2009 — 18 July: Saturday
Right! Junior intends to drive down in just a few hours, so (it's fair to say) there's a certain minimum amount of tidying-up to be done hereabouts. Wonder where his bed is? (Just joking, son.) Mind you, you've grown some since this picture was taken!
Christa, Peter and dear Mama in Saville Garden, 1980
Time to sleep — it's already 00:29. G'night.
Up we get!
Time (08:06) to get (crockpot) stuffing. It's positively cool (which I like) and the clock is ticking.
And now (09:16) said pot will shortly be simmering. I'm often1 asked what goes into said pot. Today's answer would be onion, spuds, carrots, leek, parsnip, swede, Bramley apple, chopped tomatoes in garlic and olive oil (tinned, though that almost seems like cheating), a smear of mint sauce (bottled, also cheating) and — for the nucleic acids — diced leg bits of a poor little Baa-lamb. All this is swirling around in a pint of lamb stock to which a judicious splash of red cooking wine has been added. Give it a few hours for my appetite to recover and it should reach tasty perfection in time for tonight's six o'clock news.
Given what I've just learned John McCain is quoted as having said, it seems we had a narrow escape from his Presidency (not to mention that of his utterly charming Alaskan VP):
And on the public stage, economists were seen as far more trustworthy than politicians. John McCain joked that Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, was so indispensable that if he died, the president should "prop him up and put a pair of dark glasses on him."
Mind you, I'm also acidly amused to note that this particular rag ever thought the dismal science was ever for the most part anything but a massive, and generally malign, con trick. But that's just me, of course. This is much cheerier. Forty years? Very hard to believe.
I don't know about "big salary" but I'm certainly more familiar with "modest pension"! I also think our London mayor would get into much less trouble if he wired his mouth shut.
Flawed processes... dept.
It seems the route by which I acquire stuff can affect the efficiency with which I update (or, more tellingly, fail to update) one of my databases. And hence limit the accuracy of (say) a list on my web site. Today's example became mine when I bought it from Mike since he'd just replaced it by the Blu-ray version. And it didn't help that it was sitting downstairs (as it were) under a blagged copy of the Sunday Times for a week or so. Those pesky round tuits don't always turn up when they should.
Come on, son, where are you? I'm getting hungry! (It's 13:09)
And off he whizzes again. Still, very nice to see him, and he's looking good. It's now 17:30 and the fridge is somewhat emptier. Plus he's opened a pack of "Daddy biscuits", which isn't going to make it easier for me to ignore them in the coming days. Kids.
You would think, would you not, that the SD DVD output stage and the Blu-ray output stage should be identical in brightness from my fancy new toy? You would (of course) be wrong — still, once the brightness level is reset, the picture quality is pretty damn' good from the DVD stage. It's fantastic from the Blu-ray stage, but it would be really nice to have just the one disc playing box. Suddenly it's 21:41 and I have just a few hours before I get to enjoy visitor #2. He said he'd arrive before lunch.