2014 — 11 November: Tuesday
I've decided to break with recent tradition and stop making my main heading black on the anniversary of Christa's death. I hardly need reminding, after all. She remains with me while I can still access my memories.
Having woken up late, I've been spared any decision-making about whether to dash to the foody shops before the rain. Or even before my initial cuppa. So now I shall stay in out of the ghastly stuff (which is quite heavy) at least for a while, methinks. Meanwhile, it appears from an attachment in one of this morning's emails — thanks, Lis — that the NZ branch of the Mounces is definitely a little denser1 than the UK twig:
That twig, after all, has consisted of just me, Peter, and dear Mama2 for precisely seven years now. <Sigh!> I haven't even met all this lot, yet. Compare and contrast with the 1987 variant here (taken by Big Bro) of a subset of the same mob.
Our New Zealand family branch, summer 1987
That's Claire on the left, Christa and Peter (of course), Lis (in pink), Heather on her lap, Rachel (the helicopter pilot) perched on my chair, and Michelle ruining her knees on the right. But why on earth was I wearing a suit?3 I surely didn't have any customer meetings. It's a mystery.
[Pause] Right, time for some breakfast! I heard last night, by the way, that the now-departed breadmaking apparatus has already churned out its first satisfactory white loaf up in the Smoke for Peter and his g/f. On the first attempt too. Better than Christa and I managed. I still remember having to chisel out and discard our first attempt after a trivial mis-reading of the instructions.
While reading...
... a thoughtful "Saturday essay" in the WSJ — source and snippet...
England's libel laws — long a scandalous system for enabling the rich to suppress their scandals — now have imitations in Europe and the U.S. ...
In Britain, the sitting Tory home secretary, Theresa May, long resisted efforts to reform a catchall law regulating speech that the police have enforced with extraordinary zeal and no sense of proportion. These police actions include
arresting a protester for asking a policeman "Is your horse gay?"; prosecuting a drunken soccer fan who, from his sofa, attacked a player in a racist tweet; summoning a youngster to appear in court for a placard describing Scientology
as a cult; and arresting a Muslim demonstrator for burning a Remembrance Poppy.
... I was reminded of Brendan Behan's doleful assertion:
I have never seen a situation so dismal that a policeman couldn't make it worse.
Mid-afternoon, and still it rains. Ghastly weather.
I've been doing...
... a spot of necessary meta-file-mangling before I let Brian and his Pythonic talents loose on an over-sized XML file. (It's output from WinAmp and can be put to good use for generating semi-automated music lists.) All will doubtless be revealed.
I've also just spotted — and stopped — Win8.1's apparent leisure-time hobby: automated data "File History" backing-up on my behalf. It had quietly taken so many incremental data file snapshots of my main data drive inside BlackBeast that it had reduced the space available (on the 240GB 'scratch' SSD I'd given it to play with) to a mere 16GB or so. Leaving aside my audio and video files4 what I regard as my 'working set' of data on my main SSD (which is already duplicated on a same-size dedicated backup SSD) is less than 20GB. In total. Even that's already 1,000x more data than I had on my Acorn RISC PC quarter of a century ago. So you can see just how busy Win8.1 must have been as it salted away many, many minor variations on a saved-data theme...
Worth noting that the File History process seems perfectly happy to ignore the space limit I'd imposed when I first set it up, too. It obviously felt I'd given it free rein over the entire 240GB. I recall the "Time Machine" process on my unlamented iMac was just as happy to fill up all the space it could find. Just sayin'. Feeling slightly paranoid, I've also taken a fresh System Image and tucked it safely away in case this evening's onslaught of 'updates' goes awry.
Not that that has ever been known to happen.
Aside to Christa
I'm willing to bet you didn't know I'd kept this for 33 years after it had run out!
The warranty card for the first car I bought you, largely financed by some heavy-duty weekend freelance writing (including a self-teach COBOL course for ICL 1500 Series programmers in 36 busy hours one hectic weekend). Like I said on Sunday: the young have an excess of energy.
Having stared, in some mild dismay, at the huge assortment of almost exclusively analogue video and audio signal cables that are now strewn over the living room floor — the result of foolishly emptying four of the plastic crates that have lain peacefully undisturbed in Peter's room for far too long — I've given up temporarily, and have just raised a glass of something mildly alcoholic in Christa's memory. The cost of these cables must have been several hundred pounds, and they are now all essentially redundant. Such is the power (or, at least, the effect) of digital.
As one of the daughters of Peter's honorary grandmother remarked a couple of days before Christa died:
I haven't seen either of you for many years now, so the way I think of you is fixed in time back in Old Windsor. I said to Mum that I can remember coming round to your house to see the new baby - Peter - who now, incredibly, is grown up. Somehow, I feel he must only be a teenager, but that is probably because I can't possibly be the age that I am. Christa, you were always happy and laughing; David, you were always doing something with wires and equipment.
Some things never change :-)