2009 — 22 October: Thursday
Here's Christa in Penn (at my parent's home) back in May 1975, just a few months after our marriage:
What a lovely smile! Almost powerful enough to soothe my sore throat... G'night.
Me again
It's 08:39 and the promised heavy rain looks very like sunshine and quite heavy clouds at the moment. The throat is incandescent and the nose could do with a touch of what I did to the kitchen sink's waste-pipe yesterday (though I doubt I'd survive such rough treatment). Still, there's a crockpot to be stuffed, a Walker replacing the Wogan, a postal strike, and (when I first booted) a dead Internet connection. Whatever doesn't killya makes ya stronger.
Nothing that comes out here about la Thatch's short-sighted, wrong-headed, opposition to German re-unification changes my opinion of that particular "statesperson". Christa and I were unified in many things, not least our loathing of the lady to whom Alistair McAlpine (the chap who defected temporarily to James Goldsmith's curious Referendum Party) dedicated his interesting 1992 book "The Servant". To the most magnificent, Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven. Priceless.
It's 10:03, the crockpot is simmering, a fresh cuppa awaits, and the rest of the morning is my nasally-congested oyster. I'm hungry, too. Or I was, until I read this:
The egg floated just beneath the surface of a salt cod espuma, with only the bright orange yolk visible. Beneath the egg, the baby squid rested invisibly at the bottom of the bowl, and an ethereal ring of pheasant consommé was poured deftly around the circumference. A delicate feast for the eyes as well as a symphony for the palate, it was a perfect combination of organic purity and synthetic preparation and structure.
From the world of molecular gastronomy, apparently.
Middle class? Moi?
Nice to see (I suppose) that my little household (ie, me!) scrapes genteely into the middle class, even as I face the loss of benefits that I don't actually receive.
Nicely put:
"If you plan to take a big bonus my advice would be to get ready to explain why your bank's earnings are genuinely attributable to your performance rather than the support of taxpayers across the globe."
Asides to Christa
I picked the final pear a few minutes ago; the grapes are coming to an end, too. The weeds go from strength to strength (of course). Last night I also re-watched the first four episodes of "Carnivàle" — fabulous programme. And I finished the Brian Sibley ("Shadowlands") with its many parallels to our own last few months together. Don't think I can yet face the film version. Speaking of which, I never realised that the "William (Bill) Lindsay Gresham" who wrote the novel (from which Edmund Goulding made his film noir) Nightmare Alley...
... was Joy Davidman's first husband.
A mere two hours ago...
... I decided to take a gentle poke around my PC to see what, if anything, Windows 7 would have to say about it were I to offer it as a new home. That was before the 150+ MB of .NET-related gorp and framework stuff and the three reboots and further traversals of the Microsoft Update process to pick up all the latest service packs and patches (just for this stuff) of course. But, when I finally ran the "Update advisor" it took just a couple of minutes and I didn't really get any nasty surprises:
Apart from the bit below the scroll bar which basically says "Virtual XP support on this old heap of junk? Forget it, chum!" The perils of running a Pentium D, heh? (Intel's elderly dual-core CPU lacks the latest hardware support.)
I suppose I could now repeat the whole exercise on the older of my two HP Media PC machines (a 2 GB Intel Core 2 Duo system from late 2006). The newer one (a 2 GB dual-core AMD 64 system that started life with Vista installed) is currently waiting patiently for its Ubuntu upgrade from 9.04 to 9.10 "any minute now". And of course some might say that the Snow Leopard OS X system purring inside my iMac is already far in advance of Windows. I couldn't possibly comment.
Definitely time (13:49) for a spot of lunch while I listen to the pros and cons of air travel. "Costing the Earth" indeed.
Thanks, Tom!
Your suggestion about "Tutti Frutti" also got me on to Para Handy. Not to mention "Takin' over the Asylum". You're a perisher, spending my poor pensioner's pittance! Oh well, time (16:32) for a cuppa while Miles Davis (Amandla) burbles nicely in the background. None of the promised rain yet, I note...
Taking a break after two more bracing doses of "Carnivàle" (to do the dishes and tidy up the kitchen) I'm now aware that it's horrid weather out there at last. It's 20:39 and a cuppa is brewing downstairs, thank goodness. The soreness of the throat seems to be on the wane (also thank goodness). If this was flu it was pretty mild. If it was a cold, it was less so. I'll still be glad when it's gone, though, whatever it is/was. Better do a spot more shopping tomorrow — somehow it's already crawled round towards the next weekend. And (at last) the clock in the Yaris will be nearly right as we move back off daylight saving time for six months.