Reply to: test please delete

[NickFitz]

Lunch was some leftover chicken bits, then tea was also leftover chicken, but this time it was some of the zaatar and lemon chicken thing I made the other week, with chips

All in all, a very chickeny day

[ladymuck]

Evening all

Getting dark now but it's been a sunny day with cloudy lumps. Currently 13 degrees and the high was 16. Barometer down to 1013 mBar.

Sunrise 07:18; Sunset 18:17 BST

The drive down to Mum's and back was fairly uneventful. There's a local road that's been closed now for a couple of weeks that is causing havoc. Adds at least 20 mins to the journey.

[NickFitz]

Morning denizens

I slept very soundly last night, awaking this morning a bit after eleven, having not even woken up and thought “I should get up now” then gone back to sleep before that

It’s a sunny and Simpsonesque day out. Currently 12°C and aiming for 14°; the barometers are up a little at 1001/1009mB

[DoctorStrangelove]

It looks like the aurora has made it south but it’s cloudy here, as it always is when this happens

Odd, that, innit. . Same happened here. Never mind, I managed to dry the washing. .

Morning.

Sunday.

Inneresting night's sleep with the complaining back. . Read a bit more of the book at 4. Oh, I'm a poet & I didn't know it. .

Dry.

Grey.

16.7 deg in here, 16.6 in the kitchen, 15 in the leanto, 10 out the back.

1008 mBar, 29.77 in Hg, 756 Torr, 14.62 psi, (down from 1009 last night), 67% RH (Lidl electric).

Meanwhile on the 6th of April 2020, between 10:41 and 11:30, in popped Brillo, BR14, DaveB, LM, and SimonMac.

Walk (unabbreviated, towpath) walked in the greyish gloom with wanish sunshine. Quite chilly by my estimation, though obviously hot by the estimations of those going about in t shirts & the like.

Lunch: brunch. Entertainment: dashcam bollox S4E5/6 or whatever.

Back is sufficiently uncomfortable to require yet another ibuprofen, though, for some reason, these are capsules rather than the usual caplets.

Well I'm still not feeling up to much even after that. Maybe a proper pill will help more. .

Tea: beans on toast etc. Entertainment: something on R4, though the thing about the gay Jamaican novelist went <click> pretty quickly.

Blazian bollox: Oak Island nutjobbery: finds: a button. A 26gm piece of lead. A chunk of what looks very much like a concrete paving stone: it even has the sorts of marks you see on such things. Obviously a mediaeval paving stone brought across by the Knights that say Ni! to make a shrubbery Templar. Can't decide which of those two options is the more likely: I think I'd go with Monty Python if I'm honest about it. Which is more than the makers of this endless crap are.

BBC4: A stitch in time: reproducing the leather jacket of an 18th C hedger: obviously a high end leather garment when new, passed down through many hands to end up in the portrait of said hedger. Only this morning I mused quietly to myself as I trudged along the towpath that at some time in the past the hedge alongside the towpath had been laid in the traditional manner: all grown out now of course over the many years since it was last done.

More Blazian bollox: Turin shroud. Real bollox.

Blazian bollox with Duchovny: Operation Azorian. Greenlight team: SADM: man carried nuke. The Berlin telephone tap tunnel, they didn't mention George Blake. . Operation Cold Feet: Soviet Ice Station abandoned on an ice floe. Used that skyhook thing to get the personnel back. Operation Pimilico: exfiltration of Gordievsky. Operation Ivy Bells: the tapping of Soviet underwater cables, as betrayed by Ron Pelton. William Colby WWII operation in Norway 1945 blowing up a railway bridge to immobilise the Werhmacht. Operation Rype. Used meth to keep going for 3 days on the way to Sweden.

[NickFitz]

Monkey Life and other wildlife stuff was on earlier

Tonight, I read a bit more of Adulthood Rites. It’s good, but TBH I’m not hooked; I don’t really care what happens to these aliens - or, indeed, that remaining survivors of the human race! Not much of it left to read so I might as well finish it, but I won’t rush on to the final part of the trilogy

It looks like the aurora has made it south but it’s cloudy here, as it always is when this happens

Goodnight all

[NickFitz]

Tea was brought to me from KFC

We were hit by a huge CME earlier, it seems. Not sure it’ll result in the aurora reaching this far south from what the NOAA map shows, but it might be a nice show for those in the far north

[xoggoth]

Ah! Post thing was signed for Power of Attorney docs. I expect my sons will soon bung me in the loony bin and pocket all my money. Finished bonfire and off for walky soon. But chilly but quite sunny.

[NickFitz]

Afternoon denizens

It’s a blustery day today and spitting rain from time to time, though it’s expected to brighten up towards teatime. We’ve already reached the day’s high of 13°C which “feels like” 7°, and the barometers are up a bit at 1000/1008mB

[ladymuck]

Morning all

Sunny with lumps of fluff. Currently 14 degrees ('feels like' 12) and that's the high for the day. Barometer up to 1014 mBar.

Sunrise 07:17; Sunset 18:19 BST

Towels in the WM.

Not sure what to do with my day. Might just bimble around the house.

Never heard anything about the job yesterday. So, either I didn't get it or the client hasn't told the agency who they've picked.

I need to figure a way to encourage the last of the chillies on my chilli plants to ripen before it gets too cold. I can't bring them indoors.

[xoggoth]

After that, a rewatch...

Yeh, I'm rewatching Teeth, I mean Death in Paradise 'cos there ain't nowt else worth watching. Nice when I see a bit and think, yeh, I remember that, proves I'm not quite senile yet.

Nowt on today, probably have a bonfire. Nature reserve volunteer thing tomorrow if I can be bovvered.

Had a Parcel Force note yesterday that signed for thing not delivered. Dunno what it is, I ain't ordered anything. Checked with my neighbour as his things sometimes get delivered to my place by mistake as I'm an infill house with no number, but he ain't expecting anything either. A mystery!

[DoctorStrangelove]

^^^ About the only thing I remember about "The Avengers" (assuming I'm thinking of the right one) is how badly fitted "Steed"'s bowler hat was. Shocking. Sadly "The Man from Uncle" was equally poor, though having watched some of the originals recently, even those seem much less inneresting than they did 60 years ago. An even more inneresting question is how I conflated The Avengers with The Man from Uncle. .

Morning.

Saturday.

Dry. .

Sunny. .

Blue sky.

17.6 deg in here, 17.4 in the kitchen, 15 in the leanto, 12 out the back, 11.8 in the saltinghouse.

1009 mBar, 29.79 in Hg, 756.8 Torr, 14.6343 psi, (up from 1008 last night), 69% RH (Lidl electric).

Meanwhile on the 6th of April 2020, between 10:18 and 10:27: as per yesterday.

Washing frenzy in progress.

Entertainment Yng Nghymraeg mit subtitles: thing about Plas Newydd on Anglesey. Takes talent to go through the equivalent of £43M & go bankrupt for £500k in 1900 or so, as the black sheep of the family managed, before dying in Paris at the grand old age of 29. His bust ended up kept in the toilet. .

Lunch: brunch.

Entertainment: dashcam bollox S4 E4,5.

That requiring the iRon has received its attentions & is airing upstairs.

Everything in off the line.

Walk (unabbreviated, towpath) walked in the sunshine & semigale. Back has been playing up for much of the day & the leg was complaining a bit halfway through. Zero conversations.

Now getting outside a mug of mediocre yet consistent coffee, tesco's finest.

Tea: soup etc. Nice enough. Entertainment: PM.

Book.

Maigret "Death of a butcher (1961)". Chap from St Fiacre who knows Maigret gets threatening letters.

Blazian Bollox: "Shadow Man" William Stephenson, aka "A man named Intrepid"*: a Canadian who worked in septicland for Churchill/MI6 and manipulated Wild Bill Donovan to create the OSS eventually, once the septics had had the crap bombed out of them in Hawaii.

*According to some he was never known as Intrepid at all but there you go.

[NickFitz]

Tonight’s major motion picture premiere was released this very day on Apple TV+: Matchbox the Movie (2026). It seems that Mattel were so impressed by the success of Barbie (2023) that they believed other toy franchises now in their possession would also be suitable for representation through the medium of film; and this is the result. What it is, is a fairly mediocre “CIA agent framed for theft of nuclear weapon” thing, but the buddies who help him save the world and his own reputation are the friends with whom he played with Matchbox cars when he was a kid. Yes, it really is that tenuous, folks! Though they chuck in the occasional pun about “thinking outside the box” and such, to reinforce the audience’s understanding of how hard it is to make a film based on a range of toy cars that aren’t relevant to the plot. Still, it’s reasonably entertaining in terms of explosions and chases and the like

BTW, somebody should have pointed out to them that you can use colons in film titles now, but the form used above appears to be the official version

After that, a rewatch of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015) which is also a mediocre action movie, though maybe not quite as mediocre. As I think I said last time I watched it, they clearly expected to build a franchise on this, judging by the ending and the start of the credits. But it never happened, which was probably a good thing as the main cast have all, or mostly, gone on to make some very good films afterwards, which we may have been denied if they'd carried on turning out this kind of tosh

Finally, the last two episodes of S1 of Dark Matter, which I’m still pretty confused by. But I’ll probably watch S2 as well just to see if I can work out what the hell is going on, which was probably their plan. I suspect my poor memory for faces and names doesn’t help with this one, as I can never work out which timeline/universe somebody is supposed to be from or in

Goodnight all

[NickFitz]

Rack of BBQ ribs and chips for tea, being the M&S ones that have a bit more kick to them

To go with this, a bit of Police Interceptors

[ladymuck]

The wind's gotten up and it's spitting with rain. A lovely combo to walk into after getting my hair done at the hairdressers.

[NickFitz]

Shopping accomplished!

I went past the old place, where the chestnut trees are only just starting to change colour - they always seem to be a few weeks behind, possibly a different strain? Their husks don’t really have much in the way of pointy bits either. Anyway, approaching from that direction brought me to M&S first, where I bought more than I expected to in the Food Hall. All good stuff though

And so onwards to Big Sainsbury’s, where I also ended up doing a bigger shop than expected. This was partly down to needing various things, but also picking up some bits that Not-as-Big doesn’t stock or often runs out of

I’m glad I went and got my hair cut yesterday lunchtime, as the plan was originally to go there first thing today, and that would have made the morning a bit too hectic

Anyway, time to grab some lunch; I think I’ll have a cold chicken leg