test please delete

[ladymuck]

Morning all

Sunny with lumps of fluff. Currently 13 degrees with a high of 15 expected. Barometer up a bit to 1026 mBar.

Busy morning, too many meetings. Got a contract extension offer, which I accepted because I'd be daft not to in the current climate.

[NickFitz]

Got a contract extension offer, which I accepted because I'd be daft not to in the current climate.

Boomed!

[NickFitz]

Lunch seems so long ago, but for the record, it was cold cocktail sausages in a wholemeal bap (I'd bought a load of them and they Needed to be Eaten™) with a bag of plain crisps

Onboarding of the two new devs continues, but from my perspective it largely consists of answering the occasional question on Slack or Teams at the moment. They should have got all the mandatory training and other nonsense out of the way shortly and we'll have to get down to some actual development. I'm still not sure we need three developers, but I daresay we'll manage to pad out the work available so as to justify the headcount

[WTFH]

We've had our inspection visit and the lady who did it seemed to think we'll pass no problem. She took a lot of photos in the garden and I hope the fencing is good enough.

[xoggoth]

Walk loony lady 3 today. It will be a relief when I go deaf.

[SueEllen]

Hacking - sorry pruning - of garden plants completed. Late this year due to the last frost date actually being as late as stated.

At some point tomorrow need to go and deposit the stuff at the tip.

[NickFitz]

Tea has been chicken scouse with a crust of white

And I'm also in the middle of making chicken and pearl barley soup, flavoured liberally with tarragon. At Easter, my sister roasted three chickens for the assembled masses, but I'm the only member of the family who prefers brown meat. So I had one leg, and she was left with the remaining five. She had meant to give them to me, but forgot, so she froze them; and I picked them up after visiting my Mum last weekend, and now they're becoming soup

My Mum should be getting out of hospital on Friday afternoon, once her care package is in place, so I'll be going down to visit her and Dad at home on Saturday. Not sure whether to aim to arrive after the Coronation to avoid watching it, or set off early so I'm in time for it, as it will at least spark some interesting reminiscences of the last one

[WTFH]

Harry’s out and about tonight.

[NickFitz]

The car blokes have moved to the USA now, starting with a Pontiac GTO. I might find some better way of spending my time until they get around to putting on some new ones

And the gold diggers suffered various setbacks: some mechanical, some meteorological, and some entomological (viz. ticks from detecting in a wooded area).

Then a new episode of Traffic Cops

And so to bed to read more of Aubrey's Brief Lives

The soup seems to have turned out OK - six bowls thereof. I shall let it mature overnight, have a bowl for lunch tomorrow, and then see if I can fit the rest in the freezer

Goodnight all

[NickFitz]

Morning denizens

Sunny start out, probably designed to tempt people out to the polling stations for the council and mayoral elections. Currently 8°C, but predicted to soar to 18° later, though possibly with some thickening of the cloud. The barometers are down a chunk at 1006/1015mB. It's also predicted to be quite breezy out

Last night, I went to reorder the monthly prescription, only to find somebody at the surgery had done so last week without telling me. No idea what's going on there, and I'm not even sure if I'm interpreting what it says on there correctly - the Patient Record is, of course, constructed primarily for the benefit of medical types. So I'll have to go to the pharmacy and see if they've got them. I hope people aren't going to make a habit of messing with my system like this

But I need to go out to vote anyway. I'm a bit unsure still about who to vote for in the City Mayoral one, but it won't be the incumbent. He's been there for as long as we've had one, and was leader of the council since at least the 1980s before that. But for years now he's been in the hands of the property developers who are turning everything in sight into student accommodation, and of DMU who encourage this because they want to keep their numbers on the rise. I know from people who have business dealing with them that the property developers are doing very nicely, but meanwhile, the city centre is virtually derelict (except for all the places that are being turned into student flats). I think I'll go for one of the candidates who wants to be elected so they can abolish the role, or at least hold a referendum on it. Though not the Tories of course, who are so utterly alienated from the concept of truth that they couldn't even stop themselves uttering blatant lies and distortions in the official booklet outlining the candidates' positions that was sent to every voter