2014 — 9 December: Tuesday
I must be getting senile1 as I can no longer recall just how many times the New York Times has now offered to extend its low-rate introductory subscription rates just for little old me. Nor quite how many times the automated idiots in their Marketing department have urgently emailed me to point out the pending expiry of these oh-so-uncheap offers. (Is it clever to piss off a potential customer? I don't think so!) Not even the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica2 at its most egregious over 30 years ago was quite as irritatingly persistent (and, come to think of it, I only finally shook them off by moving house).
My old chum Jack Frost...
... has evidently been busy outside, but I shall still have to nip out on a supplies run at some point. There's also an impending drive up to the cousins in the Midlands to be factored into my "planning". Meanwhile, in the wake of yesterday's tiny spot of pensioner's operating expense analysis, Big Bro has kindly sent me an interesting partial analysis of some of his own figures for comparison. Of course, down there in the NZ Land of the Free on his huge country spread things are a little different. Indeed, as he points out:
We have the 2 bedroom self-contained flat and additional sleeping facilities in the main house for overflows. We have two rooms set aside as offices... his and hers. Add in the three cars (would have been 4 but we are giving Heather the Logo) which includes the restored Mini which is coming home at the weekend. 21st December sees the start of the invasion and we will swell from the current population of three to seven adults and 3 children for a week or so. That is when the grounds and the pool come into play! Everything is thus relative.
I'm (almost) sure his pun was unintentional but I enjoyed it no less for that. Horses for courses, as he says. Here's a pictorial reminder of the splendour that is Casa Big Bro:
It's from 2008, so the current composition of the roving creatures in the foreground will have changed. (Awfully large pets, in my opinion.)
I can barely...
... hear the — now, thankfully, after a jolly good stuffing — somewhat more muffled whining from Mother Hubbard's relentless cupboard above the sound of my chattering teeth. Crikey, it's bitingly cold out there. I'd left it until the alcohol in the porch thermometer had crawled all the way up to +2C, and then I crawled out into the merry hordes. What a perfectly horrid time of year.
I suspect that, after...
... Mr Postie's visit today (assuming he bothers to stop off at Technology Towers) I shall finally be able to deduce exactly which of my recent batch of orders has gone astray with the most-unwanted substitution of that pair of "Nativity" DVD titles I mentioned. (Still shrink-wrapped, and likely to remain so until I palm them off on somebody.) I further suspect it will turn out to be my order for the first three seasons of "Drop the Dead Donkey".
Admiring...
... the way I'd tidied up in Peter's room after the upheavals of digging out power and digital video leads for the loan-of-a-monitor to my neighbour on Saturday I happened to glance up at the bookshelves. Right at the end of the top shelf was the box from which this is the "System Requirements" bit for that Britannica:
I didn't actually have (or feel any need for) a Windows PC at the time, though both Christa and Peter did, of course.
My tea's gone cold...
... while I was distracted upstairs by a book I'd actually bought back in August 2005...
... that was promptly half-inched by the aforementioned Peter before I'd had a chance to read the bl***y thing. I found it sitting quite near the Britannica — having had no idea it had come back from London at some point in the intervening (gulp) nearly a decade. Do you ever get the feeling Time is whizzing faster all the, erm, time?
I'm fairly sure...
... the applicable collective noun here is an "embarrassment" of riches. Long winter evenings sorted? Check!
Wish I could write as well as Westlake did, too. [Pause] Meanwhile — thanks a whole big bunch, NPR! — I've just heard the mother of all plot spoilers for the end of Season #7 of "Sons of Anarchy" dagnabbit. And there's me having only so far watched the pilot and the following episode. Great music, by the way. Grrr.