2015 — 10 April: Friday
I've been granted a small stay of execution for my job of clearing an access path to the spare1 bedroom. Peter and his g/f won't now be arriving here until early tomorrow afternoon. They spent last weekend in Edinburgh, I gather. Flying there for rather less than the £800 single train fare from London. (Is this an example of the post-Thatcherite economic miracle of privatisation in all its ghastly glory?)
Gaming the stats?
I think nuclear missiles on US-controlled Trident submarines are no madder than any other form of nuclear weaponry. They are all totally insane, and totally abhorrent, as is any person willing to "push the launch button".
The UK is part of Nato, and a condition of that membership is the expenditure of no less than 2% of GDP on defence. This government has already tried to boost the figures by now including war pensions in the figures and even mooting the inclusion of intelligence budgets to game the stats still further.
But no-one asks me, of course :-)
On occasion...
... I've heard it suggested that I have a hint of the obsessive. And, I confess, I've read more than one book by Henry Petroski. But this lady reigns supreme, surely?
Naturally, her book is now on its way :-)
Having done my early (Fridays can be hellish otherwise) fresh food gathering, I suppose I'd better sort out breakfast next.
I've just added...
... a 1 TB lump of spinning rust2 storage space to BlackBeast. I've called it "rusty" and will be using it as a staging post as I transfer some of my data hither and yon in one of my periodic (and usually futile) attempts to impose a lower level of entropy. For a while. My initial comedic attempt to create a symbolic link to /rusty placed a link to /home in /rusty (rather than the other, more useful, way round). Furthermore, /rusty had somehow managed to convince itself that only superuser was actually worthy enough to be allowed to create folders and files in it. (I blame the twit who was driving a sudo terminal at the time.)
I took a dim view of that. A second blast of GPartEd to exercise what this superuser (aka "the owner") likes to call his Ace of Trumps "nuclear option", followed by a sudo chmod 777 /rusty got me off to a better start. And I now have the desired symbolic link to /rusty sitting clickably in my /home/david folder. All this hard work has to be worth another cuppa, surely?
An affirm-filled meeting...
... with my solicitor (I don't hold with touching bibles while asserting that I'm being truthful) and I've now avoided a trip to Winchester.3 I'm on the final stage of my Probate application. I've sent off the just-'witnessed' paperwork — the signed "Oath", a signed checklist, and a signed copy of the witnessed Will — to the Winchester District Probate Registry. I should get the Grant (and the four 'sealed' copies) in two weeks. I can then close down mother's estate.
I officially registered her death exactly 21 days ago. The bank's solicitors took a lot longer in Christa's (much simpler) case to do a lot less... And charged me nearly £400 on top of the Probate fee itself when I wrestled control back from them (as was my absolute right, by the way). Had I not done so, they would have gone on to charge up to 5% of the value of her estate before declaring themselves satisfied. More tea, methinks. I've jolly well earned it.
I look forward...
... to hearing this. I first read it shortly after buying it, in July 1971, while on holiday up in Oban. I should have been working on a summer engineering project from Hatfield Poly, of course. UKleG is 85! (Link.)
On this day...
... but exactly 20 years ago:
One more day, and the house gets back to what passes for normality around here with just the three of us. Peter has, of course, now started his two-week Easter break, so Christa and I will each try to take some time off too. I find that German teenagers are, if anything, even larger and more demanding than the UK ones, and rather more affluent (if marginally less fluent in English). The 10-day exchange hasn't been a total success, perhaps partly because Peter underestimated the amount of time the visitors wanted to spend in their own company — but it's all useful experience for him.
There's a picture of one such 'guest' here.