A wide variety of activities have concentrated the mind wonderfully over recent days. Walking on snow and ice for a start – all thawed away now.
Barbara has had her bone density measured this week and we were disconcerted to say the least that the result shows a 40% loss of density in the last 12 months, attributed by the nurse to the now totally sedentary state of Barbara’s mobility. Apparently astronauts undergo similarly drastic losses when weightless in space, as their albeit limited movements don’t exactly count as exercise.
Then there was the meal on Tuesday at the Dun Cow in Dunchurch with brother Bob, sister-in-law Jane and nephew Ben, to celebrate Bob’s 70th birthday on 2nd December. Very enjoyable. The trip down the M6 to Rugby and then Dunchurch was remarkable for its views of the frosted-over landscapes of Staffordshire and Warwickshire / West Midlands. Such Christmas Card scenes we (Barbara and I) have only seen once before, in the film Doctor Zhivago which was our first date in 1967!
I have so far recorded 3 vinyl LPs onto this laptop using a new USB turntable, a new toy which was suitably and masochistically satisfyingly fiddly to install and get working properly. Have since screwed up the playback system on this machine, temporarily, by playing back a programme off BBCi Player, switching on Sound in the Control Panel to “a HDMIdevice” as detected when I started the playback and could only hear sound through the laptop’s speakers. Lost the speakers altogether but now recovered through helpful forum on the topic, involving .ini, .dll, .pnf and .sys files, whatever all those are. Still can’t see USB Audio Codec listed as a choice in Playback- it has disappeared; plan to seek it out in due course, but it doesn’t appear to be necessary just yet. Wonder what will happen when I engage the Audacity programme to record another LP.
I had an extraordinary evening of music last night with friend Dave at the Victoria Hall, Hanley where we had Smetna’s Overture from The Bartered Bride, Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No.1 featuring the miraculous soloist Nobuyuki Tsujii and Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9 From the New World. The orchestra was the BBC Philharmonic.
Received the annual missive from 4th cousin Don Granter and his wife Pam in Australia; their address now has an e-mail in it so I sent them a link to my photos from the Family gathering in Warrnambool in April 2001.
Received a “Have a nice day!” kiss on Facebook from Karen Barlow, another relative, this time a little nearer home in Worcester, England, where Dave lives as well.
A really bad headache over the last 24 hours can probably be put down to the over-strong cup of instant coffee yesterday morning. Feels now like I was kicked in the head about then by a particularly upset mule and the damage is only just subsiding. It didn’t spoil the orchestral concert though.
Out again tonight to see The Town, the latest Ben Affleck movie set in Boston, USA.