2013 — 18 April: Thursday
A temptingly-sunny start1 marred only by the need to clean the crockpot container, which I'd left to soak overnight. Although kitchen things seem perfectly content to dry by themselves (evaporation is one of my allies) they rarely if ever clean themselves first. Odd, that.
Not only have we totally missed out on all those fancy back-pack personal jet flying kits we were so confidently promised (along with genuine AI) by Raymond Baxter on "Tomorrow's World" we also seem to have avoided most of the promised domestic robot housework companions that were going to make 21st century life such a breeze.
Elbow grease to the rescue.
I know it's very...
... very wrong of me, but I found brief laughter was the only possible reaction to a news item that an NHS morgue delivery vehicle had been sent along to a garage for some maintenance work... with a body still on board. In a Hollywood comedy, perhaps. But in real life, not so cool. I don't suppose it was La Thatch. Now, that would be funny. Mike banned all mention of politics on today's walk.
Nor was the daffodil hunt terribly successful. We shall return in search of the lost bluebell in a month or so.
Meanwhile, as soon as I got home after said walk (one of our further-flung ones involving a round trip of over 70 miles) I had to go along to Mr Postie's bat cave to pick up today's lumps of incoming video goodness:
"Margin call" impressed me very much, Parker Posey is a favourite comedy goddess of mine, and I somehow missed the Poliakoff when it was originally broadcast.
"Citizen Kane" in its BFI-restored glory is a no-brainer, and "Room with a view" was originally in my collection on LaserDisc in the mid-1980s.
Time (nearly 18:00) to do a light evening meal. I had a delicious home-made venison pie and a pint for lunch, but the abundance of contour lines helped work all that off.
Having enjoyed...
... my little sandwich of wild Pacific oncorhynchus nerka (or "salmon" as I was wont to dub it, as a lad) I was disheartened to see that some Marketing genius had appended
Allergens Contains fish
to the labelling information. That's my second encounter with such a genius today. The first was with a chap who claims to be Head of Communications for MBNA, and who was keen to give me "Important information about my MBNA Cash Rewards Credit Card". This used to be a very simple VISA card from what was Alliance & Leicester until they got into trouble and were gobbled up by a Spanish gang whom I've basically now shaken off. Like a bacterium, the card is about to bifurcate and become a "More Cash Rewards American Express Credit Card" and a "More (ditto) VISA Card".
Actually, I had an Amex card for many years. IBM gave it to me, and Amex eventually got fed up of waiting for me to use it and took it away from me. I was also given a Diners Club card that I excitedly used precisely once (to book a flight to New York to a meeting that was cancelled two days later as IBM was experiencing one of its [many, regular] expenses2 crunches). I can't now recall what happened to that card, but I certainly didn't still have it by the time I took early retirement a decade later.
Now, here's a...
... creature you don't see every day — I'm pretty sure it's a fine specimen of anguis muscosos:
We also spotted a couple of deer, and a dead pheasant. It's a jungle out there.
A little nugget...
... I was sent from Austin, Texas some while ago:
The spin cycle on the washing machine does not make earth worms dizzy. It will however make cats dizzy and cats throw up twice their body weight when dizzy.