test please delete

[NickFitz]

Lunch earlier was a Pukka steak slice. And tea was brought to me from the Chinese restaurant just past the park. Pretty decent, and certainly better than the one in town

It was closed for much of the summer; maybe it was being refurbished, or maybe they just went on holiday.

 

[NickFitz]

The usual wildlife stuff was on today, though it ended earlier than usual due to boxing

And tonight, I read more of A Quiet Place

Goodnight all

 

[DoctorStrangelove]

Morning.

Sunday.

Grey.

Misty.

Sunless.

Drily damp.

14.4 deg in here, 13.3 in the kitchen, 10 in the leanto, 6 out the back.

1016 mBar, 30 in Hg, 762 Torr, 14.74 psi, (down from 1017 last night), 66% RH (Lidl electric).

A curiously decent night's sleep, though where the bit about Samuel R. Delany came from is a mystery, other than a reference to him in a review on Goodreads of "Nine Princes in Amber" by Roger Zelazny.

It just generated some sort of error trying to edit this after editing a post further down: refreshing the page fixed it.

Walk (unabbreviated, towpath up to the res & back) walked in the sunshine. Said res is still looking absolutely fine: and I found someone who'd met someone who'd taken a photo of it when it was 3/4 empty & orange, which proved that I hadn't dreamed it. Which was good. My sense of reality isn't very strong these days.

Had a wee in the leat instead of the canal: it's getting colder out there & at my age etc. .

Lunch: brunch. Watched the walkpast on BBC1W. One of the participants was 103.

Alan Cummings Scottish Islands thing: Barra, Eriskay, South Uist, North Uist, Berneray, Harris, Lewis, Callanish. Abandoned crofts.

Book. Other book.

Tea: beans on toast with scrambled egg. Nice enough.

Entertainment: 17 o'clock news. Something or other. The thing about Values & why engineers were first up against the redundancy wall when AI discovered how to code.

Oak Island bollox. More wood etc. A venetian glass bead, one, very small, red. More wood. Logs of wood in the swamp comprising what might be a stage leading to, wait for it, The Eye of Ye Swamp. More digging in the swamp now they've stopped digging in Smith's Cove. Again. The X ray florescence lady, Emma, always seems to be laughing at them in the so called "War Room". I gain the impression she can't get over being paid for all this crap.

Henry Cole crap <click quicker than one might reasonably expect can't stand the ****>

Edited highlights of the morning's events.

Another ep of the Duchovny bollox on Blaze: The Oak Ridge Plutonium experiments to find out what injecting 4.5mg 4.7ug of Pu into someone does. Nothing good, much as one might have expected. Ebb Cade died in 1953. The USSR supersoldier project: mating chimps & humans, humans and chimps: oddly enough due to the differing count of chromosomes it doesn't work. Unit 731. Plague Island, Aral Sea: those nice Russians working on adapting smallpox & other nasties as weapons. Who'd have thunk? Mr Roman Tritz: flew B17s during WWII, got PTSD, received "treatment" from the VA that included hot & cold sprays, insulin coma therapy, ECT, and finally a lobotomy. Poor sod survived until he was 97, still as fecked up as when he started with the added advantage of state sponsored brain damage. Brainwashing by Edward Hunter, a CIA plant who wrote a book based on Pavlov's human experiments in that nice Russia in the 1920s. DDR, Stasi, Erich Milke: collecting bottles of individual's human scent so they could be tracked using dogs.

 

[NickFitz]

Morning denizens

It’s another foggy start, and once again it’s 7°C with an expected high of 9°; the barometers are down a little bit more at 1009/1017mB. And the weather app informs me that the air quality index is 8, which is apparently “High” and worse than yesterday. I wonder what it would have been back in the day, when we still had factories all over the place running weekend night shifts?

 

[NickFitz]

This morning has already been busier than expected. The dishwasher needed emptying, if only so the stuff that had piled up since I ran it on Friday could be put in there.

And upon going to shower, I was reminded by the controller that its batteries were virtually depleted. I’d been wondering when their time would come for over a year as they seemed to be lasting very well, but the low battery indicator started showing up a few weeks ago. The trouble is, it’s only shown for about two seconds after you turn the shower on, and it’s a tiny symbol in the corner so it's very easy to either miss it or forget about it. So I figured I should probably sort it out while I remembered

Once I’d got it off its mounting plate, which was easy enough, it turned out the battery cover was held in place by four small screws. So then it was time to remember where I’d put the small screwdriver set I got from Maplin. For once in my life, I’d put it back where it was supposed to be! And I also had batteries of the right size

So that was done, and it remained paired with the actual water-controlling unit which is hidden somewhere under the bath so I didn’t need to work out what to do about that. I only realised towards the end of my shower that it felt a little cooler than usual, because it had reset to its default temperature. I also need to change the time on its clock, but it needed that anyway because it isn’t BST-aware. But it’s not that far out with the time it's set itself to, and the clock doesn’t do anything but tell you what time it is anyway, so I probably won’t get around to it until the clocks change again next March

 

[sadkingbilly]

morning all
batteries in the shower??? wtf?
mine just turns on and off.

 

[ladymuck]

Morning all

Foggy start, cleared up a bit but overcast. Currently 8 degrees with a high of 11 expected. Barometer at 1022 mBar.

Sunrise 07:07; Sunset 16:22 GMT

No visit to Mum today. I'll be staying from Thursday to Monday next week while my brother is away.

I need to look at the fridge freezer. The motor makes a right racket when it's running. I did hoover off accumulated fluff from the back but I wonder if I ought to take the grill off and do a more thorough clean up inside. It's at least 15 years old and I'd rather it not give up just yet.

 

[NickFitz]

morning all
batteries in the shower??? wtf?
mine just turns on and off.

The previous owner had the bathroom completely redone when she bought the place in 2016, including a wireless controller for the shower/bath - so yes, batteries!

I daresay these days it’d be Bluetooth, but it was just before such things became commonplace so this one uses good old-fashioned radio

 

[DoctorStrangelove]

morning all
batteries in the shower??? wtf?
mine just turns on and off.

Mine too: it has two options: cold or cold.

February is my favourite time: it's really really really cold then & even colder than that if you've just flushed the bog.

I suspect that in prior centuries I'd have had a hair shirt. .

The odd thing is how steamy it all gets with just my body heat: I must be hot stuff & no mistake.

Which reminds me that I dropped the bath brush and the head broke off it, so I need to buy another.

Things just don't last any more: I only bought that one back in the days when I was working away.

i.e. before 2003.

 

[sadkingbilly]

I'd rather the hackable items in my life be kept to a minimum.
i'm still capable of switching lights/heating/ovens/showers/taps etc on and off unaided.
oh, and why do i have so much negative rep on here?? i don't recall ever doing anything with 'rep', whatever it's supposed to signify.