Showing posts with label Morrisons. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Morrisons. Show all posts

Friday 23 October 2020

When Midnight Comes At Noon


 Took the title from a Daniel Easterman novel, although just referring to the early morning darkness on my walks this week, and not what actually happens in the novel. Last week I did little walking this week it's been a lot.

This week my main network hard disk died so need to sort another one so that I can listen to music round the house , the backup drive is doing fine but a bit smaller. We expect things to last forever but they don'yt always.

There is no real sign of this lockdown ending so we have sort of drifted into an alternate reality, mask wearing , and avoiding contact, I'm not sure when I'll see any friends again, and I still remember the last friend I had physical contact with was Sophia which was a hug as we finished a lunch at Snackwallah.

The working from home has enabled me to catch up on a great deal of music, although I am barely scratching the surface of my own music collection, and my own collection while large is a mere dot on the universe of music.

One other thing is that I have managed to curb my chocolate addiction , I have had two 100g bars courtesy of The Co-Op and Morrisons for my birthday , and they were very nice but I have not felt a desire for any more. Tesco didn't give me one.

So it's late at night , and my posts have been sparse this month , so song time . One of the songs that impressed me was "Season of The Witch" from the album "Bang Bang You're Terry Reid" , also a rather good album, so that's what I'll play out the week with.

Thursday 4 June 2020

Long Distance


I have a Canon SX620 camera and it enables me to take long distance pictures. The control says I can take up to 100x zoom although the front of the camera says 25x optical zoom so that maty be why my longer distance pics get a bit less detailed, after 25x the zoom becomes digital.

I use the photos of long distance shots as a screensaver on my desktop and love when I see something and try to work out lots of things that I had never noticed before in relatively familiar surroundings. From the top of Cow Hill I can photograph from The West Road to Wallsend taking in the City Centre and St Jame's Park.

Having a sizeable zoom worried me about privacy , but I trued taking photos in my front room and front bedroom and the lack of light and glass reflection ensures good privacy. I do wonder about controllable drones that could easily be used to snoop, although I have seen some great outdoor drone shots.

Today Shaun Keaveny brought up the fact that you can use scissors to cut pizza, something I had never thought about , but I suppose you could , although the take aways I get are usually ready cut , and I haven't had a frozen pizza for a long time (Dr Oetker and Morrisons are my preferred ones when I feel in a pizza mood).

So given that this started about cameras we shall go with "The Camera Eye" by Rush

Saturday 27 May 2017

Early Saturday Morning


This morning I did something unusual for me. As Fiona is still in hospital 200 miles away I am home alone, she is being well cared for, and her Kindle is a godsend although her dislike of headphones means she can't watch any video but has a whole library and more thanks to her Amazon Prime subscription. It's 16 years since I was last in hospital for a long stay (ITP) and technology has advanced significantly since then.

Anyway I was awake and put on "A Kiss In The Dreamhouse" by Siouxsie & the Banshees which had been on when I went to sleep last night, then realised I was sort of awake and thought maybe I should get some steps in for my Million Step Challenge, yesterday I passed 300K a day ahead of schedule, it is a gorgeous morning and people at work were talking about rain so I thought why not get some in before the day really starts, so I did.

Walking up Two Ball Lonnen I noticed the lights were on in Subway, it wasn't even 5AM then I started thinking of all the people who have to get up each day virtually in the middle of the night just so that you can have a coffee or bacon sandwich before you get to work. It turns out that there was no one there yet but maybe the lights are left on all night.

Walking past Morrisons at Cowgate I saw the biggest slug I've ever seen outside of a David Attenborough program, it was big, and like the coward I am when it comes to those creatures I tepped round it, and continued. Maybe they only venture out at night normally.

Anyway I walked over Nunsmoor Park and took some video on instagram here , and when you have days like this it's great to take advantage of it.

I'm still enjoying the random play on my player and David Bowie's "Janine" was followed by Tom Waits' "Jayne's Blue Wish" , two "J" girls names (and I have Facebook friends with those names too), but then another song came on with a gorgeous fluid piano which I recognised as Mike Garson and his incredible contributions to Bowie's "Aladdin Sane". The song was "Lady Grinning Soul" and Garson's contributions were similar to Roy Bittan's contributions to Bruce Springsteen's songs, in never afils to amaze me how fluid their playing is and can hardly imagine the songs without them.

So this morning you get Bowie's "Lady Grinning Soul" and listen to that piano.

Have a good one.

Sunday 14 May 2017

Catching Up


Due to one thing and another , rain and Andrew and Glen's wonderful wedding , I didn't even hit 6K steps yesterday, although I am still 1K steps past the required target, so today I need to catch up.

As a start I thought I would walk down Two Ball Lonnen to Westgate Road, then back all the way up Wingrove Road to the Central Motorway , then along the Motorway to Morrisons, pick up a few essentials and walk back down Two Ball Lonnen then eventually home. That clocks in at 10.5 K steps which puts me just ahead of the required number but I need to do another few thousand. We shall see.

Yesterday I ran out of data on my EE phone plan. Because of EE's grabbing top up policy (like every mobile phone company) I am going to try not to buy a day add on. They put a time limit of a week on the data you buy, 1Gb would last me a fortnight, but there's not much one can do if you want to stay on the same number.

It's a bit weird not having information at your fingertips but if you walk along Westgate Road there is free on street wifi provided by the shops via XLN and it works (unlike As You Like It when I was at Andrew and Glen's wedding, which spent an age before timing out, like several bus companies I could mention), a sensible concept but mobile phone companies like EE won't like it.

Without data the step monitoring app doesn't update (but it records steps) , so having done 10.5K I wanted to hit 12K, but had to just guess and when I got home I found I'd done another 5.5K so that's 16K for today and I am back to 6K over my required target.

I wrote this in two parts as I was incredibly tired after my first walk, and still feel awfully tired and achey, almost as though I have the physical aches of 'flu' without the cold symptoms , I should have really had a bath , but it's too late so I will probably just go to bed.

I haven't really done much today apart from catch up on some TV (Broadchurch, The Fall, The Aliens, Doctor Who) and am enjoying Darwin's Armada although Charles Darwin liked a fight and hunting animals, odd as he wanted to be a clergyman.

So #ATuneaDayinMay, , what's it to be, it's just come to me , as my may walk today to catch up on my walking was a big rectangle we'll have Dave Brubeck's "Unsquare Dance", which all based on the handclap rhythm then everything hangs of that. The piano is almost superfluous.

There's a load of  other things I was going to write about but they will keep for another day.