Thursday, January 04, 2007
Retirement rules!
Last visitor now departed so Christmas well and truly over. Woke up this morning around half past six and thought how great it was not to have to do anything. Dozed for another couple of hours before tackling the not exactly challenging Thursday edition of the Telegraph. Then off to the baker in a nice fresh morning... TE says that this is just the resting period after retirement and that after a while I will start to hanker for more activity. We will see.
Not making much progress on the Chelsea bun front. 'You don't seem to do Chelsea buns very often?'. 'No'. 'Maybe they are a once a month thing?'. Silence. I will try again in a week or so's time. Perhaps they are a bit too crude and English for a baker that fancies himself on being an Austrian patissier.
Parakeets are back with the New Year. Have been quite a few about after an absence of a few weeks.
Having emptied the Eastern end of the allotment compost heap, gave a large and useless book decent burial - in the interests of bearing down on the amount of interesting but unused clutter that we have at home. An economic atlas of Ontario published for the government of Ontario by the university of Toronto press in 1968. 2 by 18 by 24 inches which I make 864 cubic inches of economic geography. Beautifully produced affair with lots of maps of things in Ontario. Coal mines to the square kilometre, mean distance to the nearest bus stop, number of Wal marts within 6 miles. You think of it there will be a map. Many of them in three leaf pull out format. All on good quality paper with carefully thought out layout, type and all the rest of it. What must have been a very expensive bit of vanity publishing but fairly useless. Reminded of the economic atlas that 'The Economist' used to publish when I was little. Was rather keen on it when I was 15. Not sure where I got the Ontario thing from, probably one of the second hand book shops that used to be in Merton Mills. The same place as I got huge and battered bibles decorated by Dore (can I do accents in the blogging world?). It will be interesting to see whether the atlas is still legible when I next visit it in two years time. The iris which we removed out of the pond about two years ago was still recognisable yesterday so perhaps it will. Odd because I would not have thought that the bottom of the compost heap was neither anaerobic nor dry and so things ought to decompose. Not like the bottom of a landfill site.
Bit of over excitement on the soduku front. Thought I had come across another puzzle with more than one solution. But checking the next morning it turned out I had made a mistake - which thirty seconds checking would have revealed and probably corrected. A late mistake of the sort which one can recover from without going back to the beginning. Must bear in mind the ancient lesson that if you discover something surprising you have probably made a mistake so check very thoroughly before blowing your own trumpet.
FIL wanted to see how the registration of his house was getting on so we took a peek at the Land Registry site. Registration now arrived with one typing error and with some unecessary clutter about wells copied off an ancient conveyance. And this has taken since 31st May last. We are not in a hurry but one might of thought that an entirely routine transaction of this sort might take three months rather than six. (The Land Registry operation itself looks good - it is the getting there which seems to be hard).
Not making much progress on the Chelsea bun front. 'You don't seem to do Chelsea buns very often?'. 'No'. 'Maybe they are a once a month thing?'. Silence. I will try again in a week or so's time. Perhaps they are a bit too crude and English for a baker that fancies himself on being an Austrian patissier.
Parakeets are back with the New Year. Have been quite a few about after an absence of a few weeks.
Having emptied the Eastern end of the allotment compost heap, gave a large and useless book decent burial - in the interests of bearing down on the amount of interesting but unused clutter that we have at home. An economic atlas of Ontario published for the government of Ontario by the university of Toronto press in 1968. 2 by 18 by 24 inches which I make 864 cubic inches of economic geography. Beautifully produced affair with lots of maps of things in Ontario. Coal mines to the square kilometre, mean distance to the nearest bus stop, number of Wal marts within 6 miles. You think of it there will be a map. Many of them in three leaf pull out format. All on good quality paper with carefully thought out layout, type and all the rest of it. What must have been a very expensive bit of vanity publishing but fairly useless. Reminded of the economic atlas that 'The Economist' used to publish when I was little. Was rather keen on it when I was 15. Not sure where I got the Ontario thing from, probably one of the second hand book shops that used to be in Merton Mills. The same place as I got huge and battered bibles decorated by Dore (can I do accents in the blogging world?). It will be interesting to see whether the atlas is still legible when I next visit it in two years time. The iris which we removed out of the pond about two years ago was still recognisable yesterday so perhaps it will. Odd because I would not have thought that the bottom of the compost heap was neither anaerobic nor dry and so things ought to decompose. Not like the bottom of a landfill site.
Bit of over excitement on the soduku front. Thought I had come across another puzzle with more than one solution. But checking the next morning it turned out I had made a mistake - which thirty seconds checking would have revealed and probably corrected. A late mistake of the sort which one can recover from without going back to the beginning. Must bear in mind the ancient lesson that if you discover something surprising you have probably made a mistake so check very thoroughly before blowing your own trumpet.
FIL wanted to see how the registration of his house was getting on so we took a peek at the Land Registry site. Registration now arrived with one typing error and with some unecessary clutter about wells copied off an ancient conveyance. And this has taken since 31st May last. We are not in a hurry but one might of thought that an entirely routine transaction of this sort might take three months rather than six. (The Land Registry operation itself looks good - it is the getting there which seems to be hard).
# posted by Jim @ 2:31 AM 
