2009 — 18 February: Wednesday
Well, if I say so myself, the network has been behaving itself nicely since the great untangling tidy-up. And the new server has been doing what it says on the tin, too. Good!
Time for another picture of Christa and me. It's the last one I've so far found that shows the two of us on a weekend visit to dear Mama sometime in 1975 fairly soon after my Dad had died. Not the happiest or least stressful of times, I admit, but we did what we could...
Christa and David, circa mid-1975
That's one of Christa's jackets I'm wearing. As I wheeled the black bin back in, by the way, Christa, I noticed one of your (many) daffodils in the back garden is just about to do its flowery thing ahead of all the rest. There's always one, isn't there? Nice. G'night.
Mercy me!
It's 11:35 and the list of accomplishments so far this morning is pretty unimpressive. Good job I'm retired. That chap Parkinson formulated one of the most accurate Laws known to us, I guess.
A perfect Guardian headline?
Happy days
Having promised to lend Len a couple of CDs of some of my versions of Rimsky-Korsakov's "Scheherazade" I've actually found one that, although it had got into my database, appeared to have gone AWOL from my shelves.1 I also found another two that have yet to make it into my database. It seems I still need a system! The prodigal son was a version I bought during Christa's final illness, just a week or so before she went back into hospital. I'm listening to that CD right now, and note that the conductor is singing along, almost inaudibly! As for the other two, oddly enough they are both actually the same performance, the difference being that one of them has some narration by Bernard Cribbins spliced in between each movement.
It can be jolly hard work being a completeist.2 Perhaps that's why I avoid great fat catalogues of recordings telling me what stuff to buy. On that theme, I most heartily recommend a little online movie you can find here. It's probably too late for this cycle of human life on the planet though.
Late lunch
It's exactly 14:00 and lunch — a rich mélange of carrots, spuds, swede, pork chops, chipolatas wrapped in discardable bacon, small apple-based stuffing balls, and peas — has been enhanced by the addition of surplus crockpot "gravy". Report to follow! Yummy. Though I obviously still haven't cracked the problem of portion size "for one". I mean, one moderate-sized carrot, a smallish scoop of peas, five or six post-baby but sub-teen spuds, an inch or so sliced off a smallish swede — all added to the plate alongside the two smallish chops, the two smallish chipolatas, the four small stuffing balls. Is it any wonder I'm now full?
"Pud", by the way, is a fresh orange, just one (tiny) lump of the dark chocolate we both liked very much, and a cuppa. Then it will be time to walk off some of these calories with an errand to my Spanish bank (thank you, Mr ERNIE) and maybe an exploratory chat with Mr TASS, from whom we bought the present plasma screen TV seven years ago.
When the Bank of England committee...
... is unanimous, is it time to worry? Quantitative easing, indeed. Their graph, by the way, neatly covers the period of my own life on the planet...
It clearly shows (between 1976 and 2001) the relatively high rates during the 25 years I was busily engaged in clearing a mortgage.
I hate being so stupid. I've just listened to the "justification(s)" for quantitative easing on the main BBC TV news at 10 and I still think that printing money and injecting it directly into the economy is an act of irresponsible lunacy. What, pray tell, is behind this paper as any form of security or asset of tangible value? It all smacks to me of those management consultants on one of the Douglas Adams space arks who decided on tree leaves as the new currency, and we know how that ended.