Reply to: test please delete

[NickFitz]

I continued reading Pixie tonight, in which PCS and her father have travelled back to England, which her family had left when she was 10, spending time in New York and Jamaica. This detail is at variance with the account of her life in Wikipedia, according to which she returned after her father died, but there wasn’t a decent biography of her until quite recently so maybe it’s Wikipedia that’s wrong. And anyway, it’s a novel based on her life, not a history. I got to the point where she’s just about to be introduced to Bram Stoker, who helped her in establishing her career and also introduced her to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, ultimately leading to her work on the Tarot

I also got a bit distracted by eBay and have bought more fonts of type, being several sizes of both Rockwell Shadow and Imprint Shadow, both of which are faces I’ve always had a fondness for. I wouldn’t mind some Gill Sans Shadow as well, but that’s harder to find in the larger sizes I’d prefer

Thursday tomorrow!

Goodnight all

[xoggoth]

At last - managed to find the error in my accounts, only £27 discrepancy in balance sheet now, think I can ignore that. Don't think HMRC will pursue me for a a £5.32 underpayment of CT.

[NickFitz]

Tea has been shepherd’s pie out of the freezer

To go with it, a bit of the fare dodgers programme. Apparently Nottingham University students get caught on the trams a lot

[xoggoth]

No scrabbly thing today, me nice old lady neighbour has been in A&E.

[NickFitz]

Ocado will be delivering an eclectic mix of gin, tonic, crisps and paracetamol because I forgot to edit the order before the cut off time.

Not sure anything needed to be added

[NickFitz]

Lunch: Heinz tomato soup and white toast

It’s quite nice to have soupy weather back again

[ladymuck]

Morning all

Cloudy but bright. A few spits of rain occurring . Currently 17 degrees with a high of 20 expected. There may be more rain off and on. Barometer down to 1020 mBar.

Sunrise 06:15; Sunset 19:46 BST

HWMBO goes home later today. Ocado will be delivering an eclectic mix of gin, tonic, crisps and paracetamol because I forgot to edit the order before the cut off time.

[NickFitz]

Morning denizens

It’s a gloomy, grey, drizzly start to the day and likely to continue in much the same vein, though the rain might stop by mid-afternoon. Fairly mild though: 15°C with an expected high of 20°, and the barometers much the same at 1006/1015mB

[WTFH]

Morning all
Cooler walk this morning with some light drizzle.

[DoctorStrangelove]

Morning.

Wednesday according to the clock.

Wet.

Grey.

Sunless.

Lawns greening.

20.2 deg in here, 20.8 in the kitchen, 19 in the leanto, 16 out the back.

1011 mBar, 29.86 in Hg, 758.3 Torr, 14.66 psi, (down from 1012 last night), 67% RH (Lidl electric).

Meanwhile on the 3rd of April 2020, between 15:08 and 16:16, in popped eek, LM, MrMarkyMark, PhilTheGreek, and scruff.

Much dreaming before waking: it was some sort of intelligence quiz, with the impression it was in some way related to the IEE (as it was and is no more), for CEng (something I never bothered with, and post 2000 was no longer qualified for).

And now it's time for Jack Hargreaves Old Country. Fishing for plaice in Poole harbour. Truckline Ferry (now part of Brittany Ferries). Trotting races up north. Apparently a Dr Blackburn (father of you know who) caught a large plaice, and in 1989 caught an even larger 8.4 lb plaice. Well there's a thing.

It was drizzling earlier, it's raining quite heavily now. The grass is getting ever greener by the minute. .

Lunch (shortly): brunch. Entertainment: suicide amongst the medical profession <click>. Much too grim.

Dashcam bollox: S3 E3.

With the ongoing deluge: DMAX: America's most secret structures: HAARP, that animal disease place off the Hamptons, the space fence, USA193.

DMAX: Expedition thing: D Day: digs up Nazi structures in the Maisy Battery. Pegasus Bridge: bits of Horsa Glider. The sunk ship in the channel incorrectly identified as LST523 turns out to be LST496. They find a parachute mine.

Jack Hargreaves Old Country.

Tea: Tesco battered/breaded "white" fish. Reasonable enough for the price. Entertainment: PM.

Dan Do. Tumble etc. Again.

Jack Hargreaves Out of Town (1986): freeze branding using dry ice. Making cider.

Bab5 S3 E18 "Walkabout". The Good Doctor goes walkabout Down Below. Sheridan has a Bright Idea about how to deal with Shadow ships.

Cartrefi Cymru. Flatiau. Again. Penarth. Aberystwyth. Cowbridge.

Blazian Bollox: What on Earth? Louisiana Delta Bayou: WWII naval AA training site. Close by: fort built to fend off the Evil British after the 1814 excitement. Rows of trees across 5 states: shelter belt planted in the 1930s to remedy the evils of the Dust Bowl's Black Blizzards. And it worked. Botswana: Okavango Delta: 350 dead elephants. Siberial: abandoned diamond mine after mining tunnels flooded. New Hampshire: Mystery Hill ?built by preColoumbian Irish monks?.

Ditto: What on Earth? Circular mounds in Yorkshire: bell pits for mining iron ore & coal. Remains of calcining furnaces & tramroads. Coin pattern in Japanese sand: made by peasants to keep the samurai happy. Abandoned railway structure in the Arabian Desert: who blew it up? Lawrence of Arabia of course. Doughnut shape in Poland: fort built by the Teutonic Knights (they didn't say Nii or require shrubberies, just killed every mother****er they encountered). Vampire graveyard, Poland. Idaho: in a burned out area ravaged by bush fire it turns out that dams built by beavers are A Good Idea & keep some bits from burning. Geronimo the parachuting beaver: 1930s/40s plan to reintroduce beavers to remote areas where they'd been hunted out in prior centuries.

[NickFitz]

I finished To Each This World tonight. It’s very good, and I got used to the author's (very minor) stylistic tics that had distracted me a bit at the start

Then I started Pixie by Jill Dawson, a novel based on the life of Pamela Colman Smith, the artist and occultist who (among many other accomplishments) drew the cards in the Rider-Waite Tarot deck, which is the one almost everybody thinks of when Tarot is mentioned - well, unless they think of the one in the James Bond film

Goodnight all

[NickFitz]

Four weeks had passed, meaning it was time for me to amble round to the chemist’s for the monthly parcel of anti-decrepitude pills

While I was out, I decided to continue on to the kebab shop; it’s only an extra minute’s walk along the road so it would be a shame not to. So tea has been kebab and chips, and has also been much earlier than usual

[ladymuck]

An uneventful day.

Some bloke came round from the letting agency to do an EPC for the flat. Apparently these things need periodic renewing to make sure everyone's keeping up with the moving goal posts.

Not very many jobs out there at the moment.

[NickFitz]

Lunch was a Pukka sausage roll

Not exactly a busy day, but enough to keep me trundling along. The site’s accessibility statement had its annual review and needed to be updated, so last week I dealt with a bunch of accessibility issues that had been hanging around, not getting prioritised because it’s an internal service and none of the people who currently use it were affected. There was one bit involving a JavaScript widget which I'd fixed, but it also looked completely different to the standard GDS styles for such things. So I dug into how that could be configured, and into GDS’s styles, and got it looking proper with a bit of CSS

[xoggoth]

Old arty farty thing this morning. Then, apart from walky, more fencing and sorting errors in accounts. Exciting. Not.