2011 — 7 April: Thursday
I found a suitable place to park the second of my A/V racks. Instead of digging ever deeper holes in the new carpet upstairs in what used to be Christa's study, it's now housing some surplus kit1 behind the living room sofa. So far, so good. In other riveting news I finally gave up on "A town called panic" after 40 minutes and had a shower instead. Win some, lose some.
And so to the next in my series of newly-scanned old photos. This one, dating from the summer of 1976, and taken with my already then ancient2 Pentax S1A, shows Christa with our young house guest Claudia. I've shown you both these ladies before, of course.3 I took this shot of them while we were all walking back from an evening stroll along the river (Thames).
As I said (here) Claudia went on to become a goldsmith. I haven't seen her for 35 years. How's that possible? Ho-hum. G'night.
Watch it
Before today's lunch date with new retiree Len I need to nip out and have a new battery fitted in my watch. I noticed last night that it's started doing the "two second" jumps that is its (subtle, I agree) way of saying "Feed me, Daddy". Since Christa handled this task last time I think the current little juice pill has done very well. I wore one of her 'el cheapo' watches from Lidl when she went into hospital, and for another year until it ran out of "oomph" — let no-one say I don't have my peculiarities :-)
Breakfast first, however, on what looks so far like being another sunny and very warm day. It's 08:30 and the barometer is sky-high. Anti-depressant prescriptions up by 40% in the UK over the last 4 years? Golly! Mike and I were discussing those yesterday; neither of us like the idea one little bit.
I do what I can...
... to keep David Lodge's pension fund topped up:
This is his "take" on HG Wells, though it's described as a novel. I was also so pleased to be charged only £3 to replace my watch battery that I rather spoiled my domestic economy drive by promptly getting a new toy in the same little shop:
Whether I will live long enough to test (or even care about) its purported accuracy of one second in 1,000,000 years remains to be seen.
Afternoon delights
After a tasty sandwich and chat in the sunshine out in the back garden of "The Wheatsheaf" (alas, no more pigs rooting around since the change of management that occurred at some point after my visit in October 2008) I discovered I had to shift the plasma screen — it's a good job I put it on its wheeled set4 of shelves — to be able to reach the two packets Mr Postie had popped through his personal delivery system: my living room window.
It's raining cherry blossom...
... onto (into) one of my tulips. Click the pic for a bigger image:
And another tulip, evidently a little on the neurally-challenged side, has managed to grow up (right through) the rope hole in the rim of one of Christa's mysterious large bucket-like things (probably a bucket, but on a grand scale, and made of the orange-brown plant pot terracotta [?] that you can just see a bit of) in her equally mysterious plant-manipulating botanical experiments area underneath two of the trees:
Meanwhile, this yellow one eschews what William Blake referred to as "fearful symmetry" in his poem "The Tyger":
It's 17:31 and time (obviously) for my next cuppa.