9.02.2023 Spam, spam, spam, spam, SpamTube.

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  Thursday 9th 30F. The house has cooled overnight. 16C/61F upstairs. 13C/55F downstairs. Up at 6.30 after a restless night. My back aches. Carrying books? Highly likely. Cycling? Probably. No cooking classes this week. They fall every other week. My laundered towels were just as stiff. Despite the hand rinsing and spin drying after the usual tour in the washing machine.

 08.30 Overcast and breezy now. Bright, veiled, golden sun in the east. After a beautiful, blood red blush to the north east earlier. I should have lit the stove, had a cup of tea and heading for my walk by now. Instead of which I have been browsing. 

 I have removed my rant about google.spam.con. Foisting one's opinion on others rarely has any value. Except to reinforce one's own viewpoint. And/or to collect the brain dead into a suicidal/genocidal/sociopathic cult. 

 10.30. Walk over. Where I saw a small group of long tailed tits. One particular male [?] was resplendent in bright, breeding colours. Which I have never seen before. They usually present a rather monochrome black and white. 

 The stove kindling has diminished to near critical mass. I had better have a drive in the car to collect more. I have been getting through much more kindling but no paper at all. Since being shown how to properly light a fire by the sweep. 

 I bought three sacks of kindling. Using my phone to pay in my first, active transfer using a popular payment app.

 Back at home: It took 12 large, plastic, baskets full of logs. To bring the indoor stack back to a reasonable level. Thereby depleting the stack in the greenhouse to a rather miserable heap. More logs required so soon? More splitting. More damp logs to dry out.

 Dinner was fish fingers, organic Fettuccine pasta, organic frozen peas and organic, tinned tomatoes. The pasta is easy to crumble into short pieces after removal from the freezer. 

 I discovered previously that the pasta soaks up most of the juices from the tinned tomatoes. Whereas before I had to use a slotted spoon to drain them. I cook the pasta with the peas by dropping them into boiling water in the pan. The boil is lost but comes back in time. Then the battle is to stop it boiling over!

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8.02.2023 Google remames YouTube as SPAMTUBE.

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 Wednesday 8th -1C/30F. White frost, bright but misty and cloudy. Expected to remain so. 

 Up at 7.30 after falling asleep again at 6am. Museum day. I'll have to wrap up warmly. In layers, so I can adjust to my workload, task and situation.

 I took a snap of the old farm kitchen following restoration. The wall on the right and the door have been replaced due to subsidence. This was once the laundry, brewery and kitchen combined. Imagine working long hours in clogs on that bumpy, cobbled floor! The rest of the house has smooth floors.

  I have safely returned from my stint at the museum. The morning was spent ferrying boxes of books from the old library to the new one. Different building, 1st floor. Via steep and narrow stairs. I was too warm. Having dressed for outdoor work. I removed my jacket, jumper and hat and then I was comfortable again. No ill effects from the loads I was carrying. They were clear that I should just say so. If I found the work to be too hard for me. There was constant sunshine all morning.

 Mid afternoon and I went for another ride. Just a loop around the rural block to keep the momentum going. A bird of prey in every tree in the quiet end of the loop.  Where I pass close to the Far Woods. A heron left a roadside stream and sailed away.

 Only an undulating 7 miles but I was keeping the pedal revs high and dancing on the pedals on the rises. I seemed to be going better than ever. It looks as if yet another neighbour has moved away. The western sky was crisscrossed with vapour trails.

The stove was still going well on my return. I ought to be bringing more logs in from the greenhouse. The last lot are almost used up. Lazy git!

 Dinner was perfect poached eggs on overdone toast. Followed by tomato soup and a roll. It was fine. The toast was from frozen bread. The first go added hardly any colour. The second go was slightly too much. Fortunately this did not affect the flavour.

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7.02.2023 Balloon puppet masters.

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Tuesday 7th 0C/32F. Another misty, grey, monochromatic day. Visibility down to ~250m.

 Up at 7.15. I have a slight back ache. Probably from the cycling. I didn't lift much yesterday. It felt cool at 14C/57F in the lounge. I have just realised that I hadn't been changing the dates to 2 for February. Silly old whatsit! Not a cooking class week.

 08.30. The stove lit quickly this morning and was soon producing a wall of flames. With maximum air supply I let it have its head for a while. To quickly warm the chimney and clear any soot or tar buildup. The dampness of the firewood is visible as a thin film on the glass of the stove door as I add more logs. The glass is usually amazingly clear. 

 Such damp produces a risk of coating the chimney. I went outside to check what the chimney was doing. Light grey smoke and lots of it drifting around the top. It felt cold outside and there was light drizzle on the air. Or just the mist making it feel prickly damp. Time for a walk. If I can drag myself away from the PC.  

 10.15. Back from my walk, restarting the stove and finishing morning coffee. Not much to report apart from a zombie driver failing to change course as it approached. A few gulls drifting low over the landscape. My back pain was soon forgotten. So I added a detour. Today I wore the GripGrab bifurcated mitts. My usually winter cycling gloves. As expected they were perfectly comfortable at these temperatures.

 The mitts are some years old but show little sign of wear. I trust them more than any fingered gloves. There is actually a pair of soft gloves hidden inside these. The split between the fingers lifts the dexterity to another level from ordinary mitts. They are very comfortable for cycling or walking.

 The amusing farce over [or rather under] the Chinese balloon continues to make the headlines. The balloon was floating at twice the supposed ceiling of the billion dollar, US fighter jets. Which made me wonder what they'd do if the ballon had been a UFO hovering over Washington. Presumably nothing. In case it crashed on the city. 

 It would be daft to suggest the payload was NOT spying on the US. Not if it can be so easily recovered in fairly shallow water. Albeit scattered far and wide. I presume somebody from "the lower ranks" suggested they bring down the balloon over shallow water? To make diving relatively risk free. Not to mention avoiding catastrophic damage [to the foreign parts] if it hit the land from that height. No doubt they will find most of the electronics were not strictly Chinese in origin.  

13.15 +3C/38F. Lunch over. I am going to ride to some different shops about 7 miles way. There is a quite a southerly-southwesterly breeze. So it will be easier going than returning. 

  I was right about the wind. It was much easier going than coming back. Yet the odd thing was that I began to feel the rhythm of pedaling steadily at a high cadence on the way back. Even danced on the pedals for a while up a long hill.Though I am far from cycling fit as I once was. 

 Which is hardly surprising given my very low mileage over the last couple of years.  I am now using an Android GPS app which provides tons of data on elevation, inclines, speed graphs and maps of my routes. [Geo Tracker.] 

 17.00 There has just been a gorgeous sunset. With a full red disk behind the trees. Time for a nap.

 Dinner was an omelette with chicken and mushrooms. Waddya mean, it don't look like no omelette you've ever seen? 😳 It was fine. Perfectly cooked and tasty. So there! 😊

 Talking of messes: They've had years to get it right but Windows is still a complete mess. It gets worse with every iteration. W11 merely proves the point.

 How long have people been using high res monitors? 2440P, UHD, 4K, 8K or whatever. Don't you think Microsoft would have heard about these by now and automatically adjusted font size? Nah, that would be infantile. Not when you can hide all the controls behind meaningless terms and maintain your outdated, nerd status. Case in point: Screen brightness. I rest my case.

 They now have so many explanations for their drooling idiocy that they have to use Bing to show the details. Having an onboard user manual would swamp most PCs and laptops. How utterly corrupt is that? What if you can't get online? No 100k page user manual! Pathetic! 

Now they will have AI support on Bung. In a desperate attempt to complete with google.ADVERTISING.con. My first question to Bung AI: How do I fix W11 so I can always read the text, EVERYWHERE on the screen, all at the same time?!!? 

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