It has been a fairly inert day, but not without its
small achievements. The main one was persuading my mobile telephone to work. I
don’t use it much. I depend utterly upon my iPad, and communicate with the world by
email. But I like to have a functioning mobile telephone to hand at night for
emergencies. And I seemed to have signed up for a system that kept running out
without warning me. That has been put right, but it involved a new sim card and
the authentication thereof and bank details and wasn’t straightforward. It defeated
even Daniela. Helen – who is working here again today – eventually cracked it. Except that I have a new mobile telephone number which threatens to complicate other aspects to life.
The knitting progressed well. I’ve done another lace
round and am beginning to feel slightly more confident. And the m**hs have continued to eschew the current yarn.
That makes things pleasanter. Gudrun shows us in the Craftsy course how to make
sure that the lace is lining up with previous lace rounds. She doesn’t give any
hints about how to start fudging if it doesn’t. She just looks severe and says
that something is wrong. I’ve had a couple of those and think I’ve fudged successfully.
Tamar: (comment yesterday) Our neighbours’ attitude to
that ditch is very odd. It has no function in their sheep field. It is out of
sight of their house. Why won’t they sell it to us? Why did they plant those
leylandii, other than to inconvenience us? They seem reasonable at the moment
but years of struggle have made us mistrustful.
I forgot to say yesterday: a week of skulking indoors
made Mass-going last Sunday more than ordinarily exciting, as spring was found to have
advanced amid the pots on my doorstep. Some things are blooming, and a clematis
that I thought Daniela had dealt too harshly with has sent up strong shoots.
Wordle: my starter words yielded two vowels this
morning, one green, one brown. As often in similar situations, it was very
difficult to think of any qualifying word, but when I did it was a good one,
and very Wordle-y. I typed it in with confidence and it was wrong, although now
both vowels were green. I struggled on and finally thought of another word, a most
unlikely one, T thought, but it qualified. And it was right. So I got four,
which was the majority score today. Alexander and Theo got three.
Nothing seems to rile relations between urban and rural people more than the smallest bits of land. You are right to be mistrustful, as the past is the best predictor of the future in such matters. We learned this through bitter experience with a renter who cost himself a good lease when he was land poor and wound up having to pay the costs of a lawsuit after many sessions of mediation failed.
ReplyDeleteThank goodness for Helen! I am hopeless with modern electronics.
ReplyDeleteMy wild guesses about the ditch are: that someone wanted to pretend that there was "nobody out there", so the trees were planted to baffle the sound of people coming and going, and to hide the sight if they were ever in that field. That person may or may not still feel that way. The ditch, on the other hand, seems to exist to drain water if there is ever a torrential downpour, and someone may fear/have feared that if they sell it, it will be filled in and the potential drainage will be lost. Or maybe they just always wanted a moat and haven't built the bailey.
I thought all my flowers were gone but today I saw a surviving clump of paper-white narcissus.
I changed my mobile phone number at Christmas. What a lot of people and organisations to notify!
ReplyDeleteI dread any number changes. I no longer have the facile memory to remember them. There was a question as to the most common starter word for Wordle on the American quiz show Jeopardy last night. I thought I would remember to tell you. I didn’t. (It was full of vowels). Chloe
ReplyDeleteIt was “Adieu”.
ReplyDelete