pumpkinstrokemarrow

A new culinary experience from Cheam where I have taken to buying cholla bread on Fridays (said, at Cheam anyway, hola, more or less as in the Spanish for hello). Hitherto I have always had the unseeded version and generally it had vanished in a couple of hours, eaten without butter. Yesterday, had a bit of a brain storm, and bought the poppy seed version instead. Not so keen at all: the grittiness of the seeds constrasts improperly, for me anyway, with the sweet flavour and the smooth, layered texture, sort of on the way to croissant. I also learn that some do indeed eat the stuff with butter.

On the way back came, across a cone men exercise. It seems that there had been a drill to erect a circle of cones around the roundabout at St Paul's church on Howell Hill, taking a six feet annulus out of the annulus you are supposed to be driving in. Very neatly errected, with no sign of anything as messy as road works. And, lo and behold, today the ring has gone again. I suppose it is important that we train new cone men in the art of placing and removing cones neatly and with dispatch. Can't call nimby just because they happen to use a roundabout that I use.

Then, not to be outdone, I moved into a geek drill. From time to time I buy music from http://www.eclassical.com/ and from time to time they send me emails in case I want to buy some more. My eye was caught by a flier for 24 preludes and fugues by Shostakovitch; and, having recently been much taken with something of the same sort by Chopin, thought I would give it a go. Seemed very cheap at $7.99. Flashed the plastic and after a very reasonable half an hour or so of download, was the proud possessor of 300Mb worth of preludes. Can't play them on the PC onto which they were downloaded as no loudspeakers. So load them onto shiny new hard drive, an operation which seemed to take less than a minute, something which I find more amazing than the chip speed, having been brought up in an era when one stored things on punched cards and rolls of paper tape. Then move it onto a newish desktop computer. Double click on a prelude, whereupon MS Media Player fires up and informs me that it can't find anything to play the thing on. No loudspeakers here either. Then move onto a more newish laptop. Laptops generally do have loudspeakers. Double click on a prelude and off we go, if a little tinny. Then we move into geek drill mode. How do we get the preludes into the Media Player library? Help seems to be a bit erratic, as often as not being straight windows help which was not very relevant. Manage to build a play list by hand, by adding each of the 24, one by one as I fired them up. Tedious but one gets there. Next morning, think to actually listen to the things rather than play with them and Media Player announces that the preludes are not where it thinks they are. Eventually work out that maybe the problem is that the things are on the E: drive rather than the C: drive. Eventually work out how to add this drive to the list of places where the Media Player looks. But Media Player still can't see them. Finally, it dawns on me that it can't see into a compressed folder, although it will play something in such a folder if you double click on it. So uncompress it to a folder of what appears to be the same size and bingo, we have arrived. So I now have a playlist containing all the preludes which appears to survice closing and re-opening the Media Player. Eventually I will learn how to work the thing... Clearly intended for much younger folk who like playing songs.