2011 — 15 June: Wednesday
The single most attractive feature of my present house (and I've now been present in it for 30 years, so I guess I'm still happy with it) is the double-length garage1 as it supported a "front-to-back" study / bedroom that's most recently been turned into my books warehouse. (Oh, my aching back.) Here's a photo of Christa in what was the "utility" back half of the garage before we had a brick wall built across it and turned that half into our dining room:
That cunning manoeuvre, in turn, gave us a full-length living room uncluttered by dining table, chairs and sideboard stuff. Excellent wheeze.
Whether the weather...
... is going to allow us a walk today looks rather uncertain. I've yet to touch base with Mike this morning. Time for some breakfast in any case.
What is it about lists of books? Here's the Grauniad's latest "Top 100 non-fiction", for example. I've got (or at some time have had) 28 of them in the 'warehouse'. I've even heard of a few of those I've missed. But if these are truly the "top" 100 then I suspect I'll discover I'm the uncle of a simian. I would champion the claims of the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, but what do I know?
No walk today; it looks too iffy.
I've just finished...
... cleaning up my two spare XP machines physically (with yesterday's hi-tech "Airduster") and then bringing them fully up-to-date in the software sense by patching them with yesterday's piles of gorp and removing such older gorp that I've realised I have little or no use for. There's a certain amount of amusement to be derived from seeing which software "goes quietly" and which needs a re-boot.
It's approaching time for lunch and there's been an onset of drizzle out there. It all helps keep our new streetlights clean. They were switched on last night and will take some getting used to. It's nice having a white light rather than the sodium orange/yellow, but they don't seem to be quite as bright. Still, I now have a better free reading lamp shining at least part of its light on to my little patio and back steps without blasting so ferociously into Peter's room.
Later
A rare sighting of Mr Postie in late afternoon, it seems. It's 17:02 and I've spent much of the last few hours sucking the last vestiges of data from the various nooks, crannies, and hiding places on the HP MPC machine and whizzing it over to the Terastation. I've been giving serious thought to wiping off the XP Media Centre edition and having a play with Ubuntu 11.04 desktop edition. I'll probably get a new hard drive for use as the system disk, first.
And before I know it, it's 20:46 and well past time for my next cuppa.