low-budget in its approach — and it's hard to trust a device you have to dismantle to remove a disc from, so it's been gathering dust (in disgrace) on the rejected equipment stack for many months now.
Time (09:50) for some brekkie, methinks, before I hit the road running, as it were.
Neatly put... dept.
The brain, it seems, is complex enough to conjure fantasies of technotranscendence and also to foil their fulfillment.
My own fantasies are much simpler! Nice article, though. This next piece (and its final paragraph) is a bit too late for Christa, sadly... Mind you, she was not depressed, nor particularly anxious (except about the horrible pain, of course). A brave and wonderful woman.
Speaking of fantasies...
If I sold — correction, if I were able to sell — my house, I might just be able to scrape up the necessary readies, but where would I live while I was pouring money down the gambling plughole that other people refer to as an investment market?
Vox populi... dept.
Even the undoubted lure of Clive Anderson temporarily hosting the two-hour lunchtime BBC Radio 2 phone-in is insufficient to stop me twitching that dial. It's now 13:50, the inner man's pacification is just about complete, the foodstuffs have been popped away where (with luck) I will find them again, and I've achieved another slightly melancholy "first" as a widower. I've taken Junior's surplus-to-requirements 20" CRT monitor down to the local "tip" where four youngsters happily watched me struggle out of the car with it. I was (momentarily) tempted to throw it at their feet, but that would have been nasty of me. I've decided that, from now on, no kit enters the house without something leaving the house! So I then rewarded myself by wandering the amazingly unbusy aisles of Comet which do, finally, have a few bits of "Freesat" kit in evidence — they're not exactly pushing this as, no doubt, they get a lot more by continuing to push that nice Mr Murdoch's subscription-based alternative.
I failed to yield to any of their goodies (not surprising, given their high prices) and am now back home reading Chris Bidmead's article in PCPlus magazine wherein he's pretty scathing about the whole "Freesat" enterprise.
I've just been trimming...
... the vine that grows up against our back wall beneath the kitchen window. It was one of the last plants to receive Christa's care and attention, last September. I've removed nearly a cubic metre of growth from it in two major sessions since then. Click the pic to see the results today:
The vine today after Christa's work last year
I am, of course, very grapeful for all the little round things! Live long and prosper, fellas.
We both liked these grapes because they were very similar to the sort that grow in Meisenheim and help make that town's extremely dry1 white wine. We used to pick up a crate of the stuff from the local vintner on each visit in earlier years. It's not exported — the natives are far too canny for that! I have to admit it's a sad thought that I'll probably not taste it again... But then, drinking it without Christa and her family doesn't seem right in any case.
Coincidentally... dept.
Last night, I finally transcribed all those saved episodes of the Scottish sitcom Still Game from the neglected Pioneer PVR, where they'd been sitting on the hard drive for (literally) months. Today, on a whim, I picked up a copy of Radio Times while foody shopping and discovered that next Thursday is episode #2 of a new series. My agile brain correctly deduced from this that tonight would be episode #1, and a request to record it has just been placed into the brain of said Pioneer.
In 1980 (here he goes again) I bought the National Lampoon Tenth anniversary anthology: 1970-1980 for which I remember having to fork out what seemed an outrageous fee to my then bank for a special continental US bank draft. Today (after an email exchange with a chap whose wonderful blog I found last night) I've just forked out an even more outrageous amount (this time, for shipping) to Amazon in the US for a DVD that contains scanned images of every issue of that magazine. Sad completeist that I am. (How else can I pick up the few sublime Shary Flenniken Trots and Bonnie strips that I managed to miss by not getting up to London's "Dark They Were and Golden-Eyed" quite as often as needed?) Besides, it will nicely complement the Josh Karp study of Doug Kenney and that amazing magazine that I ordered yesterday.
If none of this means anything to you, just talk among yourselves. I've not entirely given up work on my massive study of underground comix and their artists!
Is it just me...
... or does the story of the Vatican's financial woes dovetail neatly with their new(ish) mortal sin of accumulating obscene wealth? (It's probably just me.)