Author: Sleepypete

I had a brilliant intro in my head for this earlier but it has escaped into the bounds of amnesia.

Something to do with “Let’s face the music … and dance” but with Mini Eggs and madness involved. It’s quite possibly a good thing that it’s disappeared into amnesia.

Two subjects for today. I quickly moved into 2 books completed for 2018 ! Ahead of target. I quite enjoyed Brick Flicks. It’s a book where the authors have recreated vignettes from many of the famous films out there. From Ben Hur to the Godfather. Alien to Tomb Raider. Death on the Nile :

To Indiana Jones :

It looks better in your hands than when trying to arrange the pages for a photo. I didn’t want to damage the book by scrunching the pages back in a rather tightly bound hardback ! Cruelty to books is a very deep evil.

Good book. Great present.

Music ? I have a huge amount of music in the library. The library is expanding fast enough that it threatens the capacity of my laptop … Aren’t there those songs that when they come on, you just can’t help trying to join in ? Tori Amos gets me a lot like that, despite her being blessed with a remarkable voice and me …. not.

What are some of these songs ?

The one I’ll start with is by Nina Persson, formerly of The Cardigans, singing Algebra with the band A Camp. I’ve linked this one a few times before but …. this is a special song by a very special singer who has produced so many songs that catch my ear.

Back to Tori Amos and there are a bunch of songs I go back to with this special lady. The one that provoked me croaking along over the weekend was The Beekeeper.

I Do Adore a good song and that’s one right there by Mindy Gledhill.

Sad songs too and Ghost of a Dog is a remarkable one by Edie Brickell.

Sometimes All I Need (by Air) is a classic song to break a dark mood and set me into happy times again.

Son of a Preacher Man (Dusty Springfield) is definitely a classic that always catches me.

Seal has been making a trade in singing old classics too, here’s I Can’t Stand The Rain. Must get his latest album.

Or a not so classic really new song that’s ultra catchy like Call Me Maybe by Carly Rae Jepsen. Love the humour in the video.

Most of the Rumours album by Fleetwood Mac gets me singing along and the F1 theme will always be The Chain for me.

Glad I didn’t get Stuck in the limited wintry weather we had over Xmas. Caro Emerald is another remarkable singer. Guaranteed to get me chair bopping as well as singing along.

It can feel good to be on a Road To Somewhere, one of Goldfrapp’s best and most singalongable.

I found a particularly good version of Martha’s Harbour by All About Eve too a while back. Here it is with Apple Tree Man.

And an unusual one by Nouvelle Vague, I Melt With You.

So Thank You For The Music (the songs we can’t resist singing) and I hope this selection brightened your evenings !

PS There’s so many more songs that coulda shoulda been here too ! Like Walk Like An Egyptian that’s just been playing on the iTunes :-).

Don’t worry, I’m not going to give a series of book reviews when I’m going over the books I’ll be reading through the year. I’m too likely to give away spoilers with those.

And with a book like Leviathan Wakes (James S. A. Corey), it’s better left to unfold without the spoilers.

Same as Last Jedi actually.

Book first, yesterday’s day later.

Leviathan Wakes is the first book in The Expanse series by James S. A. Corey. It’s been picked up by Netflix as well and turned into a series. I’d highly recommend checking out Netflix, just for The Expanse (in my case, I picked up the free 30 day trial for Star Trek Discovery, stayed for The Expanse).

The setting is our Solar System, in the not that distant future. Only a few hundred years hence. We don’t have light speed travel, so we’re still anchored to our home system. But there’s a huge amount in our solar system, so that’s not so bad. Instead, we have a space drive that opens up that solar system to the characters within the books. Nothing too dramatic, the ships are still limited by the people within them and their tolerance to acceleration.

It shares its focus between two characters in their different settings, with their stories intertwining through the book. There are subtle and not so subtle alterations between book and series …. but both make sense.

I enjoyed the book and I’m highly tempted to watch the series again (it would make it a third time through). The second book is likely to be the third book I’ll include in my Book A Week aim for this year.

Yesterday had a lot going on and I was exhausted by the end of it.

First up – work, which had a fun session with my brain being picked up by two contractor ladies. I love to be able to pass on stuff I know and in this case, I’m in the possibly unique position of having seen through the previous case that they’re looking to gather data on so that the next project can be planned out correctly.

I can’t say too much more about that because of the line of work I’m in but it is nice to have the knowledge in demand.

Following that was a run into town, perhaps a little later than intended but I still had plenty of time to complete what I wanted to be doing.

Lunch – sausage-inna-bun ! I like these. I did grab a Facebook pic but I’m not going to copy it here. Apparently it was cold enough that either my hands were quivering the picture into blurriness or the phone camera couldn’t cope. I think it was my hands. It was good to have some hot chocolate to warm them up.

Shoes – to their credit, Pavers offered no quibbles when I returned my last pair of shoes. They were very surprised that I’d managed to destroy the back of the shoes inside a month. I’ll probably get more shoes from them because the pair I had were incredibly comfortable, just a shame they didn’t last long.

Market ! Probably the last few days of the Christmas Market. To be honest, I was a little disappointed in it this year. No Happy Cookie Place to keep going back to and a few of the other munchie stalls made me steer clear in fear of having my tummy bitten to what they were offering. But one place has excellent cakes, one of which was my brunch today. 😀

Cinema – I ended up comfortably in time to watch another showing of The Last Jedi, this time without the effect of alcohol blurring the senses.

It’s a great film. Films are best when everything is on the table, where you have no idea of what’s going to happen to the characters as the film progresses. Who will live ? Who will die ? Will they win … and to what degree … And it has some amazing moments of pure drama with fun characters to watch as well. I do like the new Rose character, she’s great.

I’d recommend watching it if you’ve already seen The Force Awakens, which introduces the latest era of Star Wars and it feels like The Last Jedi is setting up something incredible for the final film. Looking forward to it !

Oh and the last parts of the day were a shopping run followed by picking up pizza …

Quite.

Too tired to stay up for the cricket and I think I got some sleep despite what the pizza does for causing me to make too much acid.

Busy day ! Chilling out for the rest of the weekend though and contemplating what washing machine I’ll need to buy … Mine has done me quite a few years (possibly 12) but I think the bearing or motor is starting to go. That’s another day’s problem though.

Back to the books and videos !

First day back at work today after the holidays !

My feet want to murder me.

I’ve had a curious time with shoes lately. I wore out my last proper pair, then got a pair that lasted literally 1 month … (Need to take ’em back tomorrow). I’m now I think 3 or 4 full days into the new pair and I haven’t worn them in properly yet. The last pair were extremely comfortable ! Until I wore through the soles in a month.

Anyway – yep. First day back at work and I probably over do it by following a week and a bit of idleness with the walk around the bus, full day of work and a run up to the Mall to check out laptops (and buy pants : acquired, jumper tomorrow probably).

Two things to talk about today, first is laptops because I’m seriously pondering maybe taking advantage of the second thing to acquire a cheap laptop upgrade. What am I looking for in the spec ?

A nice keyboard and trackpad. This is a total deal breaker. You can get external keyboards and mice for laptops but why would you want to do that if you bought the right laptop to start with ?
8GB minimum. Windows always likes more memory.
1080p screen, preferably IPS. It could be that it was new but my new(ish) desktop monitor looks amazing still compared to the old screen. The difference is : More pixels (doesn’t matter), it’s new (and not burned in) and IPS (different and much superior display technology).
An SSD plus a conventional HD. The SSD drive makes things go fast, the HD gives space for Stuff plus all my music. My iTunes library went past 100GB … And my Windows machine has 115GB left of its 256GB SSD (albeit with 30GB of Blade and Soul installed), which doesn’t leave much room on a 256GB for the music.

Everything else is in my opinion, fairly secondary for a laptop. I don’t need or want game performance, so separate graphics hardware adds weight, takes power, makes heat, adds cost.

The big thing with computers is to spend as much as you need to, avoid spending money on stuff that will give you no value.

So what did I think of the laptops ? Quick summary time :

Dell – high quality, costs a little more. Can cost a lot more but you don’t need to spend £1000 on a laptop. Seemed to have acceleration on the trackpad though, which is nasty and would need to be disabled.
HP – horrendous trackpad. Awful. Spec is nice but a bad trackpad is a deal breaker.
Lenovo – cheap and cheerful. Promising if the spec is good.
Acer and Asus – avoided looking at these. Acer have lost their edge as everyone else has got cheaper to match them and I believe you’re paying for a label with Asus.

It’s likely to be from PCSpecialist though because I can get the exact spec I want from them. (Although now it’s apparently £704, which is up about £100 from when I had been looking).

Why now though ? The emergence of the Meltdown and Spectre bugs have sparked my instincts … What are these bugs ? The Register has a reasonable story at the link, although it’s a bit heavy-geeky in its explanation.

What’s my interpretation of it ? This may not be wholly correct but I hope it illustrates the problem.

It’s all about Speculative Execution. Computer processors are doing a lot of things at once, with a pipeline of around 10 steps long. To have it going at its quickest, you want all 10 parts of that pipeline working. So the processor looks at its list of instructions and checks if anything can be done ahead of time.

Think of baking a cake with something like the following as a list of instructions :

Fetch list of cake baking instructions
Buy stuff to make cake
Mix together the bits for cake
Put cake in oven to bake
Prepare filling and icing
Put filling and icing on cake
Allow to cool (YEAH RIGHT)
Demolish cake in eating frenzy.
Finish Cake Procedure.
Fetch credit card info used to order Cake Stuff and send to nefarious people.

Your speculative execution thing would say that you can make the filling and icing while the cake is in the oven, so why not. The procedure should stop at “Finish Cake Procedure” (there should probably be a “Deal with leftovers” in there too) but … Meltdown and Spectre mean that the Baker Processor has looked ahead and thought …. “I can be really helpful and fetch that credit card info too !!!”

And it has grabbed info it has no right to have and put it where other processes can get to it for sending on to malicious people even though the reaction from the Baker Processor should be : OH HELL NO YOU AIN’T GETTING THAT.

The bugs mean that the processor itself has grabbed the data, outside of any authorisation controls that would otherwise stop it and then your clever hacker person can get to the data via other bugs. Internet browsers have been targeted as a very likely threat here which means adblockers and use separate browser windows for your online transactions and close those windows when you’re done, that should flush the data.

There is more in the Register story, which goes more deeply into the problem but the summary is that Speculative Execution is a trick that makes computers faster but apparently can be exploited to make the processor do stuff that was never intended to be possible.

What does this mean though …. I believe it’ll cause some hysteria among the PC buying public which will cause a drop in demand. The supply is likely to remain constant. This may well lead to a drop in prices to cause the demand to spark up again.

Lower prices mean it’s a good time to buy. (And I’m not particularly worried about this bug – run adblockers to avoid bad code coming into your browser).

And that’s probably enough buying advice from me for today !

My good friend Cyberkitten mentioned something like this a while ago …

The idea is to read a book a week. I’ve been enjoying reading again, since putting up the reading light that’s been taking up space for ages not actually being a light. It was a bit too dark before to contemplate reading in my perch under the stairs.

It’s a good perch. I can see everything from there in my swivel pooter chair. Main telly across the room, laptop and desktop. And it now has a reading light behind it as well to let me dive through the books.

The first book is going to be Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey. It’s the first of The Expanse series which is also a Netflix series that I would heavily recommend if you’re interested in space scifi. It’s fairly realistic and well thought out too, the only cheating is the invention of a leap forward in space drive technologies that make space travel within the solar system a feasible and every day endeavour.

The book and series are different to some degree. The book is allowed to play out over a much longer timescale, while the series has more going on around the setting that it’s in. The series is sped up for keeping the drama and tension going between episodes and the book, as books do, has much more scope for telling you what’s going on outside of what the actors are getting up to.

I’ve used part of my credit card voucher for buying the next one. And a few more besides …

I’ve also dropped a little cash on Elite, with shiny things appearing :

Shiny Shipka. The station ? Not so much :

That’s the station where I was helping evacuate people. Still broken but they’ve added in scaffolding to expedite the repairs.

But I didn’t want to stick around too long. So off we go back to the more populated areas of space :

Topping off the tanks at the way. (Not at that star, it’s a T Tauri or protostar which hasn’t properly ignited its hydrogen yet, so you can’t refuel at it … but it was pretty)

And finally, to the other ship that had a paint job acquired for it :

Very shiny. Very chrome.

Back to work tomorrow but I’m seriously considering bringing in the iPad with the Kindle software on it. I don’t that would necessary work though because I’d be eating my lunch at the same time as supposedly reading and that’s … a little awkward. Maybe a holder to prop up the iPad.

I’ve been acquiring more for it … As well as a book called “How to destroy the universe and 34 other interesting uses of Physics”, which turned up for my birthday that I’ll definitely enjoy reading, oh and Brick Flicks too. That one is next up after Leviathan Wakes :-).

What’s been added to the collection today ?

Star Wars Catalyst – this is the story behind the Rogue One movie.
James S. A. Corey – Caliban’s War. Book 2 of The Expanse.
Anne McCaffrey – Freedom’s Landing.
Alastair Reynolds – Revelation Space.

And a trio of albums from John Carpenter, Taylor Swift and Norah Jones. I still have money left on the voucher too !

Whatever shall I use it on …

I have a slightly odd feeling at the moment …

There has been a steam games sale going and I actually have more money now than when it started …

Although that’s not saying much because my built up funds from selling the daily trading cards that you can get through Steam sales is currently £1.14. I’m rich !

Maybe not. I do have a few other vouchers though. The credit card I use accumulates points over time which work out to about £50 a year. Not too shabby. Last year, that £50 went on a mechanical keyboard which I have enjoyed using over the past year. This year there are three two main choices :

1 – it goes towards a Lego BB-8 which I’ll enjoy putting together for a couple of evenings and then have to find a place to put it. That finding a place thing is getting more complicated these days. I need to throw out some stuff.
2 – it goes towards lots of e-books and music. This is the favourite actually because there are 6 more books in the Expanse series that I think I’d enjoy a lot, plus I have my eye on other authors. And there are albums by Lisa Hannigan and Agnes Obel that I want. (Although Amazon appear to have double the price of the Lisa Hannigan album – meh, it’ll wait). I also want the latest Ed Sheeran, Evanescence and Tori Amos albums but I’m waiting for the price to reduce on those.
(Choice 3 is new pants. And a cardigan. But I am ashamed of this choice, forget you read it).

I can’t use the credit card vouchers on games sadly. But what games … most of the games I really have my eye on aren’t released yet, or they fall foul of my weak wright rist being sore. I’ve been steering clear of the shooty games due to that. What games are most likely ?

Surviving Mars – I want this. It looks like it’ll be a lot of fun for the colony builder part of my brain. I’ve watched a couple of livestream videos from the community manager and one of the senior devs and it looks like they’re coming out with a cracker. Not yet available though.

Frostpunk – a post apocalyptic colony builder set in a frozen Earth. Looks very promising, not actually out yet.

Aven Colony – another space colony builder but … I’m not actually too convinced by it.

Holy Potatoes game – I watched KatherineOfSky play the We’re In Space game from this series and she had a huge amount of fun with it. Here’s the link to the playlist and I would thoroughly recommend watching more of her videos.

Bomber Crew – a jovial WW2 esque bomber game. Not discounted enough yet but it is a very recent release.

Doki Doki Literature club – actually a free game that is attracting legendary status. I need to check it out …

Heat Signature – this is quite likely but I’m a little concerned that it might aggravate that poorly wrist.

Yep. Lots of potential stuff out there.

All of the games.

I also have 3 vouchers for the town centre cinema too, one of which may actually go on a second watching of The Last Jedi on Friday. Maybe. Good film, enjoyed it and I have a feeling there are things I missed the first time around.

Resolutions ? It’s the time for new year resolutions ….

I don’t usually go in for these but I have one this year, actually maybe a couple. I’m going to try and ignore more stuff. My mental state is affected heavily by those around me and what I choose to take notice of. So I’m going to attempt to :

Ignore the bad. Harder than it sounds because helping people is an important part of me. This may sound selfish but I’m going to concentrate on the people I find really important and attempt to ignore the rest. Because that negativity has an effect on me too.

But that doesn’t mean stopping having fun with people, in a make ’em laugh and be cheered up by their smiles kind of way. It does mean avoiding most of the unimportant drama that erupts over the internet. Just scroll on and avoid that.

Another resolution is to read more. I enjoyed Revenger and I’m trapped into the first Expanse novel too and more Alastair Reynolds and James S. A. Corey (The Expanse) books are what the voucher is likely to go on.

And the last one is to actually get out there and do stuff. My outsides are steadily getting back to normal, so I can’t be trapped by them any more. It’ll be good to break those shackles.

A good year I think.

And lots of treats yep to round it off with. Just around me there is loot from various places :

Green and Blacks mini-chocolates which I’m working my way through;
Half a bag of tasty strawberry bonbons – love these;
Half a bag of rock hard strawberry bonbons – not so much of a fan of these;
Remnants of dark chocolate digestives – won’t last long;
3 blocks of pre-Brexit Toblerone – possibly my favourite chocolate;

And a few more treats too. They last a while because I’ve been doing better at rationing them out. (Should probably check my weight sometime – oops !)

A good year for me, although that’s balanced by things going on with family at the moment which aren’t for here. I am worried about them though.

The condition of my outsides has improved a lot and that’s dominated my thoughts over the last few years. There’s been significant improvement over the last few months, although it isn’t actually fixed yet it does seem like it’s moved into a healing mode. I have to help it out there though by …. not helping it out. It seems to have moved into a mode where it’s getting better on its own, with interference making it worse.

Encouraging signs but still some way to go before I’m all better. I won’t be playing cricket again any time soon though.

That’s related to something I’ve come to realise over the past few weeks/months. I gave up the cricket due to a combination of two factors :

1 – My knees and outsides were too torn up to play and this got worse over the year or so after as well as my legs swelled up to scary levels.
2 – I thought my reactions had badly dulled with age … but this looks like it was the after effects of a concussion that may have taken a few years to subside.

My first concussion was bad enough, it severely damaged my memory and I still feel the effects of that with slight difficulty in forming memories since then. I still have near perfect recall of events before then, although it does sometimes take a little effort to dredge up those memories. The second concussion affected my reactions though, adding a lag into what my brain was trying to do. That manifested in delayed reactions and I think it was affecting my judgment of speed while driving too.

It wasn’t as far as me being unsafe (except on the cricket field) but it definitely shakes your personal confidence to know that something’s very not right. Oh and even if my outsides do heal up in time for the season, my insides are now too battered to let me enjoy playing.

Haha, this was supposed to be a bit of a review of the year post, instead of a look back on stuff that’s held me back. I think I have an appropriate picture :

Maybe not that one.

That’s not it either although I think I have some nuts around.

There we go.

One reason this has been a much better year for me is the people around me. Confidence is up on last year and I need other people to give me that confidence. I am a critic of myself and it takes other people to remind me that I do have certain talents. Like the writing here, the writing of book that needs to happen sometime, the artist creative stuff where people seem to like the pictures I publish and modifications of pictures that I unleash on an unsuspecting world.

Yeah.

I’ve had a fun year on my own and while sharing that fun with other people. I’ve been shying away from the toxic ones and embracing those who are just amazing people. I’m being led by my own feelings instead of being dominated by others.

I’m happy with how things are going.

I will miss a few people though and there are too many of those to mention. (No it’s actually because if I mention some, I will feel really guilty when I realise I’ve forgotten some very important people).

The important thing is though – have a great new year. May it be a fantastic prelude into an excellent 2018.

And I promise to post a little more too. After having some fallow weeks, I’ve enjoyed the daily nonsense that came out of the Advent posts. They were definitely complete randomness where I never knew what would emerge even 1 minute before I started typing but I enjoyed writing them hugely.

I need a similar meme for 2018 ….

HAPPY NEW YEAR !

I suspect a new discovery over the past few days is responsible for vastly disrupting my sleep pattern …

Actually. Not suspect. Know. What is it ?

It’s called Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms.

It’s still playing through as I tap out this post. They’re up to 693 trillion gold now with the next upgrade coming at 952 trillion gold. It isn’t much of a game to be honest, which is a mystery as to why it’s so addictive ! All you do is watch them bash the monsters, with Minsc the Ranger doing sterling service bashing at many monsters at a time and you tell them which upgrades to go for when and which heroes to have in the group to make sure you have all of the skills working together.

I don’t know how long I’ll stay with it but it has me hooked so far and I haven’t resorted to the microtransactions yet. I had a dabble in Star Trek Timelines but that looks heavily dependent on microtransactions.

Games with microtransactions that I’m ok with :
The ones where it is not vital to progress that you give them money. You can shortcut the time needed in Idle Champions but the alternative is just to wait and let it play in the background while you do other things. Elite has microtransactions for paint packs and other addons … these have zero bearing on progress, although they did open up one particular system to people who backed the game pre-release.

Games where I’m not ok with microtransactions :
Where the money unbalances progress in the game or gives people an unfair advantage. I felt ST Timelines was requiring the money just to play the basic game, to get around the issue of needing Chronitons to do anything with the game and those Chronitons needing time to build up. That’s very wrong, although it does fit for occasional play Facebook or mobile type games where you have a little binge of play and then running out of credit means it’s time to go away for a while.

I’ve never really got on with that type of game, I like my time management to be down to me instead of arbitrarily enforced by a game. Perhaps with my potential for addiction, the time management is a good thing. But I don’t like it.

Besides, being stuck in a game for many hours on end is a bad thing, even if it’s a background thing to things like watching the cricket, reading a book, watching videos or other activities.

Other games have the problem of you potentially being able to buy power within the game and get an unfair advantage that way. One reason I avoid Player vs Player type activities is because they are infested with sociopaths who can invest immense amounts of time (or money) into making their avatar as powerful as possible … and these people will prey on those who just want a little fun in the games on their own terms.

I need to hit the sales as well at some point before going back to work on Thursday. Possibly Tuesday as I suspect the shops will be shut for New Years. I better check that before I repeat something from quite a few years ago !

I did wonder why I was the only person at the Mall that day ….

I really enjoyed reading this one.

It’s called Revenger, the latest novel by Alastair Reynolds and the verdict ? After not getting on too well with his Chasm City, I’ll be looking up more of his novels now.

It’s a tale of a perhaps Firefly inspired solar system with space ships being a cross between what we’d expect and sailing ships of days long gone. With treasure hunting and piracy mixed in there as well.

Good book. I’d thoroughly recommend it. The central character is Fura Ness and as a young lady new to the ways of space and baubles and treasure hunting and piracy, she’s a perfect narration character to draw you into a wonderful universe set up throughout the book.

You have technology … but it’s technology that’s been handed down. Ancient works of art, death and tools for getting the people ahead in their travel through the world. Most of the technology is found on baubles, shielded worlds with ancient troves of goodies that are only open for short bursts of time, after which they close behind impenetrable barriers again.

It’s 425 pages long and I’d quite happily still be reading it.

I think it’ll be the first Expanse novel though. I should go book hunting at some point. I’ve intentionally avoided heading out over the past couple of days mostly to avoid the snow that came down. If you have no need to head out in wintry conditions, you shouldn’t. The most important rule I’ve gone by is : Don’t become the casualty. And heading out unnecessarily in conditions of snow and ice gives you a high chance of getting damage either to yourself or to what you’re travelling in.

Oh and if you’re on other people’s transport (bus, train, air) there’s the high chance of them deciding that they aren’t going to be travelling … in which case you’re really stuck.

Nah. I may venture out tomorrow (I’m almost out of milk and have the pizza urge again …) but I’ve been quite enjoying watching the cricket during the night and day too. Maybe pizza in the evening followed by Day 5 of the cricket up until lunch if I’m feeling ok and all day if I have the acid. The pattern at the moment is to start watching at 11.30, watch the pre-lunch session up until 1.30 and then head to bed and watch the rest in the morning.

It’s been a good pattern.

But I’ve also been suffering from the insomnia again which makes me think of doing a reset in the form of an all nighter, which works out well in conjunction with pizza …

We shall see !

No Lego today sadly, although I am well overdue posting the results of a rather glorious build from a while ago.

That BB-8 is definitely tempting though. Very tempting.

I’m back home now and in probably the best time to travel back too. Here is the scene from about 2.30am last night :

(2.30am ? I have trouble sometimes cooling down after a long drive. My nerves and brain go on high alert watching out for all of the numpties who are about to do stupid things on the roads. The trick is to not be in the place where you end up being caught up in what they’re doing).

That’s maybe an inch of snow in a Bristol that rarely sees much snow, if any. The conditions travelling back were poor. Very heavy rain, continuously for the whole trip after getting to Leicester. It was a balmy 5 degrees C for the early part though, so it was coming down as rain instead of anything more slushy. It did touch 2 degrees C around Birmingham though.

I sense that if I’d attempted to travel today, then I’d have been turning around.

It’s good to be home again, although it’s also good to see the family again. We didn’t get up to nearly as much as we usually would, due to ill health. And that’s me too ! My outsides are much improved but there’s still a fair way to go with them. It does help having lots of good munchies inside me though. I have pictures … Which would probably upset all of the vegetarians who come here.

There’s more going on there than I’d ever write here though.

Sad to hear about the Kate who was the subject of the Tips and Charity link up in the top right for a while. We lost Kate to breast cancer on Christmas Eve. I hope the kids will be ok. Kate was a lovely person.

I’ve been reading again …

I’ve been meaning for ages to set up a second light in my main room, overlooking where I’m on the computer and where I’d be in my chair reading. After attempting to read in what my phone declared as 0 lux earlier (no detectable light) and just now as 2.0 lux, I figured it was time. That can’t have been doing my eyes any good.

I do have a proper ceiling light in my room but it’s never been the same since I switched it to a dimmer energy saving thing. With the extra light, I’m in a dazzling (hah yeah right) 80 lux if my head isn’t in the way of the light.

Much better for reading Revenger by Alastair Reynolds, which I’m enjoying tremendously. I sense it’s all going to come to a rapid conclusion but stories can be best if they’re not drawn out. Some of the 500-600 page (or more!) novels feel stretched, this one is moving on at pace and I think I’ll be acquiring more books from Mr Reynolds.

I still aim to hit 100 posts for the year … I’ve been a bit lazy over most of this year. 3 more to go ! So that’s …. Lego Star Destroyer, Lego BB-8 if that happens, music post ? I wonder what else.

Oh and that 2.30am was partly due to cricket watching too, which I totally intend to do again tonight :-D.

Yep.

Have a great day ! I’ll be at the mum and dad’s place still* but it’s a good place to be.

*(The usual seasonal bugs, mum’s maybe 10 days behind me in the progress of her cold and I’m still suffering a bit)

Yep. Hope you have a great day, stay warm :

Yep. They nearly escaped with me yesterday. And …

Beware …

Easter is coming.