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It’s sunny out, with a few wisps of cloud here and there. Mild too, being 12°C and shortly to be 13°. The barometers continue to descend, being at 1007/1015mB
Blue sky with wispy bits. No obvious breeze. Currently 6 degrees ('feels like' 4) with a high of 14 expected. Barometer continues downwards to 1021 mBar.
Sunrise 06:02; Sunset 18:16 GMT
Having a coffee and then I'm going for a mooch around the farmers' market. HWMBO arrives on Tuesday so I will be sending him photos of what's available and he can decide what he wants to cook next week.
One of our ex Esteemed Customer electronics students worked in F1 before going off to Australia. He was the one who was doing an OU degree at the same time he was doing ours. We didn't have many as enthusiastic as that. .
Morning.
Saturday. Thankfully slept through to a reasonable time of waking.
Dry.
Sunny.
Blue white sky.
NotSoChilly in here at 14.2 deg, 13 in the kitchen, 11 in the leanto.
Meanwhile on the 21st of March 2020 NF went to the Chinese, which wasn't shut despite the unlit sign, had a nice chat with "Janet", LM wasn't travelling to Scotland with HWMBO, scruff popped in & the Orange Moron was railing on the news (probably about bleach or maybe clouds), whilst on the 22nd of March 2020 AndyGarbs & WTFH popped in.
Walk (unabbreviated, towpath) walked in the hideous heat of the morning.
Lunch: brunch. Entertainment: noon o'clock news. Moneybox waffling on about heating oil.
Book.
The scaffolding next door but one has departed noisily.
Tonight’s major motion picture premiere was Superman (2025) which was pretty good, I thought; if you’re going to do a new Superman film, it should probably be done this way
And then a rewatch of F1 (2025) which is an entertaining film as it goes. I once got a call from an agent about working with the Torro Rosso F1 team, but I’d just accepted another gig so nothing came of it
This was from the Sainsbury’s TTD slow-cooked range, rather than my homemade one, in part because I realised I have no way of telling if mine is coming out right without anything to compare it to
Mine tastes pretty similar, so I must have been doing something right
To go with this, some more of the Brazilian air crash documentary
This afternoon was largely devoted to the forum upgrade stuff, specifically, the URLs. Having exhaustively examined the process by which XenForo handles such things, I’m now confident that my approach (which is extremely simple because that way it’s unlikely to break if anything changes in future) works for all the cases it has to deal with
I didn't know such places existed! Is this for the first stage, getting on the foreign births register, or for the actual passport application?
It’s just a small community centre run by volunteers in an area of Manchester that has a lot of Irish people, as far as I can tell. They offer advice and support with various things like benefits and housing for that community, and also offer this service of checking your paperwork for the foreign births register and witnessing the forms and photos. It’s not an official Irish government thing, but their service is in some sense officially recognised because using them means the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs doesn’t have to check that the witness exists and so on
Blood has been donated and I picked up a couple of birthday cards too. One of which I wrote while on the bus home and posted after I got off at my stop. Missed the collection but it's not needed until next week so, hopefully I have allowed enough time.
Last edited by ladymuck; Today, 09:35.
Reason: typo
It was Big Sainsbury’s in the end. I was tempted to just go to Not-as-Big, but Diligent Me castigated Lackadaisical Me, pointing out that I was supposed to be getting a set of passport photos of the standard required by the government of the Republic of Ireland, and only Big has a Timpson’s concession where they could be obtained. We (my siblings and I) are going to be applying for Irish citizenship shortly, which is what I need the photos for
We’ll all have to go to an Irish community centre in Manchester where they have somebody who can check all the paperwork and witness the relevant signatures, in return for a small donation, and the plan is to do that some time in April - probably my birthday week, as I’m taking that off work, but it depends on their availability.
Diligent Me also remembered to take the bag of batteries for recycling, some of which have been in there since the old flat, so that's sorted out as well
My preferred parking space, which wasn’t free after shopping last week, was still taken when I returned
Next up: lunch
I didn't know such places existed! Is this for the first stage, getting on the foreign births register, or for the actual passport application?
It was Big Sainsbury’s in the end. I was tempted to just go to Not-as-Big, but Diligent Me castigated Lackadaisical Me, pointing out that I was supposed to be getting a set of passport photos of the standard required by the government of the Republic of Ireland, and only Big has a Timpson’s concession where they could be obtained. We (my siblings and I) are going to be applying for Irish citizenship shortly, which is what I need the photos for
We’ll all have to go to an Irish community centre in Manchester where they have somebody who can check all the paperwork and witness the relevant signatures, in return for a small donation, and the plan is to do that some time in April - probably my birthday week, as I’m taking that off work, but it depends on their availability.
Diligent Me also remembered to take the bag of batteries for recycling, some of which have been in there since the old flat, so that's sorted out as well
My preferred parking space, which wasn’t free after shopping last week, was still taken when I returned
Morning denizens, and a happy Vernal Equinox (due at 14:46) to you all!
I awoke around half seven and decided there was no need to rush into things, so went back to sleep. I then re-awoke a bit before ten and felt much better for it, so I assume I needed the extra sleep
It’s cloudy out in a blank white sheet of paper kind of way, but not what you’d call chilly at 9°C with an expected high of 13°. The barometers have settled back down to 1012/1020mB
I need to head out to do the shopping shortly. The question is, Big or Not-as-Big?
Bright and dry but cloudy. Currently 9 degrees with a high of 14 expected. Barometer down to 1024 mBar.
Sunrise 06:04; Sunset 18:14 GMT
A flurry of activity this morning and then an early finish this afternoon so I can be a good citizen and give blood. I have to create a 'ways of working' presentation for gig2. I hate creating presentations, especially when they're being used instead of proper documentation.
Dreaming of all sorts of crap: woke at 05:15, read books for an hour or so & eventually returned to the land of nod to a nightmare where I'd returned to Loughborough to do a degree again and it wasn't going well. .
Dry.
Wanly sunny.
Blue white sky.
NotSoChilly in here at 14.3 deg, 13 deg in the kitchen, 10.5 deg in the leanto.
1018 mBar, 30.06 in Hg, 763.6 Torr, 14.76 psi, (down from 1019 last night), 67% RH (Lidl electric).
Meanwhile on the 21st of March 2020 there was a blackbird singing on my late apple tree, LM, NF, BR14, and vetran popped in, and I watch Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome & was unimpressed.
Walk (towpath, unabbreviated) walked in the senseless heat of the morning. Phew wot a scorcher. .
Lunch: brunch. Entertainment: some green thing on R4. TWATO.
Trip up to the cemeteries to look at & maintain the graves a bit: the strimmers had done the parents' grave so that was decimated & I decimated it a bit more. You never think anyone had ever taken care of it.
Grandparents graves: not so bad.
Aunt's grave: difficult to find since the daffs were blind this year so it took some doing. Cleared the dead knotweed debris off it & cleaned the headstone of most of the moss.
Long chat with a lady down by the church. Tried to rope me in for a work party to do some clearing of the jungle.
Tea: chicken in white sauce etc. Nice enough. Entertainment: PM. 18 o'clock news.
"Coast & Country".
5: "Impossible things" <click>
Taggart S8 E4,5,6. "Ring of Deceit". Complicated one.
CBS, etc, with some frost on the ground and a cool 6C at 6:15 as the sun peaked over the hills. I was thinking it must be getting near the equinox, as I'm sure it went down at about 18:10 last night.
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