2011 — 18 December: Sunday
Resuming,1 I find I've learned several useful things this weekend:
- When relatives are as nice as the bunch I've just spent 36 hours with, then I don't feel half so bad about some of the fractured relationships elsewhere within parts of my family
- When you leave the central heating thermostat on 18C, but don't factor in the chilly weekend, the living room is actually a bracing 16.9C on your return
- If at first you don't succeed (in spotting the well-hidden exit for the A38 and are fiercely determined to avoid the M6 Toll section), there's no law that says you can't simply go round the roundabout again
- Three small tablets of chewing gum can, in fact, last 142 miles, though it's not flavoursome every step of the way
- An Android Tablet PC, no matter how much fun and how successfully it plays some favourite rips of DVDs, and lets you send and receive email (though not up in my penthouse suite as that was a few walls and floors too many for the Sky broadband box's signal to penetrate) is not much use when it comes to accessing and editing these diary files. I did eventually get as far as downloading one from the Texas server, but the incantations needed to edit it and then put it back defeated me. However, I have a cunning plan...
Time for a cuppa. Then I can examine a few more precious photos of Christa and me taken in August 2007 when my cousins visited us for a day.
I was very pleased...
... that two of the most important women in my life...
Christa and Leigh, smiling as usual
... remained the best of friends right from their first meeting in the summer of 1974. (Visual evidence here.)
And now (18:06) I'm gently catching up with last Friday's "Kermode and Mayo" film review as a podcast. [Pause] And hastily paying a credit card bill that was in some danger of getting tangled up with festive bank holidays. [Pause] And grabbing an evening snack while hoping the living room will actually warm up at some point — having reset the house thermostat to 20C, my "PC area" is now at 18.4C. [Pause] And deciding whether to let the guvmint delve into the workings of my now 60-year-old bowels. Deep joy. [Pause] And reading a 2011 overview2 of country life in New Zealand, as produced by the finally-decided-to-retire Big Bro and his good lady wife, and just emailed to me.
Quite why Microspit Word takes/needs 8MB to produce four pages3 of formatted text including a small set of images just astonishes me. Still, it opened OK in Office Libre.
I've just been playing...
... a delightful 1984 digital recording (made on the once-ubiquitous Sony PCM F1) of the Drottningholm Baroque Ensemble playing Vivaldi's four seasons. Roger (who lent me his CD the evening before I departed for points North) warned me I would find it a 'different' interpretation but failed to go into detail.