test please delete

[NickFitz]

Morning denizens

Lots of high, thin, flat cloud again, though there are some near-gaps here and there and some blue on the horizon to the northwest. It's much as it has been temperature-wise: 13°C reaching 16° for most of the afternoon - though the wind is lower, so the "feels like" figure now is 11°. The barometers are steady at 1011/1019mB

[DoctorStrangelove]

Morning.

Wednesday.

Damp.

Blue sky in parts.

Grey.

Sunless.

Cool in here at 18.2 deg, 18 in the kitchen, 17 in the leanto.

1018 mBar, 30.06 in Hg, 763.6 Torr, 14.76 psi, (unchanged), 65% RH (Lidl electric).

Meanwhile on the 21st of February 2020 NF had hot buttered toast for lunch, then was off out to Sainsburys, I had poached egg & tomato on toast, WTFH was busy getting the guineas and chickens out of next door's vegetable patch, LondonManc popped in, and LM was off out to the Baltic.

Walk (unabbreviated, towpath) walked in the wan sunshine alternating with grey gloom.

Lunch: brunch. Entertainment: that Chinese lady thing: today how her grandmother's feet were bound.

Pottering about seems infectious. Several things I want to do & I've duly pottered about thinking about doing them & getting nowhere.

Easiest would be an earth spike for the Short Wave radio to see if it reduces the interference a bit. Got the Big Drill (SDS) out, got the long SDS drill (right diameter) out, measured the earth spike & one of said drills (Lidl's finest metre long SDS), then duly put it all back where it came from.

Then contemplated the front room office cum junk room: the floor seems a bit dodgy in the corner judging by the way the bookcase in the alcove is leaning. .

The amount of stuff that requires moving for access thereto is overwhelming, hence: made a cup of mediocre yet consistent coffee & started typing this guff.

Tomorrow, as they say, is Another Day. .

On the defunct freezer front, I recall the fun of emptying the defunct chest freezer in the salting house, and the even greater fun of getting it out of there with my late mother having kittens over it all for no readily apparent reason, since it came out as easily as the slightly smaller replacement went back in.

After a few days the remaining stuff in the old freezer had defrosted, fermented & was flung on the roof the salting house for the birds to eat, which probably explains the self planted gooseberry bush next to the "patio". .

Tea: fish. Entertainment: PM.

Sadly no Maigret this evening, the final ep with the late Bruno Cremer was last week.

Bored. tulipless. Nothing on the idiot lantern again. FFS.

I'm getting through these Larry Niven anthologies at the moment. They seemed much better 50 years ago.

[NickFitz]

Lunch: Heinz oxtail soup and white toast

When going to get the bread for this, I discovered that the freezer from the old place seems to have finally given up the ghost. It's been struggling for ages, just about managing to get to around -12°C rather than the desired -18°, but it was at -8° and the compressor (or whatever it is) wasn't kicking in at all, suggesting it's done. I tried turning it off and on again and it flashed its light and sounded its alarm for being too warm, but was unable to start trying to rectify the situation

I've only been using it for stuff that doesn't turn poisonous at higher temperatures such as bread and frozen chips; there's no meat in there, not even leftovers. I'll see what the situation is this evening but if it's defunct, I'll have to start changing my shopping habits and so on, as the freezer part of the built-in fridge-freezer here is relatively small and unable to handle the amount of stuff I'm used to having around

[ladymuck]

Afternoon all

Overcast but bright enough and dry. Currently 17 degrees and that's the high for the day. Barometer down to 1023 mBar.

Sunrise 07:14; Sunset 18:23 BST

A pottering around kind of day so far. I have things on my to-do list but am not currently enthused about them.

The GP surgery called to make some appointments. Turns out that I need a B12 jab, not one but six . Three times a week for two weeks. Much juggling of diaries to find slots for it all. Plus more vials of blood to be taken for more testing. Considering the headaches seem to have eased up, I'm feeling a bit on the fraudulent side. On a positive note, the doctor didn't ask my weight or tell me that things would be better if I lost some.

[ladymuck]

I am pleased to report that a minor update to Firefox has resolved the issues with Scrambled Maps. I've tested several times over the past couple of days and all seems to be restored to working order.

[NickFitz]

That's Wednesday done! Just got to get through Thursday, but it's one of the ones on which we collaborate across dev teams to address tech debt. There's some stuff I was dealing with last month that exposed a bug in some other stuff altogether which stopped it being completed, but that's been fixed now. So I'll pick that back up, and with luck nobody will ask me to do anything else, and I know from last time that I can have it all sorted out by lunch

And apparently the target completion rate across the department for the mandatory training has been increased, which reminded me that mine was probably long out of date. I checked, and it is, to the extent that my account had been deactivated for lack of use

So I'll spend the rest of the day getting that out of the way, because it's easy (if a little tedious) and should see me through until it's time to knock off!

[NickFitz]

I am pleased to report that a minor update to Firefox has resolved the issues with Scrambled Maps. I've tested several times over the past couple of days and all seems to be restored to working order.

[NickFitz]

Tea has been the beef curry I made the other week with rice

It's not that good, to be honest. Edible, but nothing special. I should find a proper recipe next time I want to make something like that

Anyway, that means there's a little more space in the fridge-freezer, as the other one doesn't seem to have revived

In laundry news, I stuck a towel wash on this afternoon

I'm very impressed by how quick the drying process was. I split it into two batches once the wash was done as it can help dry them quicker if they're done in smaller loads, and the first two large ones were done in less than fifty minutes! I forgot to time the second batch, which was a large and several small, but it was about the same

[NickFitz]

In Random Acts of Senseless Violence, our diarist's family have had to move to a smaller, cheaper apartment uptown, supposedly temporarily. But given such aspects of the ongoing collapse of society as she happens to notice while concentrating on the usual concerns of a 12 year old girl, I suspect any restoration of her conception of normal life is unlikely to ever happen. And she's not dumb; she strongly suspects the same, no matter how much her parents try to pretend things will be all right again soon

Thursday tomorrow!

Goodnight all

[ladymuck]

Tea has been the beef curry I made the other week with rice

It's not that good, to be honest. Edible, but nothing special. I should find a proper recipe next time I want to make something like that

What was the recipe you were following? I can get HWMBO to suggest a better alternative for you to try. As there are a myriad of beef curry recipes, it helps him figure out roughly which country/region the recipe came from.