Xenon's Seventh Circle

I'm really bad at this journal thing. More work = less brain, apparently. Still, a general catch up( ... )

I have dug everything. Everywhere. If there was something you didn't want dug, sorry. It's too late now, you should have said. Everything is now planted in the allotment, but turns out that watering is accomplished by hanging over the riverbank, and dipping a bucket into the water. So that's my job, as there's no way my mother can do that. If you hear a splash, it's me.

Elsewhere (a different river), I was out walking again, watching the bouncing fishes, and look look!

( ... )

I'm basically being trolled by cats now. I just cleaned out my keyboard, and there was at least one full cats worth of fur stuffed under the keys. They must get together to poke it down there when I'm not around. None of which is what I came here to post. What did I come here to post? Nothing. Something. I ought to post something, as I never do, and the rest of you lead interesting lives, or at least manage to make yourselves sound interesting, and I'm just here being me.

I read a book! It was a very nice book. It's called The Tyrannosaur Chronicles, by Dave Hone (except he's called David Hone on the cover, to make himself sound more serious and sciencey). It's all about the biology of tyrannosaurs, and what we know, and how we know what we know, and it's full of nice diagrams of skeletons. Also it's purple. 99.9% of you aren't remotely interested, but I'm recommending it anyway, as I promised I would. (I read some other books too, but this one was best).

I've also been watching films, on and off. I've been trying to watch one a week, as I haven't really watched films in years, and to start with I decided it was high time I got around to seeing the Back To The Future trilogy. It's supposedly one of those iconic 80s things, but despite seeing the first one at the cinema about two million years ago, I'd never seen the others. I shan't be bothering again! Although the third one wasn't entirely bad. Then I rewatched the Indiana Jones trilogy to make me feel better about 80s films (and indeed 80s film trilogies, I suppose). That was much, much better. Also 100% more Tip Tipping. The Last Crusade also featured surprise Julian Glover, which was nice. And then after that, I watched the proper Star Wars trilogy, because they actually put out the proper, non-fiddled-with version on DVD, and Amazon was nice enough to be selling it second hand for 12p. Han clearly fires first, sorry George. It was lots of fun, but sadly Return Of The Jedi left me with the Ewok theme song stuck in my head for three days. Here: click at your peril. Dear me, the eighties were a strange place at times.

( Some pictures and things )

I tried to conquer the macro addiction, I really did. Okay, no I didn't. And in my defence, oonaseckar did say yes to nature pictures. This was probably just to humour me, but whatever. :)

( ... )

Because I never seem to post these days, I'm just going to blather about something, regardless of whether or not I have anything to post about. It's rained fairly heavily for most of the last week. Friday was glorious though. My mother, having discovered a bottle of gin in the cupboard that nobody can identify (we assume it's a relic of my grandfather's day), has decided that she wants to make some sloe gin. So on Friday I set off in search of sloes. For those of you who grew up in towns/aren't fruity at all in nature, sloes look a bit like giant blueberries, but are in actual fact evil disguised as fruit. That shouldn't be a surprise, since they grow on blackthorns, which are themselves pure evil. People don't so much want sloes, as are forced to use them because they live in the middle ages, and there's little alternative. So when an (otherwise apparently) perfectly reasonable human being decides that they want to make sloe gin, it's best to smile gently and accommodate them. Then back away slowly.

So anyway, I spent four hours on Friday climbing hills and crawling through thorn bushes, on a hunt for sloes. Everything was early this year (the blackberries and elderberries have already all gone), so it wasn't easy, but my mother now has a copious supply of sloes, and some gin (or probably gin), and goodness only knows what will happen next. She told me that she wanted "about a pound" of sloes. I asked how much that was, since I had no intention of going equipped with a set of scales. She very helpfully suggested that it was about half a kilogram. Yes, thanks for that, Mother. For the record, in case you should ever need to know, "about a pound of sloes" is roughly equal to "rather less than I picked". So she's going to make even more sloe gin than intended, despite a: not knowing how to make it, or b: whether or not anybody is going to be fool enough to drink it.

Elsewhere, I have now finished watching The Rockford Files - or season one of it, anyway, which is all that I have. I heartily recommend it, if you're in the mood for seventies detective shows. Rockford is a terrific character, ageing, beginning to slow down a little, finding fisticuffs both harder to partake in, and harder to recover from, and increasingly suffering from a life with a very irregular income, and an increasingly dodgy future. If that sounds grim, then it's not really. It's often very funny. James Garner is a terrific lead, in the quite brave position of a heartthrob who is showing that he is no longer in his prime. But blimey, the décor. I shared a picture a few weeks ago of a brown, stripy apartment:

( ... )

It was a fabulous day today, so I decided to make the most of what might easily be the last of the summer sun. Consequently I have spent the day wandering across fields and down winding country lanes, eating an improbable number of blackberries. Basically I have been having an Enid Blyton flavoured day (although without the lashings of ginger beer, because yuck). Also no smugglers. I'm rubbish at finding adventures. Apparently smugglers and thieves and spies and sinister foreigners from countries nobody's ever heard of before, are much better at hiding from me than they are at hiding from eleven year old boys with ridiculous pets. No fair.

( There are no smugglers under here )

As said a little while ago, I like to go for long walks when I can, although it's not something that I usually bother talking about. Had a camera again this week though, so I am once again bothering you with details. I went on one of my favourite routes this time, through a sort of wood on top of a hill. It was pretty grey when I started out, but it turned into a beautiful hot day, and I wound up spending four hours tramping about (and not a person in sight all that time - seriously, it's better than sleep). Usually when I go that way I see a lot of deer, but - predictably enough, since I had a camera along - this time there was nothing! Admittedly I'd probably just have got a lot of blurry shots of them running away, but it's still annoying.

Anyway, as a result of all this, today I bring you pictures of trees. ( Many trees )