2011 — 11 October: Tuesday
On the 'minus' side, it's rather a grey morning1 but, on the 'plus' side, the volume of spam mail seems to have plummeted in the last 36 hours or so. It's almost invariably trapped in the Google mail filters — so is no great bother — but the torrent has slowed to a mere trickle at the moment. It remains stunningly unimaginative.
"Squeezed middle" incomes to drop by 7% after taking inflation (or do they mean "quantitative easing"?) into account. I suspect my widower's mite doesn't even take me up into the "middle" bracket in the first place! (Link.)
Never mind. After all, it seems "vitamin pills 'may shorten life'" too. (The story in the link is so stupid, I won't bother to offer it.) Not that I can afford the things :-)
Tea, Mrs Landingham. I need vitamin tea.
It's a bit...
... late for "lemonses", I agree, but I'm still working up an appetite for lunch. Even the brief trot to the nearest post box, while blowing away a few cobwebs, didn't do the trick. It's still grey and has been a bit drizzly. Ever onward. Local entropic levels are still uncomfortably high for the approaching weekend visitors.
[Pause]
Of course, now that I'm up to my elbows in something else, the hunger pangs have just cut in. Still, it's 14:03, so I suppose that's reasonable. I am [cue hollow laughter] simplifying the tangles of electric string (almost all carrying digital data of wildly varying bitrate) down here in the "living" room.
While I have become adept at removing all traces of celery from my (often) daily lunchtime salad, I look forward to not finding Angiostrongylus cantonensis in it. But I remain unlikely to eat slugs for a dare, too.
I've just checked...
... and it was on this day that I played my first CD on the NAD CD player. Today, its tray simply refuses to open, and the 'troubleshooting' section of the user manual maintains a lofty silence on there being any possibility of such ill-mannered behaviour. Let alone a secret concealed hole into which you can insert a straightened paperclip (that being a trick that often worked in more genteel times). So it will be back to "Audio T" tomorrow, I suspect. It's a bit late today, and I am very much not in the mood.
The A/V end of the living room is now a great deal tidier. I need a cuppa. It's 16:42 and still a dull grey out there. But the music in here is fine — I can, after all, play back CDs on either of my Oppo devices for the time being.
Normal service...
... resumes after the usual rigmarole. You know the drill: take the case off, cautiously power the thing up, glare fiercely in the usual "pull yourself together and fly right" manner, press the Eject button, and watch the drawer slide open as smoothly as silk. Try it a few times. Power on and off several times. Put the case back on and keep trying in between tightening the five screws. March the thing back across to the A/V stack, slide it in on top of, rather than underneath, the Oppo Blu-ray, plumb it back in and there you have it: perfect sound forever, just like in the original Philips ads.
You just have to show these things who it is that keeps a roof over their heads and juices them up. Mercy me, it's 22:01 already. And the spam email floodgates seem to have been re-opened.