test please delete

[NickFitz]

Tea has been the spicy Turkish chicken and potato thing

This was accompanied by the new episode of Forensics: the Real CSI on iPlayer

[xoggoth]

Walk with ll3 today, she really has gone downhill, so doddery & slow. A few months ago she always managed to keep up with me.

[NickFitz]

Tonight in the Renaissance, a pause to gain some temporal perspective. Given our tendency to see "the Renaissance" as one period of time with a lot of stuff going on in it, it's interesting to realise that to Michelangelo in his prime, Dante's Divine Comedy was from as long ago as Pride and Prejudice is to us, and there was still about two centuries of Renaissancing to come after his death (depending on how you define it).

And then the case of a seeress who prophesied the death of King Christina of Sweden (who was very much living at the transition from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, though of course they didn't know that was what was going on at the time). N.B. Female monarchs were still called kings in many European countries then, the word "queen" being reserved for the wives of male monarchs - though she wasn't king by then anyway, having abdicated, converted to Roman Catholicism, and moved to Rome.

And so onwards to an explanation of the moral philosophy of Machiavelli.

All this, and there are still 200 pages to go, not counting notes and references! I think I'll take a break from this one for a while; interesting as it is, one can only read about the Renaissance for so many days in a row

Goodnight all

[WTFH]

Morning all
A very good evening with Gordon Buchanan yesterday, glad we went.
CBS, etc, with mist in the valley that is slowly burning off.
No walk this morning as Max stayed with my brother in law last night.

[NickFitz]

Morning denizens

Another sunny start, and getting a bit warmer as well. Currently 6°C and expected to soar to 15° this afternoon, though it'll also get cloudier with a bit of a breeze. The barometers are down to 1001/1009mB

[ladymuck]

Morning all

Clear blue sky from my vantage point. Weather app says low visibility. Currently 4 degrees with a high of 16 expected. Barometer down to 1015 mBar.

Sunrise 06:35; Sunset 17:51

Had rubbish sleep. Kept waking up too hot. I'd like to have the window open overnight but HWMBO finds it too cold. Mainly because the window is on on his side of the bed so he gets the full draft.

[DoctorStrangelove]

Morning. I think I've done too much in the last couple of days.

Thursday.

Dry.

Sunny.

Blue sky.

Chilly in here at 11.4 deg, 10.5 in the kitchen, 8 in the leanto.

1008 mBar, 29.766223 in Hg, 756.1 Torr, 14.62 psi, (down from 1014 last night), 61% RH (Lidl electric).

Meanwhile on the 30th of December 2019 LM was off on her travels again and the weather was golden with sunshine everywhere but here where it was the usual grey.

Walk (unabbreviated) walked in the sunshine. Almost got too warm by the end.

Lunch: brunch.

Entertainment: the Y&Y replacement thing waffling on about business.

Decided to paint the bits of tin shed with some ancient non drip dulux white gloss: and it's not non drip any more, so I stirred it up a bit.

Managed to finish the painting before it started spotting with rain.

Poked the bottom edge of the back door with a screwdriver & found it was rotted out in places, so made a batten to cover the holes & hold it together whilst i contemplate getting a new back door & some windows. Contemplation is probably as far as it will get.

Remembered to charge the screwdriver & drill before they were needed, since neither holds charge for long any more.

Used stainless steel screws to hold stuff together.

It all looks dreadful but is good enough for an afternoon's potch.

Tea: beans on toast plus boiled eggs. Nice enough.

Entertainment: the sciency thing, then PM.

Don't suppose there's anything to watch this evening.

Feels like the pollen count is rising: the hazel catkins are in fine fettle, but I'd guess the alders are busy pollinating too and there's a lot more of them & they're closer.

"The Directors: Don Siegel".

The Swiss guy waffling on about UFOs and the founding fathers. <click>

Book. Other book. Other other book.

"The proof is out there": more Blaze bollox: KGB alien video. Video ghosts in Bradford. Mylar balloon UFO.

It's raining.

[NickFitz]

To Sainsbury's I did go, where I got the new Viz!

And while I was in that non-foodstuffs area of the shop, I treated myself to a new big cast iron griddle pan. I got one of these the other year; it can be used in the oven or on the hob, though it needs two burners. It's turned out to be ideal for the spicy chicken-and-potato things I've been making, except it's a bit of a squeeze to get everything on and this means I can't fit as many bits of potato as I'd like. So now I have two, I can do the chicken on one and the spuds on the other! Or probably a mix on both, as it's worth having the chicken fat get involved with the potatoes while it's all cooking

Continuing to the rest of the store to get groceries and such, I discovered they'd done a rearrangement. It isn't one of those minor "eggs are now sugar" ones, but a major one where all kinds of things have moved hither and yon, albeit retaining the general layout, presumably because freezers and the like are too much hassle to move. This meant I had to venture up and down aisles searching for the herbs and spices, but at least it reminded me of a few other things I wanted that might otherwise have been forgotten

Meanwhile outside, some people are moving in to the adjacent block, though at the other end. IIRC it's one of the two-bedroom flats in the middle that sold recently. They seem fairly young (thirtyish?) so the cycle of older residents dying off and being replaced by younger ones, which has been a fairly standard process since I interrupted it by moving here, continues

[NickFitz]

Just phoned the bike shop. The factory is now predicting that my new bike should be with them on March 24th

Ah well, it should be nice weather for cycling by then

[NickFitz]

Polish has been applied to the black shoes, after cleaning off a few traces of last year's January mud from the pub car park, so they're ready to be burnished in the morning

Google Maps can be very pessimistic. It admits that the journey to Liverpool will take about two hours and ten minutes but then advises me to set off just after nine in the morning for a 12:45 arrival, presumably because it once took somebody longer to get there. Apple Maps has a more positive outlook, reckoning that allowing twenty minutes or so for contingencies will do