Monday, June 08, 2009

A pleasant relaxing day - 57F - 7mph NEasterly

.
Picture 1 is the old -fashioned Shrub Rose. We have no idea of a name but she does well each year.

Even though its been an easy-going sort of day we seem to have done lots. After breakfast and a good go at the Crossword (finished mid-afternoon) I managed an hour in the garden - my herb bed is more or less complete and the main task now is clearing out some very overgrown vinca minor.

Y decided to go swimming so I took her to the Hayley Leisure Centre and she walked back via the Headstocks.

She managed 10 lengths and has told you herself about the annoying Aqua Club old women who can't swim and just stand there occupying water-space !

For lunch I did a Quorn mince-substitute Spag.Bol which was OK - certainly not more and Y did jelly and greek yoghurt plus a little compote for pudding which redeemed the meal. This afternoon Y was at the Dentists and I did some computer jobs. The main one was uninstalling AVG (I've never liked it and it expired today anyway) then I installed Norton 360 which seems fine. I got 3 licences when it came with my new Dell laptop. Gone are the days when Norton was slow and clunky and slowed everything else to a crawl. This version suffers from none of that.

Picture 2 is of a sparrow on the nut-feeder. A common-or-garden House Sparrow I think, unless anyone knows better.

The weather has been so variable again. You look at the sky and think that it is going to pour, then 10 minutes later you are in bright sun.

While Y was actually in the Dentists I went to the Computer shop and bought some new earphones to fit my Sanyo DAB Radio/MP3 player. The were quite cheap, £4, but as my listeneing is restricted to the spoken word there was little point in posh expensive ones.

My responses to you previous comments

Jill ..... I bet your 'donner & blitzen' at 7am was quite scary. I'm not sure if the weather really is unusual or whether it sometimes is like this in June.

Re the Kalanchoe - I think I decided that, having done so well, it deserved the reward of the gravel in the saucer. Probably it is good for plants. acting as a slow release source of moisture but I'm not convinced it's essential.

Sorry to hear about the rain damage to your Albertine rose. I'm hazarding a guess that it will be a 'white' and, as a generalisation they don't seem to like wet weather at all. We had 'Iceberg' once but gave up on it for the same reason.

Bob .... I get over the foot-washing problem by sitting on the bathroom box and giving them the once-over with a flannel. JC never seems to be around when you need him !

Re 'infuser' names. I don't like 'mashball' at all. Sounds too much like something to do with Robocop.

Yvonne .... How philistine to describe Waiting for Godot as a load of rubbish. It is great play and, as you know, I rate Beckett.

jbw .... Thank you for your sweet comment about Millicent and big-school !

..........................

Quotation time .......

"Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices"


Sleep tight - I'll catch you tomorrow


.

5 comments:

bob said...

I’ve always been happy enough with AVG Free – but I’m easier to please than some folk!

Did you become accustomed to headphones on National Service?
I cannot stand them!

I recall snow stopping county cricket in Derbyshire at beginning of June 1975.

Gravel is certainly recommended for orchids.

Not 'mashball'?
How about ‘Dictionary of Phrase & Fable’ then? (Brewer).

Steph is back from Jamaica with pressies:
‘Potwah’ Phrase Book, Saltfish & Plantain, Tamarind Balls, Dried Pepper Shrimps, a Brownie, and a miniature of excellent Appleton Estate Rum.

Yvonne:
If he’d been known as ‘Gee!-KILL’ it might have given him away.

I once stymied my minimal chances of getting an esoteric short play produced by Nottingham Playhouse by cheekily suggesting it made more sense than Beckett. Quite ‘high horse’ they got.
But was I right to expect them to have a sense of humour?

Jbw
My mother just took me into class to meet the teacher, then abandoned me.
I went home at playtime.
It would have been the same with National Service but the gate was locked.

Jill said...

I finished yesterday's crossword too, am two short of finishing today's, will have another go a bit later. And I finished two while we were away.....

It is indeed a 'common' house-sparrow. I visited my friend in nursing home today, she looks out onto a very large garden, with lots of bird-feeders and baths, I kept looking, lots of 'exotics' - parakeets coming to the feeders, two thrushes, and a green woodpecker, apart from blackbirds and tits. Unfortunately she is not interested....

No, Albertine rose is pale pink, with luckily some dark pink buds still to go. Another new patio rose doing well is Pretty Polly, also pink, but sort of double with a very gold centre, the sort that have a lot of buds on each spray.

Bob,I can't stand headphones either....

Pete said...

Graham thanks for the plug to my site again, much appreciated. kept off the bikes today instead went for faster machines...the Red Arrows....Awesome as usual.

Rob said...

Just catching up with the blog.

Bob has beaten me to a bon mot about naming the Prime Minister. Glad your BNP person went but the Labour-controlled County Council was a 4-star authority (the highest?) - time will tell whether it remains so. Y will be pleased to learn the Lib Dem won in Ashfield. I decided against voting for her when, on her election literature, she produced a photo with a lamp post growing out of her head. Well that and the fact she was a Lib Dem.

I'm not altogether sure the local and Euro results mean the Tories will sweep to power in a general election. It seems to me they have only done well because Labour did so badly. A general election could be very different and I don't expect UKIP to get 20% of the vote then.

We have used Norton 360 for the past year without problems of any sort.

£4 for earphones equates to posh expensive ones. Tesco sell 'em for 99p.

Sports Desk
Australia gone
No twenty twenty for them
They will win Ashes

(It could be better but I don't like cricket).

Rob

jbw said...

I used to use Norton until one year at the Autumn clock change, after which the computer would not boot up not even in Safe Mode. Uninstalling Norton solved the problem and the people who had built the computer said that they had had troubles before and so Norton was the first thing they looked at so I changed to McAfee. When BT changed their broadband they included Norton as part of their Option 3 package but they have now dropped Norton and gone over to McAfee. The computer boots up and handles internet and email traffic much faster and McAfee is integrated into the BT system and is automatically continued while ever using BT. It seems to work very well.