2016 — 17 June: Friday
While I wouldn't say it was cold, I note the central heating came on overnight if the residual warmth of the bathroom radiator is any guide. Likewise, while I wouldn't say it was gloomy, my solar-powered atomic clock is only managing a faint display at the moment. The moment being (as far as I can make out through sleepy eyes) about 09:07.
Actually, Peter's g/f told me at the weekend that she always finds it dark here. I must admit, I tend to keep curtains drawn. I have my reasons:
- partly for privacy,
- partly to minimise the amount of bright/dark contrast,
- mostly just as a lazy way of stopping books and furnishings fading in all the sunshine.
High contrast...
... is a Bad Thing for me. Avoiding it seems generally my best way of staving off my "visual zig-zags". These are an occasional nuisance because — whenever they show up — they work their way across, and thus wipe out, my field of view for a few minutes. It's as if your blind spot temporarily moves across your vision; plenty scary the first time it happens, utterly mundane many times and many years later. Besides, they have never actually gone on to become a migraine1 headache. Dear Mama was a martyr to these. They were always good for popping a couple of Veganin tablets and retiring to her bed for a period during which quiet was demanded. (Reading quietly never posed me a problem!)
Since my mortar-grinding pair...
... had vanished by the time I got back from my afternoon outing yesterday — leaving various tools and chunks of scaffolding clustered around the patio door to make access to my bins slightly more athletic than usual — I have no idea of their current plans2 for today.
Breakfast?
Following a chat...
... on completely unrelated issues with my builder, with whom I've quickly developed a rapport, I now know that repair work on the house fabric will resume — weather permitting — on Monday, so no more noise and dust for a while. (A Good Thing.) Now that the "lid" is on tight and is watertight, I regard the remaining work as largely cosmetic. It isn't, but I choose to view it that way since I'm not the one who has to look at my house from the outside! It's undeniably of less urgency.
Meanwhile, I now find myself with another just-arranged lunch date, this time with Iris. (A Good Thing.) However, I gather she has some PC security-related questions to be answered, or at least some Trusteer (IBM) Rapport-related fears and concerns to be allayed. (A not altogether Good Thing. What do I know of such arcana? And on Windows 10, too.)
If people understood the staggering extent of my ignorance they might well be less eager for my advice. I know I would be!
Some among my acquaintance...
... will both recognise, and enjoy, the translation:
Morel and his assistants outdo themselves with the following offering: "la grise et douce mere. La mer pituitaire. La mer contractilo-testiculaire." Not only are the French equivalents as delightful and as witty as the English, but they also rhyme and introduce a meaningful homonym (the passage's comparison of the sea with a mother is even more felicitous in French where mother is "mere" and sea is "mer").
Me? It's more 'meh' :-)
Even the longest...
... meal and pleasant afternoon of chat and PC-related solutions ends eventually. Driving home, I saw my first-ever cat-climbing-a-telephone-pole. Plus, on stopping at one pinch-point (to let a bit of on-coming traffic through the narrow gap first), I watched an impatient idiot overtake me and then be forced to brake — and squeeze into a sub-optimal space — to let that traffic past him when (I assume) he dimly perceived he was both out-numbered and in the "wrong". Nobody paid him any heed, but all the drivers in turn nodded or waved their gratitude to me.
Dennis (my driving instructor in late 2007) warned me to expect the unexpected; he also assured me that drivers late on a Friday afternoon were always the worst-behaved. I'll raise my cup of black de-caff to that.
Oh my!
Tsundoku, an untranslatable Japanese word that means "buying books and letting them pile up unread." Letting them? You just try stopping them!
Paring down one's wardrobe is one thing, but what kind of degenerate only wants to own 30 books (or fewer) at a time on purpose? What sort of psychopath rips out pages from their favorite books and throws away the rest so they can, as Kondo puts it, "keep only the words they like?" For those of us for whom even the word "book" sparks joy, this constitutes a serious disconnect.