Pop Tarts!!!!
Uncle B buyed me some. It’s amazing how cheering it is to bump into an old, disreputable friend like this. Though I’m so old, I still think of frosting as a newfangled impertinence. I think you can buy them in some supermarkets here, too, but they’re in heretical flavors like chocolate marshmallow.
We bought these from Amazon Pantry. First we’ve ever used it. I assume it works the same in the States.
You buy “a box”, but they don’t really tell you what means. Only, every time you put something in it, they tell you what percentage of the box is full. I suspect it’s by volume, not weight. We bought six six-packs of a fizzy lemonade we find hard to get in the stores, so ours was super heavy without filling “a box”.
A tiny woman carried it to our door, which was somewhat shaming (I found it hard lifting). The famous box was plenty sturdy, I must say.
Eh. We’d probably do it again.
July 31, 2018 — 9:58 pm
Comments: 10
Settling in nicely
Forgive bad cellphone pic; the phone doesn’t make a scary noise when it takes a snapshot.
We’re doing fine, fine. No hostility. I might get a gentle hiss and a little flinch first thing in the morning, but he soon turns into a cuddle-bug.
Likes: chicken, tuna, string, giant stinky dumps.
Dislikes: loud sounds and sudden movements.
I’ll keep you posted.
July 30, 2018 — 8:32 pm
Comments: 14
The exact moment I got bit…
Well, the exact moment after the exact moment I got bit. The next photo is me with a bloody thumb and puss looking radiantly innocent. To be fair, he wasn’t going for me (that time). I was feeding him off my fingers and he got confused.
Yes. We have a new cat. Maybe. Let me tell the story.
We were sitting in the livingroom last night, front door open, trying to catch a breeze and this…kitten walked in. Took one look at me, squeaked and ran off.
We called around, but none of the neighbors had a new cat. This is the country; sub-humans sometimes dump kittens or pregnant mothers. We set a squirrel trap baited with kitty glop and caught him about noon today.
He’s pretty feral. I let him out of the trap in the bathroom and he flipped out. Eventually I caught him and got bit and scratched and hissed at for my trouble. But he calmed right down when presented with food. Amazing how that works.
We took him to a local cat rescue this afternoon, where they pronounced him healthy and probably tameable. They loaned us a big cage and a tiny litter box and we’ll see.
A few may remember the Story of Charlotte, a tiny black and white feral kitten I trapped in a squirrel trap during a heat wave sixteen years ago. History really needn’t repeat itself so exactly.
She’s met him. She sniffed the box he was in, hissed at it twice and sauntered off. It’s all down to Jack. There’s something wrong with that boy and he flips his shit if another cat comes in the yard. I mean scary loses it. If he loses it over this kitten, there’s no option. We’ll have to find another option.
July 27, 2018 — 9:10 pm
Comments: 21
It’s a plane!
Okay, not my picture. I stole it from this Sun article from Armed Forces Day. But that is totally what it looked like.
We were at a village fete, standing in the churchyard, when we heard the most extraordinary noise, and THIS went over. Low and slow.
It’s a Lancaster bomber, and it had an escort of Spitfires. It was spectacular.
Wikipedia tells me there are seventeen of these left and only two airworthy: “Of the 7,377 aircraft built, 3,736 were lost during the War (3,249 in action and 487 in ground accidents). Today 17 remain in complete form, two of which are airworthy, and eight of which are in Canada. Only four of the surviving 17 – KB839, KB882, R5868, and W4783 – flew combat sorties over continental Europe during the War.”
Where we are, the sky was black with these once. This one was flying commemorative events all weekend. We saw it again on Sunday, when we were driving to the cat sanctuary. I managed to whip out my phone and take three pictures of a completely empty sky.
I almost lead with one of those pictures, but I actually like you guys.
July 24, 2018 — 9:18 pm
Comments: 19
Sorry for lame
I hope you don’t mind I’ve been fobbing you off with ickle news articles lately.
I’m in a bit of a quandary with this here blog. I don’t like to talk politics (don’t know if you’ve noticed, but now is an especially bad time and here is an especially bad place to be a mouthy immigrant). I’ve done the ‘local flavor’ thing to death.
And my fallback — chicken blogging — is awkward. I’m delighted to report that I am gaining a local reputation as a painter of chickens. As a result, however, my little flock is becoming Instagram famous.
That’s right, that’s right…I’m a known chicken keeper.
But I would miss it terribly if I didn’t end my days here with you guys. So I do hope my small, lame offerings are enough to bring you here for a chat. I can bake cookies…?
I sound needy. Did that sound needy?
July 20, 2018 — 9:23 pm
Comments: 43
I got nothin’
Sorry to be so boring this week, folks. I’ve had a serious of work things and technology things and household things and things.
I need a little televisual therapy…
July 19, 2018 — 10:03 pm
Comments: 15
What fresh hell is this?
Sent to me today under the subject “Disabled your outbound email services temporarily” (with low priority!).
Hello, [my maiden name]
We are contacting you today because we have disabled your outbound email services temporarily. The reason for this is because you’ve got a forum that spammers were subscribing to to get messages sent out. They used a spam trap email address that actually resulted in our mail server getting blacklisted.
We need you to add protection to it so it isn’t being exploited in the future. You will need to contact us and let us know this has been resolved for us to restore your email services.
For protection, we ask that you require an account to subscribe to topic notifications if you haven’t already. We also ask that you add protection to your sign-up page so that spammers cannot automate it. You can do this by using a captcha or something similar to that.
To activate your account, please visit our BlueHost account reactivation center. Use the link below:
[bluehost link]Thank you,
BlueHost.com Terms of Service Compliance
Thing is, Bluehost hasn’t hosted anything of mine for years, but they are the registrar for one (or maybe more) of my domain names. It’s been ages since I felt like I understood how the innertubes work. Is some spammer somehow using an inactive domain to send spam, or did they just send this to a range of IP addresses, or what? (Yes, yes…I asked Bluehost Compliance these same questions. No reply so far).
I have Wednesdays off, so I slept in. Like, for upwards of twelve hours. I feel like…someone who slept upwards of twelve hours.
July 18, 2018 — 10:16 pm
Comments: 8
RUN!
I wish I knew who to credit with this one. What a shot!
I follow a lady on Twitter who, for reasons I’ve never bothered to ask, mostly tweets pictures of stoats. She calls them stoats, too, thought she appears to be American.
Better today, but still not right. I’m’a make an early night of it.
July 17, 2018 — 9:21 pm
Comments: 7
Kind of expensive, but way cool
The thing on the left is actually the thing on the right. They reclaimed the image using a freaking particle accelerator.
It’s a daguerrotype and it sounds this particular technique (or variant of the technique) only works with daguerrotypes, because the images were developed using a mercury vapor. The machine finds and maps the mercury. Though I don’t see why it couldn’t be done with silver or platinum or any other photographic emulsion. On the other hand, I’m not a partical physicist.
It is, as you might expect, REALLY EXPENSIVE to rent a particle accelerator and it took eight hours per square centimeter. So, you know, don’t go digging out grandma’s daguerrotypes just yet.
Here’s the item in Science News. And here is a heavier, boringer version in Nature.
I used to subscribe to Science News. I loved that rag. It was a tiny weekly — a dozen pages, maybe? — with short, interesting but not dumbed-down science items. Then they disappeared up their own assholes with globular warming and gender studies.
SJW’s — is there no wholesome thing they cannot pervert?
Have a good weekend, y’all!
July 13, 2018 — 10:20 pm
Comments: 13
drought archaeology
We haven’t had rain in weeks and weeks now. They got the hay up in June — earliest ever — and my lawn is a sad, pale, yellow shadow of Springtime green.
But it does interesting things like this. Traces of humans leave impressions on the land for thousands of years and generations of farming never fully eradicate them.
This is a late stone age henge, in a part of Ireland that is weirdly full of henges. Seriously, they’d love to know why there were so many in this one narrow place. This one’s unusual for its double ring wall, but it’s on private land and there’s no intent to dig at the moment.
There is more archaeology turning up across the UK, thanks to a confluence of the drought and all the drone photography.
But not here. Not in my yard. Though we are miles from the sea now, the patch we live on was reclaimed from the water in late Medieval times. I live on weirdly new land!
July 12, 2018 — 10:01 pm
Comments: 8