The days seem to be going from one extreme
to another. Thursday was grey and wet. Yesterday
bright dry, bright and sunny. Sadly it wasn't a
warm day, although it did get close to it for a
short period in the afternoon. The temperature hit
10°C, and when the wind dropped the heat of the
sun could be felt.
At the moment we are heading into a period
when the latest revision to the forecast predicts
a 72% chance of rain, and yet it will apparently
stay dry. As I write this the sun is putting up a
valiant attempt to shine. Sadly it now appears to
be losing, but 5 minutes ago there was a
blindingly white patch of cloud that was casting a
fuzzy shadow. It seems today is likely to be dry,
but it will be overcast, to one degree or another,
all day. However the temperature is now thought to
rise to 12° C this afternoon. Only a moderate
breeze is forecast, and so that 12° could feel
very mild...maybe. A lot of tomorrow may be mild
with temperatures once again reaching 12° C, but
there will be some showers now and then.
I felt a lot better yesterday morning, but
I still had a selection of aches and pains.
However, with bright sunshine pouring through my
front windows, I felt I just couldn't waste such a
brilliant sunny day. Besides which, I thought some
gentle exercise might loosen up a few creaky
joints. It was still cold outside, but I hardly
noticed it except during a few strong gusts of
wind. Much of the time it seemed fairly calm
outside.
I was right about one thing, once I started
walking I could feel most of my aches and pains
melt away. Not all though. There was a short
period of time when I had a pain at the top of my
sternum. It was just another demonstration of my
rattly ribs. As I walked I wanted a second look at
a tree I had passed to see if there was any sign
of blossom on it. I partly turned my neck, and I
partly twisted my body. Upon straightening up the
pain in my sternum immediately transferred to
(roughly) the bottom of the bottom rib on my left.
Soon (5 minutes ?) it just seemed to fade away.
The picture on the right was taken with my
Huawei mobile phone set on "portrait" mode. It
uses some clever (?) "artificial intelligence" to
detect the face/foreground and artificially blur
the background. It is a pleasing effect when taken
with a good lens on a good camera, but I am not so
sure about this Huawei method. At least the
picture shows that delicious blue sky, and apart
from looking a bit crap, my screwed up eyes show
how bright that delicious sunshine was.
It wasn't just the sunshine I wanted to
see. I also wanted to see Angela. She had
suggested Friday as a possible day when I saw her
on Tuesday, and sure enough, she was looking
forward to it. So keen that she actually got to
the pub before me, and had a pint of Guinness on
the table for me when I arrived. It was actually
my own fault. I had sent her a message to say I
was out and about, but that I wasn't sure how far
I wanted to walk. I said I might be in the pub
early. What I meant to say was actually more like
"don't be surprised, and don't rush if you see me
waving to you through your office window much
earlier than usual".
In fact I found I was enjoying my walk, and
while I didn't really feel like rushing about, I
decided against taking any short cuts. In the end
I found myself running late and had to rush
towards the end. I passed Angela's office window
about 6 minutes before 1pm, and waved - to no one.
Angela had already left. It was lovely to see her
when I arrived at the pub. A small bit of our
conversation was about mobile phone cameras.
Angela has cracked the case of her phone, and it
has made her front facing camera give slightly
milky looking, slightly soft focus pictures. It
seemed to be the perfect excuse to take a picture
of Angela, and explain how the camera, in
"portrait mode" blurs the background.
I think I chose the wrong moment to take
this picture. Occasionally a bit of thin cloud
would pass in front of the sun, and dim it. I
think that happened when I took this picture
because it doesn't look like the sun is shining,
although I'm sure it was before and after I took
this snap. At least it shows the blue sky with
just a few fluffy clouds in it. It is a shame that
it couldn't have been a bit warmer yesterday. I
felt comfortable while walking, and mostly the
wind/breeze was so light that it didn't really
chill, but my hands still felt cold. If today
could be sunny, the forecast 12° C could have felt
almost warm.
With the afterglow of seeing Angela, and two
pints of Guinness in me, I became determined to
push myself to cover about three miles. I was
quite surprised when I got home and my tracker
said exactly 3 miles. Sadly that was not
accurate. I did some shopping on the way home, and
the first place I shopped at was the Tesco Express
on the high street. I forgot to pause the tracker
while I was inside, and if you examine the map
further up the page you will see that there is a
little squiggle that probably adds a tenth of a
mile while I was inside Tesco.
I could have gone straight home from Tesco,
but decided to continue to lengthen my walk by
taking the scenic route. In the middle of Catford
I passed a few Asian shops that sell a variety of
stuff, including booze. My brain was operating
slowly because I had passed them all before I
suddenly realised I wanted to buy some Corona
beer. There has been a joke going around on social
media, at least I think it is a joke, that sales
of Corona have plummeted because of association
with the Corona virus. Apparently there are some,
possibly those who voted for Brexit and Boris
Johnson, who think you can catch Covid-19, the now
world famous Corona virus, by drinking Corona
beer. I just had to buy a couple of bottles to
wind some people up. Fortunately I was just
approaching the Turkish supermarket, and they
stock Corona, and also Sol, the other Mexican beer
(both now made in Europe under licence). I bought
two bottles of each beer.
I was still more or less comfortable when I
arrived at home, but as soon as I stopped, and say
down I could feel myself seizing up. It was
nowhere near as bad as I had felt the day before
(particularly in the morning), but it was still an
unwelcome reminder that I hadn't fully shaken off
whatever the malady was that made me feel so bad
on Wednesday and Thursday (and not forgetting the
fever on Tuesday afternoon/early evening).
There was one strange thing that allowed me
to be unusually busy when I got home. Before going
out I had started to make yet another backup of
all the pictures stored on my PC. I have two
backups on portable USB hard drives, but I wanted
to make some small changes to the way I store all
my photos - just a few small changes to the
directory structure to make it a bit more compact.
I decided I would make a new copy on a spare hard
drive that I would use a USB to SATA adapter to
connect to my PC. It took about 6 hours to copy
about 1000 GB of images ! There was still 2 hours
to run when I got home, and rather than slow
things down, I stayed off my PC, and did a few
small other things. One was to get out my
soldering iron, and make a new lead up for
charging my Kenwood Mini Disc player.
My eating was all over the place yesterday.
I think I had a handful of assorted nuts for
breakfast, but nothing more until I had got home
from my walk. The first thing I tucked into was a
couple of sandwiches bought from Tesco. A few
hours later I had a couple of "steak slices", also
bought from Tesco. Even for half price they were
not very good - not nasty, but just sort of
tasteless. Another hour or two passed and I had a
salad (also bought from Tesco) with some ham
(bought from Iceland) to replace the not very
enjoyable lumps of Mozzarella cheese in a ready
prepared salad. For a late evening snack I tried
an experiment. It was Marmite on sugar free
digestive biscuits. They seemed to work OK as a
carrier for Marmite. Marmite has such a strong
taste that the carrier could be almost anything.
One of the first things I notice when I
first lay in bed was how much my legs ached. I
can't really pinpoint where he pain was coming
from, and anyway, pain is too strong a word.
Discomfort is probably better. I had to wriggle
around a bit to find a comfortable position, but
once I had done that I fell into a good sleep.
Apart from the end of my sleep, where I had a long
and vivid dream, I seemed to sleep very deeply.
My long dream was a very rare dream that
featured my dad. It took a bit of a time for the
dream to develop, and become interesting. Some
boring people sort of faded away to leave
basically just me, my dad, and someone who seemed
to be a friend of my dad. I think he may have been
based on just the foggiest memories of one of the
reps who would visit my dad in his shop. I am not
sure why, but I suspect they may have been in the
RAF together during the war before going their own
ways - my dad continuing a technical career, and
the other guy working for a company selling
technical spares.
My dream ended up centering around an old
fashioned looking valve based radio. It was a
multi band radio covering the broadcast bands and
shortwave, and some cleaver gearing on the tuning
dial automatically switched bands as you rotated
the knob. That was not it's most clever thing. It
also featured a wide screen TV display over the
speaker grill. It was a mystery how it did this,
and so we started to dissect the radio. We found
that it definitely could not tune as high as
television frequencies, but was able to tune to
BBC experimental radio-vision broadcasts. How it
made the display was a complete mystery because it
would have needed digital processing that wasn't
even imagined when that radio was built. We did
work out that the information needed for the
display was reduced by using a technique used in
cartoons. Only the main characters are drawn with
high resolution, and the back ground is just a low
resolution canvas that the main character(s)
appear on top of.
As fascinating as the dream was, it was
good to wake up from it because the last bit of
the dream was the frustrating bit where the
dissected radio had to be put mack together again,
and for some unknown reason we were doing it when
the set was live ! When I woke up I really wanted
to go back to sleep again, and I have no idea
whether it was because I felt I hadn't slept
enough, or whether I had been enjoying the sleep
and dreams earlier.
This morning I am having difficulties
working out how I feel. I still feel a bit stiff
and creaky, but I assume that if I was to go for a
walk I would feel OK. I have started feeling a bit
cold while sitting here moving nothing more than
my typing fingers, and only wearing underwear. It
is only about 6° C, but it should be warming up. I
think that rather than go out for a long walk, I
might be tempted enough to do some work in the
garden. On the other hand, I don't really fancy
working with that overcast sky pressing down on
me. One thing I will definitely do is to go to the
corner shop once I am up, washed and dressed. I
need a bottle of pop and the latest New Scientist
magazine. Maybe I will just be lazy and lay on my
bed reading New Scientist....maybe I won't. I
really won't know what I'll be doing until I am
doing it. It is one of those days !
This is an experiment: I have recently
learned that like embedding video, it is also now
easy to embed audio that should play in HTML5
compliant browser. I just wanted a very short
audio clip to test this, and so here is a a few
seconds of the speaking clock !
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