… had one of those days when you’ve been trying to do something straightforward and simple and it just doesn’t work?
Right now I’m having one of those. I’m making a new template for one of my websites – a task that I’ve done on countless occasions – and for some unknown reason it just won’t work out.
For three hours now I’ve been at it, and I’ve spent a similar amout of time on this template too, but I’m getting nowhere fast. I’ve even gone right back to basics and started from the beginning but that’s not working either.
What has happened, I reckon, is that I’ve made a spelling mistake with one of the *.div boxes, or forgotten a quotation mark or something, but I’m badgered if I can see where.
After all this time I’ve abandoned the quest for the evening because my eyes have turned to mush and I can’t see straight.
The day started off so well too. I actually beat the third alarm to my feet, which is something to celebrate these days. And I’d been off on my travels, as I discovered when I listened to the dictaphone later after the medication.
Last night I was coming back from Shavington into Crewe and down by Gresty Brook was a row of lock-up garages. Something had happened and there was a black Lamborghini-type of sports car with all of its front end stoved in and some of these garages were open and there were motorbikes everywhere. It looked as if this Lamborghini had lost control and smashed into these garages. As I walked past I could see that there had been some work doing but there was more to do. Anyway, all of the traffic coming out of Crewe had stopped so I was able to negotiate my way through. Then it came to updating my website so I moved some information around and wrote in a bit about this accident to fit in with a few of the images. Roxanne came to talk to me about something and we ended up talking about hot air balloons that she had seen as a very small child and where they fitted in to the story of Montgolfière, these balloons
We were all on The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour, a huge mob of us. I was interested in a woman or girl or somebody. I was doing what I could to become friendly with her. At the same time there was another guy trying to do something to be friendly with another girl and everyone kept on butting in on him like they usually do with me. So one one occasion someone said something about this girl – that Stephen from Brooklyn, so I explained to him that the other guy had first dibs and he was quite put out by that. One evening we were having a meal and it was a huge refectory kind of place, not like the dining room. I grabbed my evening meal and went to sit down and I couldn’t see this girl whom I wanted to sit next to. I thought “she can’t be here yet” so I chose a place a bit away from everyone else but there was no cutlery or anything for anyone else so i started to assemble some cutlery to make a place for her. Just then I was overwhelmed by half a dozen people who appeared at once and all sat down at this table all around me and left no space for this girl. One of them was this Stephen and he explained to me that ‘I was having a nice friendly chat with so-and-so and this girl and thank you for putting me right to the situation”, things like that, and i was thinking “God I wish that someone would put these people right about my situation”,
A hot, sweaty, sticky night again, which I have to note, and I ended up somewhere in all of this in a big 1960s American estate car, a beige one, right-hand drive. For some unknown reason whenever I left a standing start I had to push it to make the car roll forward and then leap in. It was really heavy too but one in started to roll it was fine. I remember having to do this at a certain traffic light where opposite, the road narrowed and made it an interesting procedure. So I bought a different, smaller and lighter American estate car and at the same junction I had to do the same thing and that was for some reason even heavier to push.
After breakfast I had a good go at cleaning up the kitchen and dining area. And then configure a laptop so that it would work “Zoom” – this on-line meeting thing. It had to be done on the laptop because there’s no microphone or webcam on this big machine here.
Promptly at 11:00 we had our first lesson. There was the initial teething trouble with the programme as you might expect as no-one (not even the tutor) knew how to do it, but we were soon organised and the two hours passed quite quickly.
One of the attendees had her daughter of about 6 with her, and she had brought a dolly with her. So it goes without saying that at some point Strawberry Moose joined in the Welsh lesson.
Apparently the Welsh Government body that is sponsoring these courses expected about 100 attendees and made the appropriate provision. However there are a total of 1039 people who enrolled. It seems that the events of the last four years are swinging the pendulum over towards the side of Nationalism.
It did not escape my notice that one of the choices for “reasons for studying this course” was “to establish my national identity” or something very similar.
That took me right up to lunch where I finished off the last of the bread that I had made 10 days ago. I’m surprised that it had lasted so well.
This afternoon, as I said yesterday, has been a cookery afternoon. And you cans ee the finished products here.
We have a loaf of bread, one and a half jars of apple and apricot purée for breakfast, and some apple and apricot cordial. And once again, I forgot the cinnamon and nutmeg.
The loaf was made with 400 grammes of flour.
We started off with 250 ml of water had a teaspoon of sugar and a sachet of yeast added to it. It was all stirred together and put in the microwave until it was lukewarm.
Meanwhile, 400 grammes of flour had a dessert spoon of salt added to it, and it was all mixed togather.
The lukewarm water was slowly added, every so often stopping to give the mixture a really good mix. make sure that your hands are well-floured so that the bread mix doesn’t stick to them so badly.
Eventually, you’ll end up with something rather like plasticene, nice and elastic. Then, you have to really knead it with your hands to make sure that the water and yeast are really well circulated throughout the mix. This can take 10 minutes or so and it’s quite an art.
Then put a towel over the bowl and put the bowl in a warm place for 45 minutes or so, to give the yeast a good start.
Meanwhile, peel, slice, core and dice 10 apples and but them in a saucepan with just a dash of water and plenty of lemon juice, stirring them well round as you add them to make sure that the lemon juice and water soaks the outside to stop them browning.
Then bring them to the boil and once it’s boiling, turn the heat right down to simmer gently until the apples are really soft (this could take 45 minutes even), giving it all a really good stir around every ten minutes or so.
Once the apples are simmering away, go back to the bread. It should already have started to rise now. So turn your oven on and while it is warming up, you need to knead the bread again for a while to make sure that the nitrogen being released by the yeast it distributed evenly through the bread.
Then put the mix in your bread mould and put in a hot oven 230°C for 10 minutes and then 210°C until it’s done.
When the apples are cooked, open a cheap tin of time-expired apricots from NOZ, drain off the syrup into a sterilised jar and add the fruit to the apples.
After about 5 minutes when the fruit is all thoroughly heated through, strain off all of the liquid into the jar with the syrup and whizz the fruit up in your whizzer.
Sterilise a couple of large jars (I put a small amount of water in them and run them for a minute in the microwave on medium-high and use boiling water on the caps) and put the purée in the jars and seal the lids.
Then check the bread by poking a large skewer into it. When it’s ready, it should sound good and the skewer should be clean when it comes out
Rather later than usual, I went out for my afternoon walk with the madding crowds – although nothing like as many people as I was expecting.
Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we saw them yesterday digging out the sand from the old tidal swimming pool. They’re not there now … “the ground’s all flat” – ed … but whether it’s because they have finished or simply knocked off for the day I really couldn’t say.
What i’ll have to do is to go that way tomorrow too but somewhat earlier so that I can see how they are doing.
I carried on walking around the walls, past more people than I have seen for quite a while, until I came to the Square Maurice Marland.
Between the chimneys I noticed some movement in the harbour so I took a speculative photo to see what it might be.
It’s beautifully focused on the chimneys, which means that it’s out of focus deeper in the image, but I could see that it’s one of our floating pontoons for the new walkway being pushed across the harbour by a motor boat.
A little further on there was a better view of what it was doing. It looks quite impressive too.
But we can see that whatever was keeping Marité out of her berth seems to have been resolved because she’s now back in her little corner.
The two Channel Islands ferries, Granville and Victor Hugo, are moored up over there, and today there’s just one Joly France boat, the ferries that go over to the Ile de Chausey, moored up. The other must be out on a run.
Back here I had another bash at this web site problem and then had my usual hour on the guitars.
Tea was steamed veg in vegan cheese sauce with falafel, followed by some of my apple pie and soya coconut dessert stuff.
There were a few people out there this evening but that didn’t prevent me from going running.
It was yet another struggle up the hill in the wind but I made it all the way up there. There was nothign much going on offshore tonight so I wandered around the corner to watch the fishing boats unloading at the fish processing plant.
It was really busy there tonight. There was a queue of boats there waiting for a berth to unload their catch.
But there seems to be plenty of activity down in the chantier navale
We’ve had five boats in there for the last couple of days but today it seems that one of them has gone back into the water. I wonder if we are going to be having another visitor any day soon.
Despite the strong headwind I ran on down the Boulevard Vaufleury and was almost bursting by the time that I reached my marker.
having seen them pushing the pontoons over this afternoon I went down to the viewpoint overlooking the harbour to see if I could see what they had been doing.
It’s not evident at all but I think that they might be adding a third layer to the bit that’s perpendicular to the harbour wall. That’s all that I can think of that might be different.
My next run took me up to the viewpoint at the rue do Nord but there was nothing at all happening out there so I ran on back home.
Bed now, not as early as I had hoped. But there’s a lot to be done tomorrow. I want to finish off this radio project, sort out this perishing web template and do the chores like photos and rewriting other web pages
And I need to find time for another play around as my new hi-fi has finally arrived today. I’m looking forward to that.
