2013 — 26 June: Wednesday
This time, my excuse for BlackBeast's overnight exertions was to give it time to index all that Thunderbird email. As long as it finished some time before I next "needed" the PC, what care I?1 Judging by the reported identical "kick off" time for the 03:00 disk optimisations four hours ago it finally managed the job within a couple of hours. But by then I'd switched off the screens, played my final CD of the evening, tackled the last paragraphs of the Lee Smolin book that still made sense (shortly before midnight) and retired to the embrace of Morpheus.
At one point, when my little CD concert moved seamlessly from Tin Hat Trio's 2002 "The Rodeo eroded" (first heard on Late Junction) to a Bill Frisell compilation (the one that includes an awesome 8-minute live version of "I heard it thru' the grapevine") I'd been given by Tom (who's only just discovered — courtesy of the opening paragraph of a Grauniad review of a concert he attended last Saturday — that Frisell had played on the lovely 1987 "Strange Weather" album by Marianne Faithfull — a fact I had little excuse for not knowing, given how long I've had that album) I was amazed how similar they (Tin Hat and Frisell, in case you've lost track) sounded, but that's another story, only slightly longer than this sentence.
I hate to think my writing style has been over-influenced by Ian Watson's linguistic trickery in his almost unreadable "The Embedding" :-)
One might think...
... it was spectacularly poor timing to announce yet more guvmint money (that is, my tax) being poured into the UK's "intelligence community", what with Ms Merkel hitting the boy Dave round the head with the handbag inherited from La Thatch, but apparently our charmless Chancellor doesn't see things in quite the same way. The Beeb's political editor asserts, in fact, "the intelligence services will be the biggest winners of a spending increase". Isn't that nice? (Link.)
My new heroine is this Texas senator. If only Molly Ivins were still with us to write a column about it all.
Packed lunch? Yep. Packed Buffalo? Yep. Sorted out tick-proof leg covering? Yep. In fact, ready for a walk? Yep. OK, feet-up mode for a bit. There's a bag or so of Time yet.
[Pause]
One of our further-flung routes, through and around Selborne, but a whole lot less muddy than the last time we waded round it. Nearly perfect weather, in fact. Just on 7 miles, which does very nicely. Now back to feet-up mode after a quick shower, methinks. It's 16:24. I shall assume the watering eyes and streaming, sneezing, nose show that high-enough pollen levels can still, as it were, chip away at me. Roll on rain! I'm guessing the pink splodge on the neck shows I was unsuccessful in swatting every nasty winged thing determined to feast on me, or share its venom, depending on temperament, too.
It's a jungle out there.
My recent...
... lack of sleep finally caught up with me — a little — this afternoon. I actually dozed off for 40 minutes or so before making my evening meal, and unloading the latest batch of laundry. I shall soon be trying the Terence Stamp Blu-ray that Mike very kindly lent me. Report to follow, always assuming I don't drift off again.
I didn't. It's a nice little film. Sniff.