Thursday, 1st December, 2022

[Day 990]

Last night and first thing this morning, I decided to align the tuning on two DAB radios and our new music centre. I preset 10 stations on each radio with four national BBC stations, two local BBC stations, two music stations and finally two talk stations. I have been meaning to try out one of these talk stations (‘Times Radio’) for some time now and spent a few interesting minutes listening to some discussions of the issues of the day whilst I was waiting for Meg to get herself ready.

Today is my shopping day and I get to the supermarket front door about 30 seconds before it opens which is fine. After my ‘normal’ food shopping, I always allow myself the luxury of a little trip up and down the famed ‘middle aisle’ of Aldi which features a variety of household and other goods not immediately associated with supermarkets. Last week, I was tempted to buy Meg a spare pair of pyjamas and this week, as they were on special offer, I treated myself to a pair of men’s pyjamas. Having said this, I had to hunt through a pile of stuff to find a pair (the only pair?) of the appropriate size. After the shopping and as I am in that part of town, I return via the newsagent to pick up my copy of ‘The Times‘. On the front page, there was a photograph of the singer/songwriter Christine McVie not particularly well known to me who had died yesterday and worthy of the front page of the newspaper. The newsagent’s wife informed me that she used to meet with her quite often when she visited the restaurant they use to run in California – so it is a small world. Then it was a case of getting home and a slow unpack, after which we made our normal trip to the park. We had our elevenses sitting on a park bench which was raw but not bitterly cold but did not tarry too long as we knew we had to be home in time for our hairdressing appointments. As this was at 12.00pm, I busied myself getting some of the loudspeakers attached (occasionally) to my laptop to receive some attention. For a start, I was not sure which speaker was ‘left’ and which was ‘right’ so needed to access a program on the web which allows you to access a test to ascertain which is which. I had got my units the ‘wrong’ way round and so this necessitated some reorganisation of the cabling involved to make sure that everthing would stretch to where it was intended. Having got my speakers in the right position, I was then able to access some tests which are designed to make sure that things are set up correctly. Whilst I was doing all of this, I bookmarked the sources for the speaker tests so I know where I can find them and copied the whole of the Bach folder from my pendrive onto a 128Gb flash memory drive which was only about 50% full. The memory manufacturer, Sandisk, sell some of these little ‘thumb’ drives that fit into a USB port and which only project 7mm from the edge of the computer. As such they can be left in place and act as a useful additional memory source for laptops. So all of this means that whilst I use the computer, I can now have a gentle ‘flow’ of Bach playing in the background whilst I write or email.

As the hairdressing for both of us rather got in the way of our normal lunch times, by the time we had both been done we were feeling pretty hungry and in need of a quickly prepared lunch. We tend to always have a tin of chicken and a tin of steak in our pantry that we can rustle up a quick meal on occasions such as this. So we made a meal in little more than 5 minutes by adding our (heated) tin of chicken to some instant rice supplemented by some microwaved petit pois. After lunch, I spent some time putting to rights the parts of furniture disturbed whilst I was adjusting the cabling to the loudspeakers. As I was doing this, Meg popped round to see our next door neighbours to return some little dishes in which they had treated us to some spare desserts (cherry pie and custard as I remember it). I followed Meg to next door and we learnt the sad news that there had been a death in their family as one of their in-laws had succumbed to cancer. The death was not unexpected and in some ways was a blessed relese but it did explain why our next door neighbour’s house looked a bit ‘closed down’ in the last day or so. When we returned home, we tuned into the closing minutes of the Croatia vs. Belgium World Cup match. As the score finished 0-0 at the end of the day and despite the frantic attacks that the Belgians made upon the Croatian goal, Belgium did not survive to enter the knockout stage. As they are the team ranked as No. 2 in the World, this is a considerable blow to them and, as you can imagine, the Belgian players were utterly distraught at the end of the game, although it must be said that they missed several chances fronm which they could have scored.