2009 — 12 June: Friday
I thought — given what I'll be up to in a few hours time — that tonight's photo was quite appropriate. It dates from 1982 (during the same parental visit as this photo) and shows Christa at the wheel, Mutti sitting alongside her, and Vati in the back, pointing out to Peter his poor ol' stay-at-home Pop with his camera:
Christa's parents visited us here in the "new" house almost as soon as we'd moved in... or, at least, as soon as Christa and Peter had joined me here having stayed behind in Old Windsor to sell the previous house while I settled into my exciting new career as a writer1 in the CICS team. For the life of me, I cannot imagine how the car2 could ever have been that clean on what was, essentially, a dusty building site.
I finished Weeds season #4 and have to say it ended on an excellent and clever cliffhanger. A very enjoyable TV show. G'night.
What, if anything...
... have I spent 10,000 hours on, I wonder? I've mentioned this chap a couple of times:
Among the intriguing titbits: that really successful people only become surpassingly good at what they do after 10,000 hours of practice. The Beatles were lucky, because their repeated trips to clubs in Hamburg, where they were expected to play for hours on end, pushed their collective music-clock to 10,000 hours just in time for them to pierce through to the stratosphere of fame and fortune. Gates got good at programming, too, because as a teenager, he had the extraordinary good luck of gaining access to the first generations of modern computers and was given time to fiddle on them for, well, 10,000 hours or so.
Apparently the book "Outliers" has a long chapter on flying that "argues that cultural traditions of pilots in the cockpits of Avianca and Korean Air planes contributed significantly to crashes suffered by both companies". Erica Jong was right, you know!
Time (08:34) for some breakfast to chase the initial cuppa, and then I shall be hitting the road in the direction of Holmer Green (which is about four miles from where my parents lived after 1971 until Dad died in 1975). I'm off for lunch with my NZ sister-in-law while she's over here staying with her brother. I wonder if I should take3 up the model aircraft that Bro failed to pack into his luggage last year? Thank goodness the car has a pollen filter.
133.8 miles later...
... I'm safely back having battered my way through the 15,000 miles total and a lovely variety of traffic on a relatively direct route. Thanks, Big Bro, for the steak and kidney pie that you have unwittingly bought me for lunch at The Polecat Inn — it was excellent. Your in-laws are in fine fettle and your wife likewise. Your model Spitfire is also safely back here after a brief discussion of, as it were, the best place for it. Lis decided she didn't have enough luggage space without removing it from its protective foam padding. I got the Ants Parder book, thanks; signed by the author, no less.
It's 19:45, the pollen count is quite high, there are two missives from callers who found me out (as it were), I have a fresh cuppa, have dared to eat a peach (a nectarine, actually) and am vaguely contemplating a light meal.
I saw my first ebook reader up close and personal in WH Smith the other day during my mooch around Southampton. I didn't think much of it. I'm not sure how I'd enjoy reading a book reformatted to line lengths of five or six words. So I read this comparison by Ann Kirschner with great interest.