2011 — 2 March: Wednesday
Not a blizzard in sight.1 It's 08:41 — guess who forgot to take another few slices of bread out of his freezer last night? Still, it's grey and dull so we're slightly delaying our usual "start" time. Now, where's that cuppa?
Google Mail is slipping: I had nine pieces of obvious spam in the inbox this morning. Most unusual — not the spam; the fact that it got through the usually excellent filtration.
Aside to Christa
There are buds out on the pear tree. Is this normal? I also have a vicious date with some brambles when I can find the hiding place for the secateurs. Can you tell I've been out into the garden?
I wonder if this will catch on? And was this the first use of "steampunk"? Cool!
An unnaturally bright...
... ball of yellow light up in the sky? That must be my cue. Off I go. [Pause] A mere 8 miles or so, and even a fox hunt to see at one point.
I seem to have acquired...
... a new, time-consuming, but potentially profitable hobby. Recall the unexpected tax rebate that showed up a couple of weeks ago. Today, waiting on my doorstep, was the letter from Ms Tax "explaining" her calculation. Hang on a minute! What's this line shown under "Your income"?
State Pension/State benefits
I'm not receiving anything from the State (being not yet of a certain age, and not claiming a bean, or even a job seeker's allowance). And the amount of this payment is certainly not getting anywhere near my bank account. What's going on? So I phoned them (this was the time-consuming part as I was held in a queue for 30 minutes or so).
Bottom line: one part of our Stately Apparatus (which very kindly gave me a bereavement allowance for a year after Christa's death in November 2007) failed to tell its colleague Ms Tax that these (very welcome) payments ceased after 12 months back in November 2008. (Mind you, since this allowance does only run for a year, one might think they wouldn't need telling. Not so, says my newest best friend Kathleen with her delightful Mancunian accent. "Once a benefits payment starts, it has a tendency to continue until approximately the crack of Doom.")
So now I have to trot along to my local Job Centre and get them to send me a letter2 saying the payments have stopped. I can then forward this to Ms Tax who will recalculate my tax on the basis of the smaller income and issue a further rebate for the last two years (this is the potentially profitable part).
Quite why this...
... 2008 DVD is only available as a Dutch import of a German pressing beats me:
The Yellow Handkerchief (to save you wondering). IMDB details here.
It's 17:03 and I'm pleasantly fatigued.
Man about Village
Comment is probably superfluous.
Fatal! I paused the DVD I was watching just a few minutes ago to play an mp3 I'd been sent, then shuffled more or less randomly through a few more tracks (all being heard on the electrostatic headphones via the little Class D amp from the mp3 library on BlackBeast) and, before you know it, that nice fresh cuppa is stone cold, dammit. And the ears red-hot, of course.