2011 — 20 April: Wednesday
This will have to do as a placeholder1 despite the lovely music I've been playing. (There are some fabulous tracks on "Into the Blue" — a 1998 double CD compilation I suspect I may actually have snaffled off Junior.)
G'night.
This (sunny) morning's score is...
... now 72 TV and 39 radio channels found by the Freesat box as it does its automatic retune. (I have to switch on the plasma screen if I want to see what's causing the unusual delay in firing up my BBC Radio 3 "Breakfast" music.) It's added one channel, but I have no idea which. Meanwhile, I needed to shift my little car over on the driveway to make sure Brian has room to park when we rendezvous here for the great flowers hunt. And to clear all the pollen off the bits that are supposed to be see-through.
My "atomic" clock tells me it's 20.0C in here (at 08:54) but the central heating is turned well down to discourage its activity. Time for my next cuppa while I think about breakfast and a packed lunch.
It struck me there's only one way to respond to Big Bro's magnificent chuffa last Sunday. So, "here's one I took earlier2" as they say, but scanned only the other day :-)
Christa and Peter at Brambridge
OK, so it's not quite as big as the one down in NZ... What can I say? We're a poor, old country without much room.
But we do have some fabulous walks, and it's nearly time (10:26) to set off on one... Brian has just arrived.
After a very pleasant...
... stroll of about 6.3 miles, some of it along the coast nearly to Lepe country park (we stopped short for our lunch break), I'm now listening to a 45-minute medley of Wagner's "tunes" from bits of the Ring cycle (hopefully without any of the warblers) while reading this only slightly cynical view of recent US history:
The three interconnected forces that destroy empires — military over-reach, lack of money, and the catastrophic loss of self-confidence that stems from the other two — have coalesced with astonishing speed since the Twin Towers fell. When George W Bush was elected President by five of the nine Supreme Court justices3, he took on a country swimming in cash and basking in its post-Cold War hegemony. Eight years later, despite the healthy surplus Bill Clinton left him and a barely broken economic boom, he had doubled the deficit by wasting trillions on imbecile wars and trillions more on tax breaks for the wealthy. He inherited a swaggering empire at the zenith of its financial, military and cultural might, and bequeathed to Barack Obama a traumatised country in precipitous decline.
Meanwhile, Big Bro has sent me another two pictures of chuffas, and Junior has bought a family licence for a neat encryption vault facility called 1Password that goes hand-in-glove (as it were) with the cloud storage facilities offered by DropBox. Grand stuff.
The music's not bad, either. "Wagner without voices", indeed. Perfect!
Thanks, Mr Postie
He just dropped off news of upcoming street lighting work (an amazingly well-written little booklet) and the following Blu-ray...
... though how it can be 15 years since this excellent little romp came out amazes me. Not that it takes much to amaze me these days. [Pause] I'd forgotten how it contained a clip from the "cat food hunt" section of Robert Altman's 1973 version of Chandler's "The Long Goodbye" — the DVD that's now adjacent to this Blu-ray in one of my CaseLogic folders. It's 23:06 and still a balmy 22.3C here in my living room. Nice. (Actually, the walk was, if anything, a little on the too hot side this morning.)