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The beauticians working on my car just contacted me to say that sorting the alloy wheels out will be more effort than initially estimated, to the tune of an extra £50 +VAT per wheel.
I needed some bits of shopping, in the sense of having run out of some stuff, but I didn't fancy going all the way across town and doing the planned getting-of-special-things from M&S then crossing over to Big Sainsbury's. I've got some things I want to do here, and by the time I was ready to set off, I was in danger of ending up there at lunchtime. So I popped down to Not-as-Big Sainsbury's instead and did a stopgap shop
The wind's getting a bit stronger now, judging by the shimmy on the big sycamore
It's a day of overlapping layers of cloud out there, but here and there are gaps where occasional sunny spells are getting through. It doesn't seem exceptionally windy from the movement of the trees but there's a bit of a breeze which is apparently having an effect, as the current 11°C supposedly "feels like" 6°; the expected high this afternoon is 14°. The barometers are up a trivial amount at 978/986mB
^^ Crazy notion. It's Saturday Live on Saturdays at 10 am. Used to have the Reverend Richard Coles as a presenter who quit when the BBC moved the studio to Wales.
Morning all
There's some blue sky visible through the cloud. Wet, rather than damp, on the ground. Currently 12 degrees ('feels like' 10) with a high of 14 expected. There may be more showers early-mid afternoon. Barometer up a bit to 993 mBar.
Sunrise 07:36; Sunset 17:55 BST
My clients are usually very good at paying on time. However, one of them is late and I have had to issue a reminder. Now I'm trying to keep calm about more chasing for payment.
Chilly in here at 18 deg, 17 in the kitchen, 16 in the leanto.
988 mBar, 29.18 in Hg, 741 Torr, 14.33 psi, (up from 987 last night), 64% RH (Lidl electric).
Meanwhile on the 25th of February 2020 Churchill, and BR14 popped in, LM thought "Woman's Hour" was on Saturdays at 10:00 when it's actually on at 16:00, I was in with the hoi polloi, and it was, as usual around here, raining, though it did manage to hail on me on the way back down the hill, whereas NF had some zingy chicken soup.
The case in 24 Hours in Police Custody is pretty grim. I get the feeling it'll get grimmer in part two
Later, I started reading Fifth Planet. The Hoyles acknowledge in their introduction that it's hard to predict what a society will be like in the future (the book is set in 2087) so they extrapolated from apparent social trends at the time of writing (1962). They would have been better off glossing over wider society and sticking to the spaceship stuff, as their vision of the future would have been looking pretty ridiculous within twenty years or so, and certainly does now. Husbands having to live off sandwiches when their wives are away because they're incapable of cooking anything for themselves is just one example
Mind you, they don't fare much better with the spaceships. There are two, Russian and American, and the Russians score a great PR coup by sending up a female cosmonaut, the first woman in space. While the book was written in 1962, the introduction is dated 6 April 1963, so just ten weeks before Valentina Tereshkova went up in Vostok 6. Only about 125 years out, then. There's also a bunch of stuff about the Russians having to develop special techniques because women are physically incapable of withstanding the acceleration of a normal launch!
So yes, showing its age a bit. Maybe the stuff that happens off-Earth, which is just getting started, will make up for it
Loads of fireworks over the weekend and an absolutely crazy amount tonight, which are still going on. I was wondering why there were so many on Saturday night, and of course it's Diwali, the most important day of the celebrations being today!
I'm beginning to wonder if the throat trauma from yesterday is, in fact, a version of the Chinese Plague. Oddly enough the vaccination site was a bit tender a few days earlier which generally indicates I've been exposed to sommat or other.
People have been saying that the current variants tend to be quite bad for the razor-blades-in-the-throat thing
Grey day out, though the cloud is thin enough here and there to let it get about 1% brighter than "overcast". It's been raining, and it looks like we'll be getting spells of rain or, as now, drizzle throughout the day. It's 13°C now and will get to 15° briefly this afternoon; the barometers are down to 977/984mB
I slept reasonably well until the first alarm went off - I'd forgotten to turn them off for this week. I rapidly amended this oversight and went back to sleep for another couple of hours
Wet. Overcast. Currently 13 degrees with a high of 14 expected. Rain forecast in varying levels of enthusiasm for most of the day. Barometer down to 991 mBar.
Sunrise 07:34; Sunset 17:57 BST
Woke pre-6 am to the sound of rain. Woke a couple of other times prior to that too. Needless to say, I'm a bit tired this morning.
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