Or, more specifically, organic veg box soup. We get a box of assorted organic veg every week, and every now and again we look at the overflowing veg crisper and think “it’s time for soup”. This is minestrone, with, I think, four kinds of brassicas in it, and very good it was too.
I’ve been very busy, writing and marking, and have barely left the house. It’s not going to get much better any time soon, so expect lots of pics of food and knick knacks. Plus, the weather’s turned foul again.
This is a sight and sound that greets me every few hours, whenever I am home. I suspect it carries on in the night, but I sleep through it. Oliver is hungry. So so very hungry. He’s starving, he hasn’t been fed since before the rinderpest and that time, the black cat ate all his food. And all the other times. He’s never had any food. Ever.
And so on and so on and so on.
When we first got him, we figured he had been neglected or something, but FIVE years later, he’s still doing it.
And believe me, we feed him. The guy who delivers groceries for us must think we’re running a shelter – pretty much all we buy is a truckload of cat food and some coffee. And Oliver eats it, and stays skinny.
Cat has several hollow legs, he does.
I was in Manchester all day and forgot my camera, so this was taken on my mobile phone while waiting for the bus home. This is looking up Friargate, the main road north from the city centre. There are several pairs of shoes dangling from the overhead phone lines, I have no idea why, but this was really about the sky, which was an appealing mackerel pattern.
This is kind of cheating, I know, since it’s not a photograph, and really only a picture in that it is a graphic rendition of words, but it’s what I’ve been doing.
This is based on about 15000 words of my research, the most recent 2000 of which were created today or yesterday. It’s pretty slow going – at one point I had realised I had spent 35 minutes tweaking data in order to get enough information to write ONE sentence. One whole sentence, and not even a very long one, at that.
Oh well, at least the ‘puter’s co-operating.
This is the inside of my main computer, a Sony laptop. It’s never a good thing when you can see the innards of pretty much anything, and that is as true of today as ever.
I caught some kind of blackmailware yesterday, one of those things that make you think you have a virus and then pay them to remove it. I’ve had it before, so this time I leapt into action and removed it, I thought. The problem is, though, that this particular make and model of computer has an overheating problem, and something along the way started to trigger that, so I opened it up to let some of the crap out from the fan and generally let it breathe and cool down.
It’s still not quite right, but it seems to be getting better, I think. Wish me luck – much as I love my netbook I would rather not do all my marking and writing for the next month on this dinky little keyboard and screen.
Bluebells are a mythical kind of flower to me. They seemed to feature heavily in the very old-fashioned children’s stories and poems we read (or had read to us), and I always imagined them much larger, and more sky blue than they actually are. I like them better this way, delicate and subtle
Here in England they’re a protected species, and bluebell woods are highly prized locations to visit. This isn’t one of them, it’s a neighbour’s front garden (that’s the lid of city of Preston recycling box you see there in the bottom left corner), but they’re still lovely.
This is the result of having to undo most of a sleeve for the cardigan I’m knitting because I stupidly thought I remembered the pattern. I didn’t.
Full-scale ripping out of knitting is called frogging, because ripping out sounds like ribbet. Working backwards in a row to fix a recent mistake is called tinking, ie, knitting, backwards.
The things you learn from me.
Today I had to go to Blackburn, Lancashire, for a doctor’s appointment and I have been plagued by an earworm the whole day.
You bet I went looking for holes to photograph but I couldn’t find any, so you will have to settle for this rather strange building facade. I don’t believe the text has anything to do with the bull’s head, which is also above the doorway of the place next door, which seems to be a night club. All very odd.
Edited to add: apparently this building is Thwaites House, which may well be the original headquarters of Thwaites, a large northern brewery, although I still don’t understand the bulls. Thwaites’ logo is two horses’ heads.
England doesn’t really do the dramatic skies, at least not in the way Africa does, but this did catch my eye. The tree is a local one, just a block or so away, and although everything else is green, it is showing only the faintest of reddish buds, even now.
