2011 — 6 April: Wednesday
It's odd1 just how often I hear a composer's name pronounced on BBC Radio 3 and it doesn't match what I have "filed" inside my head for that person. Just one of the perils of being an auto-didact2 :-)
Lucky for me, this smart young lady...
... never seemed to think I was stupid. Good enough for me. Here she was demolishing a minor-league hill of sand on a beach in Cornwall in September 1975. And why not?
I await a phone call to finalise details of a walk somewhere in a couple of hours. Mike has his hands a bit full at the moment, but we both feel the need for another blast of fresh air. I also need to calm down after the excitement of learning that the vital post-April 2005 supplemental part of my IBM pittance (aka pension) is rising today by 2.50% from £0-25 per month to £0-26 per month.
Despite never yet having met a plum I didn't like, today's the first time it's ever occurred to me to stew two different varieties together for my breakfast cereal topping. What a delicious combo! It's being accompanied by the overture to Christa's favourite opera — one I even bought on LaserDisc for her — von Weber's Der Freischütz.
I should have worn...
... my shorts, and indeed had to discard two layers of clothes during the walk, which was jolly warm. Spring has very much sprung. I've been back for a while, and am again fighting the good fight against the entropy in the living room. Still, at least the in-house network is behaving itself. And Mr Postie had deposited a few goodies on my front doorstep for my upcoming entertainment.
I prepared this image while listening to the new but rather mournful Unthanks CD, "Last". Here are the four videos:
Having so much enjoyed my second viewing of "Meet Joe Black" I thought I'd give the same director's "Gigli" a try as I don't usually find films to be either as good, or as bad,3 as some of the fans commenting on IMDB and Amazon would have me believe. As for the other two, I'm a sucker for French animation (probably because of the "Magic Roundabout") and I caught half of the Spike Lee film when it was first shown on UK TV. It's very powerful stuff.
It's now 18:14 and time for my evening meal. The sun is still shining brightly.
Later
I've finally succeeded in coaxing a digital audio signal out of my second minidisc recorder and into BlackBeast and thence to the hi-fi at the other end of the living room. This is progress. So, for the last hour, I've been listening to the first part ("The inner light — When we was fab") of a fascinating tribute by Bob Harris to the late George Harrison. The next part of the game plan is to start turning some of my minidisc archives into MP3 files... this could take a while.
I also need to finish putting the rest of the living room back together, of course. It's currently barely fit for human habitation, let alone mine. That, too, could take a while. And it's just gone midnight, too.