… wasted a lot of time today, I’ve been remarkably productive. I’m not sure how I’ve managed that, but one thing that I’ve noticed is that today seems to have gone much more slowly than the other days just recently.
But last night, try as I might to go to bed early, it still ended up round about 23:00 when I crawled into bed. And then, I remembered a kind-of-nighttime mantra from a couple of years ago that helped me go to sleep. I started to recount it and I was asleep long before I’d finished it. I shall have to try it again and see if it still works or if I went to sleep by pure chance.
Whatever it was, it didn’t work for long because I was awake again at some point, I’ve no idea when. I lay awake for ages, looking at the signs for all of the closed lumber companies in Luxembourg (I don’t know where they came in), and I may well have been awake when the alarm went off.
It took even longer than usual to rise up this morning, and I really was seriously having thoughts of going to bed again. However, I pushed the idea right out of my mind and struggled off to the bathroom to sort myself out for the day.
Back in here, there were several issues that cropped up. The first one was, as usual, to transcribe the dictaphone notes.
This dream is surprisingly current. A friend of a friend of mine and his wife have just adopted a small boy, and the “child” and “Vietnam” do have a certain ring about them too. But I was more interested in adopting a cat, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … and the apartment only having one bedroom is perfectly true too.
A one time, this used to be a regular occurrence, thinking about walking out on a job because of the loss of amenities, the build-up of work and the fact that I was well past retirement age.
And strangely enough, when I was typing out the notes for this second dream, I suddenly remembered a lot more about it, such as –
The logistics of retiring seem to be quite difficult in this dream, that’s for sure.
By now, the nurse had arrived to fix my legs and feet. He’d read about the seafood festival that’s taking place in Granville this weekend in the port, and he advised me to tell the taxi driver to take good care of me while we’re out tomorrow because the road by the port will be packed with pedestrians. He’s not going to the festival because he doesn’t like shellfish, etc.
And neither do I, but that’s not the point. I have to go that way to dialysis.
After he left, I could make breakfast and then read some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1870 while I was waiting.
Today, we’re still discussing fungi and also some biology, and yet another prescient remark turns up, "But on that disputable topic I shall not enter, only remarking that the extinguishment of animal and vegetable life, from meteorological causes, which has probably ever been going on upon the earth’s surface, deserves thoughtful attention, and if it extended no further than the drying up of numerous ponds in a country subjected to a continued amount of increased temperature, is a remarkable fact in Natural History."
So here’s another suggestion of global warming in the 1870s, although, of course, they didn’t call it that. And he notices the effect that it’s having on animal and vegetable life.
After breakfast, I came back in here to fight another wave of spam attacks. As you probably will have read, Chrome 154 and Linux seem to be the latest combination to be broken in a spam attack, and I’m having hits to my sites from all corners of the World with this combination of browser and operating system. It makes me wonder what else the bug is doing to the computers that are hosting it while it’s trying to attack everyone else’s. I can’t urge you enough to abandon Chrome until Google can sort it out.
Having done that, then I wrote the notes for the rock concert on which I’d been working, and they are now ready for dictating, along with the hundreds of others. I involved my friendly neighbourhood chatbot in this too, doing all the research for me and he came up with some wonderful anecdotes that he’d found hidden deep down in the depths of the internet. Having the chatbot involved by doing my research is saving me hours, and he’s doing it better than ever I could do it.
There was the usual disgusting drink break for the midday medication, and then my faithful cleaner turned up to do her stuff. One of the things that she did was to wash the windows, and that’s much better now. So much so that much more sun came in through the windows in the late afternoon and I had one of them open for a while to take advantage of it. She also found for me, at long last, a six-pack of plain soya yoghurt that I use in cooking. I can only find twelve-packs, and they’ll go off long before I’ve used them all.
After she left, I had a look at the radio programme that will follow the one that I’ve just prepared. I found that I needed quite a bit of music, so I went off on a search, and by the time that I was ready for tea, I’d found everything that I needed – or near enough anyway.
Tea tonight was, as usual, sausage beans with cheese and black pepper and air-fried chips, followed by another one of those posh soya yoghurts. Everything was cooked to perfection, and it was all really good.
So now, I’m off to bed again, ready for dialysis tomorrow … "I don’t think" – ed …
But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the office … "well, one of us has" – ed … a friend of mine worked in a place that had a “take your daughter to work” day, so he took his eight-year-old daughter.
After she’d been there for an hour, she suddenly burst into tears. All of her dad’s colleagues gathered round her and tried to cheer her up.
Eventually someone asked her what was the matter, and she replied "daddy said that he worked with a bunch of clowns and I haven’t seen one yet!"
