{"id":11680,"date":"2019-02-11T22:01:43","date_gmt":"2019-02-11T22:01:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/?p=11680"},"modified":"2019-02-11T22:01:50","modified_gmt":"2019-02-11T22:01:50","slug":"monday-11th-february-2019-that-was-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/?p=11680","title":{"rendered":"Monday 11th February 2019 &#8211; THAT WAS ONE &#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230; of the nicest cheese sauces that I have ever tasted, never mind ever made.<\/p>\n<p>Tonight, everything went perfectly and my steamed vegetables with vegan sausages and vegan cheese sauce were totally delicious, and I&#8217;ll eat that again any day of the week.<\/p>\n<p>Another bit of news is that ever since I came back from the Arctic I&#8217;ve been trying to make an appointment to see some people. They finally replied in mid-January to say that there were no appointments just now, and the same e-mail has come every two weeks.<\/p>\n<p>But today, I&#8217;ve had a different mail sent by a different person, and this has an air of being somewhat more optimistic.<\/p>\n<p>However, that is just about all of the good news today. The rest of it hasn&#8217;t been so good.<\/p>\n<p>It all started to go wrong as early as 06:00 this morning.<\/p>\n<p>This was another one of these days where even though the alarm went off, I took absolutely no notice whatsoever. I turned over and went straight back to sleep. Not out of willingness, I hasten to add, but simply because I couldn&#8217;t wake myself up.<\/p>\n<p>07:45 was much more like it, and leaving my bed at 08:30 was even more interesting. It&#8217;s not my usual <em>modus operandi<\/em>  for a weekday as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, but after the miserable day yesterday when I missed my lie-in, I must have needed it.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d been on my travels too during the night. And surprisingly (or maybe not, because it&#8217;s the whole point of doing all of this) it was a continuation of a couple of voyages that I had been on several years ago. I was in Brussels working in an office and I&#8217;d gone home for lunch. I decided to have a salad but a &#8220;fried&#8221; salad. So I tossed a lettuce leaf into a frying pan and it singed up around the edges. The rest of the salad I tossed into another frying pan but it was one in which my younger sister had just fried an egg and she&#8217;d used lard or dripping to do that. I left my home to head back to work but found myself right outside the city with the high-rise towers away in the distance and I was wondering however I would reach work in time to restart. But there &#8211; that weird American company for which I once worked &#8211; I was chatting to a former colleague of mine (from another employment) who was terribly upset. She&#8217;d received a copy of a bill that someone had sent in, on which she had been described as a &#8220;barsteward&#8221; &#8211; and this offended her deeply. Meantime, there were a pile of magazines lying around in the office. They were entitled &#8220;The Flame of Islam&#8221;, and although that might sound an inflammatory title, it was actually a Christian publication. Not many people knew that, which probably explains why they looked so astonished when I suggested that we go out and sell them to passing motorists in our lunch breaks.<\/p>\n<p>First thing that I noticed this morning was that I had the kind of thirst that you could photograph. I downed about a litre of my Vitamin B12 juice straight off.<\/p>\n<p>After a rather late breakfast, I settled down to wait for my passport to arrive.<\/p>\n<p>And waited<\/p>\n<p>And waited<\/p>\n<p>And waited.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, I tried to concentrate on the work that I needed to do &#8211; such as the photo database and backdating the blog.<\/p>\n<p>After much binding in the marsh I made the blog back to <a href=\"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/?p=11537\" target=\"_blank\">6th January 2019<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>But the photo database was rather slower today. I couldn&#8217;t really get going for some reason. But then I have days like this, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.lesguis.com\/images\/1902\/1902131.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/www.lesguis.com\/images\/1902\/1902131.jpg\" alt=\"hang gliding pointe du roc granville manche normandy france\" height=\"204\" width=\"300\"><\/a>And that&#8217;s not all the bad news either. I&#8217;m having camera issues yet again.<\/p>\n<p>And that&#8217;s a shame because the bird-men were out in force today.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve noticed for the last couple of months that the camera is having issues focusing, especially at night. And when it is particularly dark, I have to find a distant point of light to use as a focusing object.<br clear=\"all\"><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.lesguis.com\/images\/1902\/1902132.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/www.lesguis.com\/images\/1902\/1902132.jpg\" alt=\"hang gliding pointe du roc granville manche normandy france\" height=\"204\" width=\"300\"><\/a>But today, the focusing is simply not working most of the time, and especially when the background is neutral, like a large patch of sky.<\/p>\n<p>I can hear the motor in the lens engaging and the focal length changes, but it creeps in to the beginning and blurs out<br clear=\"all\"><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.lesguis.com\/images\/1902\/1902128.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/www.lesguis.com\/images\/1902\/1902128.jpg\" alt=\"hang gliding pointe du roc granville manche normandy france\" height=\"204\" width=\"300\"><\/a>And it&#8217;s not just with one of the lenses &#8211; it&#8217;s with all of them.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve tried to adjust the focal settings and that&#8217;s not made any difference. I think that the camera is slowly dying.<\/p>\n<p>But that&#8217;s not really a surprise. I bought it in Canada in an emergency, back in 2012. It was an end-of-range model then and I paid peanuts for it, so I can&#8217;t really complain.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s just disappointing. <br clear=\"all\"><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.lesguis.com\/images\/1902\/1902133.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/www.lesguis.com\/images\/1902\/1902133.jpg\" alt=\"lifeboat statue baie de mont st michel st pair sur mer granville manche normandy france\" height=\"204\" width=\"300\"><\/a>The only way that I can make it work is to focus on a specific object that is sharp enough to register.<\/p>\n<p>So anyway, I pushed on round the corner to see what things were like round by the lifeboat memorial.<\/p>\n<p>It might look cloudy out there, but it was surprisingly warm. And that had brought out the crowds &#8211; especially as it seems to be school holidays right now.<br clear=\"all\"><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.lesguis.com\/images\/1902\/1902134.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/www.lesguis.com\/images\/1902\/1902134.jpg\" alt=\"river pointe du roc granville manche normandy france\" height=\"204\" width=\"300\"><\/a>One thing that I have noticed is that there seems to be a spring of some sort here on the Pointe du Roc.<\/p>\n<p>There would have to be, I suppose, otherwise they would never have put a fortified city up here. They would need a water supply in case of a siege.<\/p>\n<p>But today was the first time that I had noticed the water evacuating out into the sea down below.<br clear=\"all\"><\/p>\n<p>And here, I had a message. My passport will be delivered tomorrow.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.lesguis.com\/images\/1902\/1902135.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/www.lesguis.com\/images\/1902\/1902135.jpg\" alt=\"night beach casino plat gousset granville manche normandy france\" height=\"204\" width=\"300\"><\/a>After tea, I went out for my evening walk around the walls.<\/p>\n<p>There was no-one around even though it was a pleasant evening. There was no storm tonight and the tide was quite far out, so we weren&#8217;t treated to the spectacle of the waves smashing on to the sea walls.<\/p>\n<p>And so I didn&#8217;t linger long out there. I came back here instead.<br clear=\"all\"><\/p>\n<p>And I&#8217;ll be trying once again for an early night. And this time, hoping that I can get out of bed at something very close to the correct time.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.lesguis.com\/images\/1902\/1902129.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/www.lesguis.com\/images\/1902\/1902129.jpg\" alt=\"hang gliding pointe du roc granville manche normandy france\" height=\"204\" width=\"300\"><\/a><br \/>\nhang gliding pointe du roc granville manche normandy france<br \/>\n<br clear=\"all\"><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.lesguis.com\/images\/1902\/1902130.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/www.lesguis.com\/images\/1902\/1902130.jpg\" alt=\"hang gliding pointe du roc granville manche normandy france\" height=\"204\" width=\"300\"><\/a><br \/>\nhang gliding pointe du roc granville manche normandy france<br \/>\n<br clear=\"all\"><\/p>\n<div class='watch-action'><div class='watch-position align-left'><div class='action-like'><a class='lbg-style1 like-11680 jlk' href='javascript:void(0)' data-task='like' data-post_id='11680' data-nonce='4f76f79927' rel='nofollow'><img class='wti-pixel' src='https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/wp-content\/plugins\/wti-like-post\/images\/pixel.gif' title='Like' \/><span class='lc-11680 lc'>0<\/span><\/a><\/div><div class='action-unlike'><a class='unlbg-style1 unlike-11680 jlk' href='javascript:void(0)' data-task='unlike' data-post_id='11680' data-nonce='4f76f79927' rel='nofollow'><img class='wti-pixel' src='https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/wp-content\/plugins\/wti-like-post\/images\/pixel.gif' title='Unlike' \/><span class='unlc-11680 unlc'>0<\/span><\/a><\/div> <\/div> <div class='status-11680 status align-left'><\/div><\/div><div class='wti-clear'><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230; of the nicest cheese sauces that I have ever tasted, never mind ever made. Tonight, everything went perfectly and my steamed vegetables with vegan sausages and vegan cheese sauce were totally delicious, and I&#8217;ll eat that again any day of the week. Another bit of news is that ever since I came back from [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,4507,1616,8571,7876],"tags":[2003,9224,3599,212,2560,5565,8581,8705,5024,1731,7325,7891,11917,11158,4522,7174,10893,2487,5040],"class_list":["post-11680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dream","category-eric-hall-2","category-france","category-granville","category-place-darmes","tag-anne-marie-hanevy","tag-camera-issues","tag-casino","tag-dream","tag-eric-hall","tag-france","tag-granville","tag-hang-gliding","tag-high-arctic","tag-lie-in","tag-passport","tag-place-darmes","tag-plat-gousset","tag-pointe-du-roc","tag-prefecture","tag-spring","tag-vegan-cheese-sauce","tag-vegan-sausages","tag-vitamin-b12"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11680"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11680\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11681,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11680\/revisions\/11681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}