2011 — 2 January: Sunday

I realise it's still early¹ but that doesn't stop it being a bit dull to find not a single overnight email. Not even spam! :-)

Sleep fled for the second time about an hour ago, leaving behind the remnants of a remarkably unpleasant dream (most unusual — could it have been the delicious cheese?) at which point I gave up, read² for an hour, and am now supping cuppa #1. My reasoning being that if I switched off the light and chased after Morpheus there's no way I'd wake again in time for my walk. And that would never do.

Happily, nothing here ...

Portman always seems to rise to the top of any list of cerebral Hollywood actresses, which might also include Jennifer Connelly, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Elizabeth Shue, Mira Sorvino, Kate Beckinsale, Julia Stiles and current sophomore Emma Watson, and she will enter her 30s this year as something of a pin-up for the not-too-busy overlap between higher education and acting against blue-screen.

Andrew Collins in The Observer

... suggests I won't enjoy the film I mentioned here. It's staying on my little list. (And surely it's green screen?)

This lovely lady...

... has been irrevocably tagged in my visual memory as "Rosie the Riveter" for longer than I care to recall. Turns out the face may have been real but the muscular arms were cheated!

Having just made my third attempt to load a missing HP printer driver, followed by upgrading the IE9 beta (and an apparently inevitable reboot) it's now time I wasn't here if I'm to be there, as it were. The sky is actually looking quite bright out there, with some hints of blue and a strange bright thing. It's 09:35 and counting.

Before you know it...

... and after another 6.8 miles of boot leather worn off rambling through a deliciously peaceful³ chunk of Hampshire about two miles from Wherwell, it's now 14:12 and there's a small pile of afternoon tasks lined up before a return to Winchester for a film and a meal later this evening. (We have to make good the calorific deficit induced by the rambling else what would be the point?)

Sadly, Mike's newish digital front-channel amplifier has just thrown a wobbly of undiagnosed severity, so the sound stage will be down from 7.1 to a mere 5.1 channels until it's been swapped out during the repair process — still, as I currently live my video life to a simple stereo soundtrack these days it won't be any hindrance to my enjoyment. The trouble is, when these digital gubbins go wrong you can't just call in Rosie the Riveter...

Footnotes

¹  06:20, to be precise.
²  Polishing off the second of my three books by Sandy Balfour: "I say nothing". I thought that a safer choice than the frankly nightmarish "Alice in Wonderland".
³  At one point as we were munching lunch we spotted a deer looking more like an over-sized white-tailed rabbit doing an impression of a gazelle as it went bouncing along the edge of a distant field. But no sign of an egret this time, though there were plenty of carp in a newly-converted giant pond that (last time we were here about 14 months ago) had been a derelict watercress bed. I would reveal the name of the village, but I'd have to kill you. And I can't remember it — my capricious storage system is strangely picky about what it chooses to retain. For example: did you know that Lady Hamilton, at 14 stone, weighed in at a little over twice the weight of Horatio Nelson at the time of Trafalgar? Why I need that factoid filed away is completely beyond my ken.