Reply to: test please delete

[NickFitz]

Home again!

The BBQ kicked off a bit later than originally planned as our brother was held up due to a crash causing traffic jams in Chesterfield. Also, my younger niece had a migraine and didn’t make it so it was just us old-timers: my siblings and their spouses, and my sister’s mother-in-law, with me as the youngest of the party

Turns out there’s still stuff coming from the estate of our parents! I ended up with a box of USB hard drives, some empty, some containing films and TV shows our Dad had ripped over the years. I also got his old Acer laptop, though he didn’t use it much later in life, preferring to sit at a desktop to do computer things, then return to his armchair to do non-computer things. And I ended up with a couple of first day covers: one for the opening of the Tay Road Bridge in 1966, which I think was sent by D. C. Thompson of Dundee for whom he was writing stories for comics at the time, and one for the Silver Jubilee in 1977 that was addressed to him but sent to his office at the Town Hall by some Press organisation.

But to my delight, in amongst all this lot was my book of Wild Creatures of our Countryside by Gwen Mandley, which was my favourite such book out of several I had in that line, and still holds up as a decent quick reference guide with nice line drawings by the author

I'd been wondering where this was for years; my sister found it in a box of our Mum’s old teaching stuff, so she must have borrowed it to use when preparing lessons or something

[ladymuck]

Simple by HWMBO's standards could still be massively more complex than anyone elses..

Also wish him a happy birthday from someone rather older today..

Thanks! And happy birthday to you too.

Duck in tamarind sauce with pandan and coconut rice.

[NotAllThere]

Morning all, greetings from Glasgow

Cloudy but bright and dry, with outbreaks of sunshine. Currently 17 degrees with a high of 20 expected. Barometer at 1020 mBar.

Sunrise 05:24; Sunset 21:22 BST

The journey up was uneventful.

Today is HWMBO's youngest's 19th birthday. HWMBO will be cooking a dinner which he says will be a simple meal. I don't believe him.

Suffering from the heat down here. 20°C sounds heavenly.

Temperature 33.7 °C
Humidity 29%
Pressure 975 hPa

Heatwave might break in a few days. I do hope so. This isn't fun.

[eek]

Morning all, greetings from Glasgow

Cloudy but bright and dry, with outbreaks of sunshine. Currently 17 degrees with a high of 20 expected. Barometer at 1020 mBar.

Sunrise 05:24; Sunset 21:22 BST

The journey up was uneventful.

Today is HWMBO's youngest's 19th birthday. HWMBO will be cooking a dinner which he says will be a simple meal. I don't believe him.

Simple by HWMBO's standards could still be massively more complex than anyone elses..

Also wish him a happy birthday from someone rather older today..

[xoggoth]

Waylaid by lady neighbour up the road while on drive cleaning me van before tomorrow's service. Nice lady, but Gordon Bennet, can she yack!

[ladymuck]

Morning all, greetings from Glasgow

Cloudy but bright and dry, with outbreaks of sunshine. Currently 17 degrees with a high of 20 expected. Barometer at 1020 mBar.

Sunrise 05:24; Sunset 21:22 BST

The journey up was uneventful.

Today is HWMBO's youngest's 19th birthday. HWMBO will be cooking a dinner which he says will be a simple meal. I don't believe him.

[NickFitz]

Morning denizens

It’s sunny with cumuli again. It’ll be quite warm here: already 18°C and expected to hit 25°. But it’ll be slightly warmer at the barbecue, where it’s expected to reach 26° - though a couple of days ago, it was predicted to reach 30° down there, so that’s an improvement. The barometers are irrelevantly down at 1007/1015mB

I had a bit of a restless night, with what seemed to be long-running dreams involving long corridors, offices, and that most terrible of monsters: work! I suspect this was triggered by the thought of returning to the regular grind tomorrow, though at least the reality will be considerably more mundane and involve no corridor longer than my hall

[xoggoth]

Cockup yesterday, doing a rare clean in my office and sucked a USB stick into the vacuum cleaner. What fun sorting through loads of fluffy mess in the bag.

[DoctorStrangelove]

Morning.

Sunday judging by the quiet.

Dry.

Wanly sunny.

Blue sky with high clouds.

20 deg in here, 21.6 in the kitchen, 19 in the leanto, 15 out the back.

1012 mBar, 29.88 in Hg, 759 Torr, 14.6778 psi, (down from 1014 last night), 57% RH (Lidl electric).

Meanwhile on the 2nd of April 2020, between 09:35 and 09:45, covbob and LM popped in.

This morning's dream before waking appeared to involve the now very late Tom Pugh, Physics master, for some odd reason located in what used to be M&S Neath, though without the shopping paraphenalia, where someone who might have been NF was reverse engineering a chip that the manufacturers had just decided to make some more of. For unknown reasons we were stuck in there for a while. I was glad to wake up.

Walk (abbreviated: 3 miles) walked in the increasingly warm sunshine. Wildlife spotted: a bee fly busily visiting my phlox flowers, a large hawk sitting quietly on a tombstone in the cemetery.

Lunch: brunch. Entertainment: the noise the fridge is making.

Dashcam thing on Sky Mix, with subtitles so I don't have to listen to the inane commentary.

Book.

Tea: baked beans and baked spud. Nice enough. Entertainment: 17 o'clock news. A thing about Gina Lollobrigida. The church thing <click>. Thing about Cream on Sky Arts. <click>.

Blaze bollox: Thing about stuff found in jungles. Skeletons covered in calcite crystals in a cave in Belize: Mayan sacrificial offerings. Ancient ?African? Copper coin found on an island off the north of Australia dating prior to Cap'n Cooke et al. Cambodia: hidden city in the jungle. Amazonia: curious henges and squares found after the jungle was cleared: turns out that 2000 years ago it wasn't jungle but savanna. Who'd have thunk?

TPTV Look at Life: Fair Isle (1960). Apparently there were far more men than women on Fair Isle in the 1960s. And out of the 10 or 15 pupils in the skool only two were girls. Chaps had to leave for the main land to find a wife. Though there were 5 times as many sheep as people so in some ways one might have been spoiled for choice. .

Blaze: Danny Trejo Buried mysteries bollox.

[NickFitz]

The usual wildlife stuff was on today

And tonight, extremely bad things happened to good people in Parable of the Talents

Heading south for a barbecue tomorrow!

Goodnight all

[NickFitz]

Tea was brought to me from Popeyes

I keep thinking something in the flat is making a weird noise. But it’s actually the very faint sounds of the Caribbean Carnival coming from the park

[NickFitz]

Home!

The hygienist must have been running ahead of schedule as I was called in there about twenty minutes earlier than the nominal appointment time. They did the usual stuff, along with the usual nagging, and that was (I hope) me done with dentistry until next year

As I was over that side of town, I decided to nip down to M&S again for the one thing I forgot when I was there the other day: slippers! The ones I bought when I moved here are pretty worn out now, as they’re worn almost constantly rather than just doing evening shifts like in the old days. I ended up buying a couple more t-shirts while I was there too. I also spotted a couple of shirts I quite liked the look of, but luckily I was already heading to the door at that point and the queue for the self-checkouts was long enough that I wasn’t tempted to double back and go through them again

[NickFitz]

At the dentist. Checkup done and all OK, so now waiting for the hygienist

[ladymuck]

The bed has been stripped and is airing. The linens have been washed and are out in the garden to dry in the sunshine. Could do with a breeze to help it along.

Testing a drip watering method in the hope that my chilli plants survive next week while I'm away.

[NickFitz]

Morning denizens

Things out there are much the same: lots of cumuli with the sun getting through the gaps when they’re in the right place. It’s 20°C and aiming for 23°, with the barometers creeping up a little more to 1008/1016mB

Next week, we’ll get back up to 28° on Monday but then revert to the same sort of conditions as now, with a decent chance of rain on Tuesday (70%)

Out the back, there’s a dead pigeon in the little car park, and one of the crows is pecking chunks out of its chest. The pigeon seems unharmed other than that so I have no idea how it might have died

And on the little lawn next to that, there’s been a dead rat for a couple of days; it started near the hedge separating the lawn from the parking spaces, and something has dragged it to the middle. I expect this is rather discombobulating for the Hindu lady on the ground floor who puts water out for the wildlife, as it’s a couple of feet from her water dish out there so she can’t miss it when she goes out to top that up