2008 — 18 November: Tuesday

Well, all I'll say is it's after midnight, and I'm reliant on the iMac and my library of MP3s for music at one end of the study having brought just one PC back online — temporarily — at the other end. I have yet to corral all the dust bunnies (they are more like were-rabbits, to be honest) but the mini-Dyson is charged up and ready to suck and roll. So I've just been checking email and sorting out tonight's picture of Christa:

Christa and Peter crossing the Channel, 29 July 1984

I had literally just got back from my first-ever business trip to America (testing the draft CICS Application Programming Primer on a batch of batch COBOL programmers in Dallas and Tampa) when Christa whisked me and Peter straight over to Cherbourg, France for the day to rendezvous with her brother Karl and his young family. I took this picture on the way over, and will dig out another one of the voyage back after a long, tiring, but very enjoyable day out on the amazingly flat beaches of France.

It seems to be pouring with rain, on and off. Still, I have a birthday invitation to attend (again at the Chesil restaurant) for my evening meal where,1 so I'm told, we'll be having steak tartare topped with a raw quail's egg. As you know, you should try everything once (except incest and Morris dancing) and the quail's egg will be a "first" for me, I assure you. G'night.

A leisurely start...

... at 10:14 and counting, to the new, unsunny, day. There remains much to be done and dusted before the technology playpen is done and dusted. First, tea and breakfast, of course, and the weather hardly makes it clothing-optional, does it? Spring-cleaning in winter — how absurd. And the supplies trail — let's not forget that! It's now crept up to 11:39 in that relentless way that Time has...

Now, even more mysteriously, it's 13:39 and time to stop that inner man from grumbling. Mother Hubbard's cupboard is slightly less bare, the car has been given a drink, a new cuppa awaits my attention. It's very odd what can trigger a brief flood of tears these days. Today's example was a fragmentary shopping list that Christa had left in the bottom of her carrier bag back in September 2007. I would say "snap out of it" but if I have learned anything about this weird and distinctly unwonderful grief business in the last year, it's that that doesn't actually work.

This is coming to you, as it were, via a Cyberduck session on my iMac. The World of Warcraft that is my various Windows systems is in all sorts of bits and pieces at the moment. Or should that be "are"?

My first Xmas card...

... is from the Mr Postie crowd themselves, this year.

My first Xmas card, 2008

I presume that isn't genuine semaphore! I had no idea Brenda laid claim to the colour red. Check this small print:

Small print

We have a new, yappy little dog that's being allowed to free-range and leave his charmless deposits dotted around our little estate. Where can one obtain an airgun for target practice, I wonder. (Recall the story about the Quaker, disturbed at night by an intruder downstairs: "I would not hurt thee for the world, friend, but thou art standing exactly where I intend to shoot.")

The perils of a butterfly mind

Well, that's what dear Mama always said I had. I wanted to offer a snippet from this piece but couldn't decide how to do it justice. Is there really a website called "ShirtlessHunksBaggingGroceries.com"? I shall have to ask around!

It will soon be time to clamber into my glad-rags and set off for the evening birthday bash. Before I do, I'm delighted to report that I have now read enough of last Friday's "Last Chorus" by the wonderful Humphrey Lyttelton to give it a completely unreserved, and completely deserved, recommendation.

Musical screens: the newest 24" screen is now installed downstairs amid (atop, actually) the A/V system. It turned out to lack any vertical height adjustment capability, so is best where it is. That brings the second-newest one up to the study, for use with the larger of the two Media PCs. And that causes the oldest one (the Dell) to shift a little sideways on the miraculously uncluttered desk. The remaining one, being built-in to the iMac, remains unmoved at t'other end of the study. And to think I started out on Life's little home computing journey with the Amstrad PCW256 word-processing (CP/M, 8-bit, Z80-based) system, a mere 23 years ago.

Right! Time (17:15) to get gently going.

The birthday boy...

... treated us to a slap-up feast and, in fact, the Steak Tartare was topped with a raw quail's egg, so I was right after all. I moved on from that to the duck, which was delicious. It's now 22:55 and I think I shall treat myself to an early-ish night. We're hoping for a walk tomorrow, and I have a crockpot to prepare and some laundry to sort out. The stars are clearly visible, so I'm predicting a frosty night.

Sweet! One of my banks wants me to wear its (initially free) third-party electronic condom:

safe hex

Erm. I don't think so! Besides, I don't think it runs on two of my three operating systems. Wonder how long before they try to make this mandatory? Wonder how long before I change banks?? Now if they insisted on people not using Internet Explorer, I might be more sympathetic. And if they didn't drop their interest rates for savers, or only provide a (slightly) higher rate for accounts in excess of the "protected" £50K limit... Sorry, Christa. I know you were a great fan of this particular institution, but I feel it's losing a certain something.

  

Footnote

1  I was mistaken (it happens!) The quail's egg was a feature of a different Steak Tartare in a different eatery. So we're none of us yet quite certain what awaits this evening. I'm sure it won't leave us shell-shocked.