2010 — 8 April: Thursday
That's the trouble with reading a good book (Komarr) while listening to good music (Late Junction). Next time you surface it's past midnight — again.
G'night.
The sunshine...
... at 08:33 looks quite promising. Let's see what a cuppa does to my perception. [Pause] Good job I was down to the last dollop of stewed plums and blackcurrants for slopping over my cardboard cereal — it was showing signs of starting a life of its own, with three small patches of mould? fungus? (is there even a difference?) that I cunningly avoided ingesting. Mind you, we live in an invisible sea of bacteria (and worse) so I'm only kidding myself. I shall let the jungle juice in the ol' tum do its digestive thing and not even think about it.
I note the political bickering is already at high volume. Aah, the unedifying spectacle of the momentarily powerless clawing over one another to persuade us to plug them back into their dealer for their next five-year "fix". Madness.
Judging by the...
... present set of "404 page not found" entries in my server log some people are confidently expecting me to be running PHP. Not so, m'lud. I was also greatly amused to find a couple of searches on "Noulded into a shake" (the hilarious Paddy Campbell short story about his youthful attempts at becoming a ventriloquist — you'll find it in the 1965 "P-P-Penguin Patrick Campbell") and one for George MacBeth's marvellous "Crab apple crisis". (You can find that highly recommended SF short "story" in the 1969 anthology by James Sallis, "The War book".) Synopsis here.
Right! It's 09:42 and time to pack a lunch for our walk in what still looks like glorious sunshine.
It's nearly a year...
... since I mentioned Gustave Verbeek (whom I first encountered in a brief feature in a weekend colour supplement in the very early 1970s). Today's email marketing salvo from Amazon in the US led me on a merry dance that culminated with the French edition whose front cover is pictured (twice) here:
A very classy act.
There was a tiny, striped spider on the garage door when I arrived back at the ranch, but he was just too small to capture, so I settled for this blaze of colour. You can click the pic for a larger view:
Spring has pleasingly sprung. If you need further proof, Mike's just emailed some of his dickie birds from today's walk:
I think egret, but am open to persuasion. We never saw the woodpecker we could clearly hear at times, nor the several skylarks. This was out at and around Old Alresford, by the way. Blissfully peaceful.
With the exception of the dishes (which I find tend not to clean themselves) and the next batch of plums to be stewed, the evening is now (19:09) my oyster. I'm making tentative plans for a mini-ICL re-union next week with my good buddy Ian. It's time he inspected some of my new toys before they become obsolete.