2012 — 14 January: Saturday

I refuse to be tricked by the brilliant sunshine as the thermometer on my fancy atomic clock suggests it's a not-so-balmy 17.9C here.1 I shall therefore cuddle my cuppa and contemplate my crockpot. I suppose I'd better dust it before I stuff it later this morning. Meanwhile, BlackBeast was running as late as me — I've just resynchronised it with "Internet Time" to make good a 30 second discrepancy.

A slightly less...

... stuffed crockpot has just embarked on its thermal journey. I forgot to pick up any cooking wine, I decided to forego the can of tomatoes, but that still leaves me with spuds, leeks, swede, carrots, onions, parsnip, stock, and some diced leg of dead NZ lamb. And a dash of mint. Should be OK. Report may follow in due course...

That brings me into the afternoon, and the living room temperature has soared to 18.8C. What's next, Mrs Landingham? Tea, nice music, and a good book? That's the ticket. (What a sensible woman.)

Who knew...

... the topic of parking places in cities could be made into such an interesting article? Source and snippet:

After 36 years, Shoup's writings — usually found in obscure journals — can be reduced to a single question: What if the free and abundant parking drivers crave is about the worst thing for the life of cities? ... Parking makes people nuts. "I truly believe that when men and women think about parking, their mental capacity reverts to the reptilian cortex of the brain," he says. "How to get food, ritual display, territorial dominance — all these things are part of parking, and we've assigned it to the most primitive part of the brain that makes snap fight-or-flight decisions. Our mental capacities just bottom out when we talk about parking."

Dave Gardetta in LA Mag


Scents drifting from the crockpot are already making me hungry even though it's supposed to be for my evening meal. I've just added a cooking apple to the mix, and will now fix a salad lunch to keep me going. How it's become 14:29 already is anybody's guess. And it's even slightly above freezing outside.

Yum yum

If I say so myself (and who else is going to say anything?) my relatively casually-assembled crockpot makes a pleasant change from a string of curries of various sorts. A fresh nectarine will do for "pud", and then the evening will once again be mine, as it were. In the meantime, in between moving another batch of MP3 files around on BlackBeast, I've just finished installing Apache on my laptop PC, again running it as a service to allow me to browse my local website regardless of network connection.

Enough PC stuff for a bit, I think.

Plans are now a'foot for some feet-based exercise tomorrow. We must be mad. I'm assured the brilliance of the sunshine will compensate for the chilliness of the air and ground...

  

Footnote

1  In the living room.