2009 — 14 January: Wednesday
I'm going to have an earlyish night for once. Today's theory is you need seven hours snooze time to optimise your resistance to colds (or at least you do until the next bit of research shows something else). Meanwhile, tonight's picture of my beautiful Christa is one of my very earliest slides of her (and was an absolute pig to work on in Photoshop, I don't mind admitting). It dates from June 1974. I'm pretty sure I took it in Windsor Great Park, early one morning:
Mike and I now have a cobweb-clearing anti-sloth walk planned, revisiting the site of one of last year's triumphs. Hope it's not as cold as the BBC is gleefully threatening. And tonight's bet is that I'll arrive home sometime tomorrow afternoon and find one of Mr Postie's "Come and get it" cards on the doormat. Any takers?1
G'night!
Nature's little curveball...
... consists, this morning, of surprisingly thick fog. I suspect the fresh air jaunt will be unfettered by any need for digital pixelation. I think I shall steer clear of the motorway, too, having half-heard a litany of minor catastrophe reported so far. It's 09:13, breakfast is going in and I have a packed lunch to prepare.
Sad to say, my Humax satellite DiSEqC multi-LNB fiddlings2 were uncapped by success. However, plumbing the "Sky" minidish LNB back in as the sole input and doing a factory reset has now (after about 90 minutes last night) enabled me to sort out an acceptable subset of Freesat TV and radio channels from the chaff of a thousand or so items being squirted at us by that terribly nice Mr Murdoch chap. I've also set the box to boot up, as it were, on BBC 6Music. That way, I can move easily through the "radio" sub-subset without even needing the plasma screen to be on. There's a neat front panel name display, too. Progress of a sort.
Fresh insight brings new delight... dept.
Anyone know which Heinlein novel contains the text of my heading, I wonder? No matter; relatively few people read Heinlein these days, I suspect. Their loss. Here's an enviably atmospheric shot of the sequoias at Rhinefield that was sent to me by our fungus expert, Graham (the fun guy). It was taken by his partner's cousin, on a Sony Alpha (whatever that is) — from the resolution quoted in the EXIF data it seems to be well up there with Mike's Nikon and my Canon, and it certainly does a nice line in exposure, too. This was a tricky shot:
Today's pixel opportunities were pretty sparse until most of the mist had burned off. I will see what I can sort out from Mike's shots, having left my Canon at home. It's now 16:58 and getting a bit chilly, but it was a glorious day for the most part. I was misinformed as to the date of our previous visit to the venue, but it's worth noting, as I scrape mud from my boots, that the clear path you can see here has now been entirely ploughed up, even though the fingerposts still clearly show a public footpath. Bl**dy Farmer Giles.
Woe is me... dept.
In the grand scheme of things, domestic technology problems here or there hardly cause a twitch. Yet (oddly) I've tonight been quite upset by the failure of the A/V amplifier that has given us both such sterling service since 1998. Coming as it does on the heels of the FM tuner failure — another item that Christa used a lot — it's unsettling, somehow. Still, at least it provides an excuse for a spot of research, which was always enjoyable in the past. Watch this space, as it were.
Meanwhile somehow it's become 23:27 and, apart from watching the photographer Rankin doing not always terribly well on his self-imposed task of re-creating seven iconic fashion photos (and not the seven I would have chosen, I have to add), I seem to have accomplished approx. the square root of bugger-all this evening. Although I did find Radio Yorkshire to be one of the available satellite channels. All very frustrating. Still, at least I've got all my music up here in the study.