GreyShack

Had it about an hour ago: a sort of one-pot pasta and lentil stew thingy, made in our slow cooker. I wouldn't call it it a particular favourite of mine, but it has the advantage of being dead easy and surprisingly substantial.

That good eh?

Hopefully the weekend will improve things.

With us, anything that is/would be smelly goes in some kind of container.

Cleaning - I would say once every 3-4 months or so in normal circumstances. Quite possibly longer.

I am not a dog lover. I find them needy, melodramatic and hierarchical: some of the features that I try to avoid in humans.

I work in an office around one day a week which often has more dogs than humans - since one of the regular staff has two dogs. In general, however, they aren't much of a problem. One frequently nudges people's elbows to get attention and howls whenever a phone rings. Another gets in the way of the door an awful lot - resulting in the owner installing a child gate at an inner doorway, and another has been traumatised in the past and needs to be taken out whenever a fire alarm test is due. However, this is not more that the needs and quirks of other people, really, and is fairly easy to work around.

I am glad that I do not have to work in that office all the time, but overall it is not a big deal.

I'm going through Robert Brightwell's Flashman tales: prequels to George MacDonald Frasier's Flashman book, featuring the original protagonist's uncle.

They are very well researched (as were GMF's) and generally engaging, but having just finished Flashman and Madison's War, I found it to be the waekest so far - lacking a strong narrative thread to tie the scattered, episodic historical events together. The next in the series is Flashman's Waterloo, which shouldn't have that problem.

I am very pleased to see how Brightwell has updated the original conceit - taking the bully from Tom Brown's Schooldays and using him as a mouthpiece to entertainingly deconstruct the Victorian boy's-own colonial genre - to fit a more modern audience, whilst retaining the spirit of the originals.

Slashdot -> Digg -> Reddit -> Lemmy. I used to spend lot of time on TheEnvironmentSite.org some time before Slashdot, but I cant recall whether anything else came in between those two.

Working from home today - or supposed to be. I finished a couple of Big Things at the end of last week and am really struggling to get stuck into any one of the dozen other things that are on my list now.

I've deleted a lot of photos and sorted the recycling though. I'll be sharpening pencils soon...

I did get out and do a bat monitoring session last night - part of the national waterway survey in August each year - without getting wet. There were a few pipistrelles about and a couple of noctules and serotines passing by, but no Daubenton's which is what this particular survey is looking for.

Today will be getting the chores out of the way then - if the rain shows any chance of dying down - out to an open air Shakespeare this evening. It will be 'Exit pursued by a very damp bear.' I expect.

Tomorrow: third attempt to get these shelves up. It has been postponed twice so far.

A lot of the practical stuff would be covered by The SAS Survival handbook, by Wiseman, which is the only one of that kind of book that I have actually used things from and have returned to from time to time. It is sitting on the shelf in front of me, in fact, just above a couple of Simon Schamas and next to The Encyclopedia of Comic Characters (I haven't organised anything since moving house).

The Lord of the Rings would be my next. One of the tiny number of books that I have re-read multiple times, and would happily do so again. It is the only book that has left me feeling able to smell the air of its world.

The third is more difficult to choose, but I'll say The Complete Works of Jane Austen - because I have never read any of them, but am certain that I will enjoy them and she is, of course, another British author - given that this is British Books.

If 'complete works' are considered a cheat, then maybe Mallory's Morte D'Arthur, which I have read a loooong time ago, but know that I get far, far more from now.

Sounds blissful to me. I can't recall the last time I had a complete weekend reading.

They always say that you should stack up everything that you think you'll need and then put half of it back in the wardrobe. The problem is working out which half, of course.

Hope it all goes well anyway and that you have a good time.

you also haven’t addressed my reasons for doubt.

A) When did you ask me to?

B) By pointing out the cost/benefit to both sides, I would have said that I did anyway.

However, if you would like me to go into more detail: this is a property that was not occupied by the PM or his family - Greenpeace have stated that they were aware of this. The 'high security' was evidently provided by the police - who would also have been aware of this. Even at the best of times, given a little advance planning, avoiding a routine police cordon - routine being the key word - is not exactly difficult.

I struggle to see why Greenpeace would take the route that you are suggesting (a literal conspiracy theory) and decide to take the risk of losing credibility instead of doing as they have frequently, attestably, through court records, done and evade the existing security.