2013 — 2 June: Sunday
Well, my house is once again back to single occupancy.1
Meanwhile, somewhat sombre news: I took a call from the care home yesterday. Dear Mama, having taken it (by whatever neural processing is still available to her) into her head to walk — blissfully unaware of the state of her inner gyroscope for the last year or more — back to her room rather than wait for a wheelchair, "took a little tumble" though appears not to have sustained any serious damage. Deep unjoy.
By contrast, the photo of Christa that I first published exactly four years ago invariably pleases me, while reminding me of the final scene in what is essentially my SF short story "Desert Island" selection:
The middle of the book held an old face with a thousand wrinkles at the corners of its steady, understanding eyes, with muttonchop whiskers on its cheeks. He looked at that one a long time while it seemed to come at him out of the mists of the past.
'If I may say so, sir, an officer and a gentleman is never willfully unkind.'
He was still meditating over the face when the sounds of distant footsteps and a rattling coffee tray brought him back to the present.
Eric Frank Russell's beautiful story "Minor Ingredient" (should you be wondering)... Well, absent the muttonchop whiskers (of course)! :-)
What an increasingly...
... charmless world this is becoming. I think, since I can't fix the problem, I shall merely assign the blame — the ever-increasing supply of what was once laughingly known as homo sapiens. A badly-named primate species, if ever there was one. (Link.)
I'm still waiting for my two USB3 16GB memory sticks to show up, and now I've been tipped off that the speed I see from them will be 'relatively' disappointing as the higher-capacity ones have a larger number of channels operating in parallel. Of course, I'm not seeing any speed from them right now... Meanwhile, my next crockpot prep will be slighty delayed this morning while the ingredients thaw out a little on my sunny kitchen windowsill. It may just be time to twitch the setting on my fridge's thermostat, methinks. So, breakfast first for a change.
Today's eventual dicing and slicing was accompanied by the podcast from last Friday's Kermode and Mayo film show. Those two lads are on their half-term hols, and the guest presenters did a more than adequate job while also leaving me feeling at the end less as if I had been drenched by a high-pressure (audio) fire hose. And now, given the resumption of a 24x7 NPR feed, I initially had the choice of "Car Talk" or the semi-divine Cerys. Ladies first.
While (naturally) I...
... regard myself as far too young for an afternoon nap (!) I was up and about at a few minutes past 06:00 this morning, so maybe I can be excused. Better have some lunch, I guess.
It is far easier than it should be to download e-books, dammit! Still, at least they're generally a lot cheaper than the paper equivalent.
After midnight? Already? Impossible!