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[WTFH]

Morning all
Overcast but dry out, slept in until around 6am, so a foreshortened walk has been had.
Noticed that the waterbutt I use to top up the pond was full, so am currently topping up the pond. Need to remember to turn that off later - someone remind me please!

[NickFitz]

Morning denizens

Mostly cloudy with sunnier spells at the moment, but the clouds are expected to predominate through the day. Still a bit breezy too. It’s getting milder though: already at 13°C (“feels like” 9°) and expected to soar to 21° this afternoon, as we build towards the heatwave that will see it reach 31° on Monday and stay in the mid-20s all next week. The barometers are shooting upwards at 1012/1020mB

Today is tech debt day, so with luck I’ll get to just do a few dependency upgrades first and can then tinker with some corner of the app that feels like it could do with some tidying. I’ll pop along to Not-as-Big Sainsbury’s at lunchtime and get the shopping out of the way, leaving the Bank Holiday weekend clear

[NickFitz]

This evening’s viewing was the rest of the Police Interceptors I started last night

And in The Middle Kingdoms, it turns out Lithuania was once absolutely huge, incorporating swathes of modern Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia; while Poland managed a very effective PR campaign by presenting itself as the bulwark against hordes from the east

Thursday tomorrow! And a Bank Holiday weekend too!

Goodnight all

[NickFitz]

Tea has been BBQ beef short ribs and chips

Rather than braise the ribs as I usually do, I decided to experiment a bit. So I browned them and chucked them in a roasting tin with a carrot, onion, and some garlic cloves, covered it all tightly with foil, and stuck it in the oven at 100°C for about five hours. Then I made a glaze: some cherry tomatoes, mustard, red wine vinegar, sugar, honey, smoked and plain paprika, chilli flakes, thyme, bit of Cajun seasoning, dash of soy, dash of Worcester… probably some other stuff too. Boiled that lot up and reduced it till it was a nice thick sauce, then got the ribs out. Chucked the veg away, took the meat off the bones in one piece (well, two pieces), added the juices to the sauce and reduced that a bit further, then poured it over the meat and stuck it all back in at 180°. Turned the meat a few times and brushed the sauce over as it gradually turned into a glaze, until it was nicely browned and sticky. It turned out very well; I shall try that again

Though TBH I tried a fragment of just meat and fat that was left behind on the chopping board after boning, and that tasted really nice on its own! So I could have saved myself some faffing around and still enjoyed it

[xoggoth]

Group walk this morning folowed by meet at the pub. Been doing a bonfire this afternoon, smell of smoke, need a shower.

[ladymuck]

Afternoon all

Cloudy with sunny gaps. Dry. Breezy. Currently 19 degrees and that's the high for the day. Slight chance of a shower later. Barometer at 1019 mBar.

Sunrise 05:03; Sunset 20:54 BST

Took yea olde jalopy to the garage for a look-see at the clutch / clutch pedal. Like all good car owners, I'd done some reading around the topic and waffled about clutch fluid and slave cylinders at the mechanic who most likely inwardly sighed at yet another numpty telling them how to do their job. Turns out I was right! The slave cylinder was completely dry and the clutch fluid was old and nasty. So they've flushed it all out and replaced with shiny new.

Some minor prep work done ahead of returning to the coal faces tomorrow, to make sure that there are no major surprises.

I did intend to do laundry but that'll give me something to tomorrow while I'm on billing time.

[NickFitz]

Lunch: pâté on toast

There’s a quarterly planning meeting going on down in London today, so no standup and the like. As the thing I’ve been working on for a while is basically done, with any further changes consigned to the “maybe if we have time” bucket, I’m having quite a relaxing day

A bedding wash is on, and I’ve sorted out more stuff to go to the recycling bins. Might pop over with it now before they fill up again. And this afternoon, I’ve got some stuff that needs to go in a very, very low oven for five or six hours - it’s too big for the slow cooker or the InstantPot™

[WTFH]

Morning all
Some overnight rain, but a pleasant walk-in the dry earlier. The dark clouds seem to have passed and I'm hearing we're in for a good weekend.

[DoctorStrangelove]

Morning.

Wednesday apparently.

Dry.

Grey.

Sunless.

Verging on chilly in here at 16.1 deg, 15 in the kitchen, 15 in the leanto.

1010 mBar, 29.83 in Hg, 757.6 Torr, 14.65 psi, (up from 1003 last night), 68% RH (Lidl electric).

Meanwhile on the 27th of March 2020 Brillo popped in along with LM, LondonManc, BR14, and NF, whilst on the 28th I, and NF posted before the Brillo deluge.

Woke up to the theme from "Ride the High Country" playing in my head, which led, of course, to some nutjob on youtube pontificating about correct choice of handgun cartridge for use against brown, black, and grizzly bears. Hint: 22LR ain't going to cut it.

Walk (unabbreviated, towpath) walked in the grey gloom and very wan sunshine. Warm it ain't.

Extra Morrisons shopping trolley spotted in its natural environment of the canal. Too far from the towpath to fish it out.

Lunch: brunch. Entertainment: This week in history: the start of the 30 years war. Weimar 1935 to 1936.

12 gauge shotgun slugs against bears. Why the 303 lasted so long. Why the Bren was A Good Idea. The last two were so infested with adverts it tempted me to reach for a gun. .

Slight drizzling.

"Dial 999". Hadn't seen all that one: still haven't seen all of that one. .

Forgot about Trucking Hell S1 E8 which featured Rory. .

Tea: Tesco battered haddock etc. Nice enough. PM. <click>

Entertainment: UFO bollox on Blaze: death bed confessions. . Presumably as in "I'm sorry my dear, I have to confess I'm from Alpha Centauri not Romford". .

S4C thing about Field Names Yng Nghymraeg. I'm convinced the only people who can pronounce the nasal mutation correctly are Gogs.

Jack Hargreaves. I wonder if he kills anything this week. Nope. This week we quieten the voice of a mule. Apparently the vet had done this before. A lot. In Burma. Between 1941 and 1945. So said mules didn't give away location info to those nice Japanese soldiers who were there at the time.

The Lugubrious One and Scotland Yard.The concrete one. Hannah Fry waffling on about AI and facial expressions. A bloomberg production. <- me.

The Unbelievable Bollox on Blaze. Monkey glands. Milgram electric shock experiment. Two headed dogs. Head transplant. Kevin Warwick and his implanted chips. Lobotomy.

"A very peculiar practice" S1 E1, E2. Mmmmmmm. Barbara Flynn. . Nah. 5 minutes was enough.

The Almost Perfect Murder on True Crime.

[NickFitz]

Morning denizens

Sunny spells today due to breaks in the cloud here and there, but it’s windy so the current 12° “feels like” 7° and the expected high of 18° presumably won’t feel that much better. The barometers are up to 1001/1009mB though, presumably heralding the arrival of the heatwave that’s due to kick in over the next few days despite it being a Bank Holiday

[NickFitz]

This evening’s viewing was a new Police Interceptors, including a moron who’d been chased all the way from Northampton wiping himself out just before the 200 yard marker for our local junction on the M1

From the way he was driving, I doubt he’d have managed to navigate the roundabout at the bottom of the slip road anyway if he’d made it that far

And in The Middle Kingdoms, things are getting a bit more organised with Diets and things forcing rulers to codify the rules a bit - though they haven’t gone quite as far as compiling volumes of law, given that laws can turn out to be inconvenient at a later date. The Poles insisted on a rule that the monarch couldn’t impose any new laws without the approval of the nobles. This didn’t work out so well as there was no record of what had and hadn’t been a law before, so there was no way of knowing if a royal edict was a new law, or just an old one that everybody else had forgotten about

Goodnight all

[ladymuck]

Safe travels! Say hello to Reykjavik as you pass through

Thank you! All flights were uneventful, and we are now on the Lizzy Line heading home.

[NickFitz]

It's hot in Sevilla! 28 degrees at the airport. Good job I don't need to go outside. We're just waiting for our flight to Paris, as it's sadly home time.

Safe travels! Say hello to Reykjavik as you pass through

[NickFitz]

Tea has been a pork cutlet with chips and beans

There was a lull mid-afternoon when I had to switch from one thing to something unrelated, so I took the rest of my lunch break then. And, as I live for pleasure alone, I used the time to give the fridge a quick clean

I now have lots of room in there, as I’ve removed all the half-used jars of assorted stuff that have been lurking within. The record holder is some M&S concentrated beef stock which was BBE December 2019. You may remember that I moved here in December 2022

[ladymuck]

It's hot in Sevilla! 28 degrees at the airport. Good job I don't need to go outside. We're just waiting for our flight to Paris, as it's sadly home time.