Three below

-3°C, fog

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Alice:

It’s dreamy weather we’re on You waved
your crooked wand Along an icy pond with a frozen moon A murder of
silhouette crows I saw And the tears on my face And the skates on the
pond They spell Alice I disappear in your name But you must wait for
me Somewhere across the sea There’s a wreck of a ship Your hair is
like meadow grass on the tide And the raindrops on my window And the
ice in my drink Baby all I can think of is Alice Arithmetic
arithmetock Turn the hands back on the clock How does the ocean rock
the boat? How did the razor find my throat? The only strings that
hold me here Are tangled up around the pier And so a secret kiss
Brings madness with the bliss And I will think of this When I’m dead
in my grave Set me adrift and I’m lost over there And I must be
insane To go skating on your name And by tracing it twice I fell
through the ice Of Alice And so a secret kiss Brings madness with
the bliss And I will think of this When I’m dead in my grave Set me
adrift and I’m lost over there And I must be insane To go skating on
your name And by tracing it twice I fell through the ice Of Alice
There’s only Alice

MOT first

1°C, E wind. light cloud. Cycle 31 miles

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Damn: the MOT needs booking before the car Tax. 

Wind-up bird

1°C, E Wind. Dry.

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Spent all day shopping for a music player for the kitchen. I really did get fed up with cooking in silence.

Except I didn’t, I got to Birmingham hungry after a train ride talking to an ex-pupil ( which was a real pleasure). Borders bookshop have the sort of Cafe with comfy chairs & sofas so I sat myself there with food & a coffee. It’s rather comfortable, so I stayed a while and read the book.

It would appear that you can alter the sensation of reading a book by changing your place. A book seems quite different if you read in a public space or at home in the quiet.

This book is deceptive, it seems easy to read, the language and voice are simple and conversational but the thoughts are much more. The author plays with seemingly incidental events and conversations amongst characters and serves them up in a way that gives them gravitas. You as reader can get drawn into this; if you do, you start to notice incidentals in your surroundings. So there am I, reading this book and absorbing the idea that things we do and see that are trivial are actually important and significant. We often don’t get to find out what the significance is, but gradually they reveal. And just like in “life”, some threads in Murakami’s books don’t ever resolve into anything. Life, as we know- is without plot: such a narrative is all imagined. Don’t we do this all the time- seek order out of the haphazard mess we are surrounded by? For now, most of the book remains unread, but there are some tantalising chapter titles to get to.

Wanted: new teeth

6°C. Dry, fresh with a light breeze, sun too.

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Teeth: I need new ones. Mine are all broken and worn down. The edges of the breaks are quite sharp, you can feel it if you push your tongue against the shattered edges.
iPodding: I have* a pile of 24 CDs to convert in iTunes. It’s going so fast I can’t stop, half way now, can I last* the whole course before spinning out?.
That should say " iHave " and can " iLast "

Getting colder, I may have to switch on the heating tomorrow.

Wasabi peanuts

…are hot hot hot, 7°C,

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Long arms: I bought a new coat this afternoon. It’s amazing, the cuffs come down to my knuckles. And you know how my knuckles are raw from dragging along the ground. I am not used to things fitting so well. Hope it looks okay ok.

Fired, paper to start it, but then paper became the whole point. I burnt some old school-books dating from 1980. Quadratic equations, stress diagrams using catenary arches and some stuff about monoclaise/feldspars went up the chimney as black shimmering ash; back to where all that carbon came from.Why did I ever keep that stuff (the answer is in putting it in a box then forgetting it was there for ten years).

20 years on…

9°C. Grey & still.

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Preparing for Christmas, but my fizzy legs want to go cycling.
Remarkable: I found a Filofax diary from 20 years ago. Cuckoldry occurred then too, and in the same seasons. The web was waiting to be invented then so, I put lots of detail in ink instead of here on the ether. I was sensitised to rejection that year too, much is encoded in symbols. Even so, there are some that need to be lost to history. Those pages are more easily wiped than musings here in the interweb I’ll wager.
I will make a fire.
Kitchen stereo: Highest priority now is music in the kitchen, I hate cooking in silence. the original  iPod Bose dock thing is said to be unable to charge the newest iPods. Not clear whether this applies to my Classic. I have a better idea anyway: buy a pair of speakers & amp from Richer Sounds and plug in a charging base-dock thing- total cost is about the same but the spare FM tuner can be wired in too. The sound should be considerably better than any SoundDock.
Decided.

I need to launch some fireworks, but not to celebrate new year- I have other things in mind. Not yet had time to paint since we broke up for the holiday. Rats.

…The Poodles are well.

Today, I can’t assemble…

9°C, dry, but overcast.

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The flat-pack contained no screws.

I’m tired after a very long term, longer than the days it contained.

And now everybody has gone.

End of term

9°C, Windy

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End of term means looking forward to waking up in bed instead of waking up half-way through first lesson. Better not say that in front of the boss.
Carrying king-sized mattress out of the car to the house was fun in the wind today. The best technique was like a hermit-crab, or something. Bend the thing partly in half, then carry it on my back while I was too bent over. It worked. Tomorrow I can assemble.

Comic Strip

 5°C, changing for the wetter.

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No interruption: to my internet connection – surprise.
A cartoon strip comes with an Ikea flat-pack stool. Excellent finale!

The comic-strip above has all the essential elements of a story, characters introduced, scene setting, the bizarre central action of a man using stools as clogs, then the dramatic finale of him doing a head-plant into a fridge-freezer. Conflict is there in the scene where we are forbidden from painting pictures of the central hero character- the foot-stool.
While in Yantar:

The cat is sleeping.

High Bitrate

5°C, dull.

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iPod Sampling rate really does make a difference. In practice, it means that the Classic sounds better than the Nano because you can rip CDs at a high sampling rate and get better sound quality. There is plenty of space on the 120Gb drive to do that. I’m shopping around for a dock/player for it now, I neeeed music in the kitchen! Sound is so much part of the house’s atmosphere, along with smells- which reminds me- I bought wood for the open fire today, but with no music or TV downstairs, there is no real incentive ot spend time in that part of the house.

Soon grasshopper, soon.