The Random Babblings Of A Disturbed Mind
Wednesday, February 22, 2023
Byeee ...
Tuesday, December 28, 2021
Here In My Car, I'm As Safe As Can Be ...
Son et lumière, Strasbourg, Juillet 2021 |
For us it was foie gras, turkey and chipolatas and roast spud and parsnip purée and sprouts and baked ham and godnose what else: how was it for you? At least the sun was out in these here parts, and 15° is a bloody sight more than we could have realistically hoped for ...
The saga of little Lilibeth continues. For those of you who came in late and can't be arsed reading the Cliffs Notes version, last we saw her she was up on the hoist in Philippe's garage - having had her engine removed, the gearbox unmounted and subjected to his tender ministrations, everything stuck back together and back into her body - with an unconnected lead direct from the battery to the starter motor.
But having been through all this before we just unhooked the gearbox from the engine, leaving this last in place, and Philippe once again proceeded to pound his head against a wall working out how to realign the differential ...
So order a new battery, hurry up and wait. As one does. Much to my surprise it turned up two days later so off I trotted, hooked it up, and oh dear! same old thing. But this brand new battery is only at 10.5V ... WTF? With feeling. Drag the charger back out ...
You were expecting a happy ending? Battery at 14.2V, start, clunk, 10.5V ... even to my befuzzled mind, something is not right here.
It's just that the Blogger interface has become complete shite. Back in the day you could click on "insert image", select a dozen files to be uploaded and, when done, select just the one you wanted to go in such and such a place. The next time you tried, you would see the thumbnails of the files you'd just uploaded, pick the one you wanted, rinse and repeat.
These days? Doesn't work. To see the newly uploaded photos you have to select "from this blog" and then scroll down through 2000-odd photos ...
Text justification is crap - even more so than once it was - but my fave fuck-up is that when you wish to edit a post it will automatically go into "HTML view" mode. Despite your having last used it in "compose" mode.
I could live with that, the problem is that when you select "compose" mode from the menu a smug little message pops up to say something along the lines of "Your html code is invalid! You may lose content. Continue?". So basically what we have here is an editor that can't even re-ingest the html code that it itself generated. Really gives you faith, doesn't it.
Saturday, December 11, 2021
May Maggots Eat Their Living Brains ...
a) Microsoft have screwed me about again, and
b) Margo bought a Hewlett-Packard printer a few years back.
Sadly, there is some shite which requires me to run Windoze, so for about a week I had to boot the trusty laptop up under Windows 10. Which required leaving it for a few hours as it downloaded accumulated updates and installed them ... then, one day up in Strasbourg, it decided to spend all day downloading some crap "quality of life" update that would bring me massive satisfaction with the inclusion of Paint 3D! (as if) and then, around 5pm, chose to install this huge pack.
Which was hideously inconvenient but luckily after half an hour or so it rebooted - as it will - and I took the opportunity to turn it off and hie me back to the hotel, where I let it go about its business whilst I ate ... and when I got back to the room after a couple of hours it had got up to 60% done and then, in front of my eyes, displayed the rather alarming message "Windows is trying to recover your previous installation ...": this is not the sort of thing you really need. Especially when far from the office.
Luckily for me it seemed to succeed, so I tried in every way known to man to turn off automatic updating: this is not, it seems, possible with Windows 10 Home, albeit only mind-bogglingly difficult with the other versions. But despite my best efforts a few days later it tried to reinstall the borked update ... now, when I have to boot Windows I have Wifi disabled and I unplug the Ethernet cable. I suppose I could give the thing a static IP address and set up the router firewall to ban all incoming/outgoing traffic for that address, but that seems overkill.
It started off promisingly enough, with first of all "Erasing" and then "Programming..." but of course things that seem too good to be true usually are not, in fact, true and this turned out to be the case because the bugger reset halfway through the process and still obstinately refuses to recognise the new cartridges. According to various forae there should be an option in one of the setup menus to enable firmware updates, but of course this does not exist on this particular printer ... also, it now comes up with a "Fatal Error 200" on random occasions, and still won't print.
In other news, little Lilibeth looks a bit sad just now, up on the big hydraulic hoist in Philippe's garage with nothing in her rear end, what with the engine sitting on the floor on a pile of sawdust and the gearbox and differential disassembled on a couple of workbenches. Still, a little jaunt to Carcassonne got me three of the four bearings for the gearbox, and as it turns out the front bearing on the main shaft - which is rather difficult to find - is in good nick and doesn't actually need replacing, which is kind of convenient.
Ah well, there's many a slip twixt cup and lip, and the Red Guy is always there ready and waiting to throw up on my eiderdown ... looks like this is going to be a Christmas/end-of-year missive rather than the one I'd planned for somewhat earlier. Never mind.
In other news, it would appear that our bar is cursed: all those that take it over seemed doomed to ... well, doom, I suppose. Let's be clear, I am sufficiently French by now to feel that there's absolutely nothing wrong with having an affair - come to that, why stop with just one, if you happen to enjoy it?
Friday, July 23, 2021
Chairman of the Bored ...
Tomorrow and Friday will surely be more of the same (although let it be said, there's the promise of a repas gastronomique tomorrow lunchtime, shame I'm not really a fan of hearty lunches), which will give me the entire weekend actually doing something vaguely interesting ie wandering about Strasbourg and poking into its crooks and nannies before being confronted with a whole glorious week of terminal ennui, after which I can go home for a week before yet another five days of the same ... have I mentioned that it's gray, cold and damp? Didn't think so.
Happy update! I must have done some good deed at some point in my life, for the client has come to exactly the same conclusion as I: namely that my presence for the next week is surplus to requirements! Consequently I shall catch a somewhat too-early train back southwards on Sunday moaning for another two weeks of basking in the sun before heading back up on the 19th, and at least for that week I should be doing something useful and actually productive, always makes me feel better.
Anyways, I made it into Strasbourg and had a fine old time wandering about: place is as lovely as I remember it from 30-odd years ago. And the beer is exceptional, you really should try the blanche should ever you find yourself there (and there's a very pleasant bar on the place du Marché Gayot which will happily serve it to you, but don't forget to specify 25cl unless you're really up to knocking back a full half-litre).
Handy hint, by the way, for identifying the actual Strasbourgeois: they're the ones with the skins the exact same delicate milky white of a troglodyte axolotl. Suppose they don't really get out in the sun that much …
Monday, June 28, 2021
Out on the streets ...
There was a rather nice cabriolet going for about 4 grand, but it appeared to have spent the last twenty years of its life in a stable, next to the horses, and needed quite a bit of work - also, it disappeared literally overnight.
When I told him the next day that it'd been accepted, he said - typical French - "Merde! Le con voulait vraiment s'en débarrasser ... Should have offered 7 ..." Never mind. A week later I rented a trailer, borrowed John and his Landcruiser, and went to pick her up - because it was all twoo about the brakes, and the gearbox, and trying to drive her back on the autoroute seemed unadvisable (also, neither wing mirrors nor seatbelts, makes me nervous) ...
Whatever, sometime in the immediate future when the 1934 Belilla has advanced to the point where serious carpentry skills are required, she shall go into Philippe's garage and onto the hoist and get hands stuck up her skirts. And I shall learn a bit about la mécanique ...
Sunday, March 7, 2021
Moanings ...
It is sad, but true, that when it comes to buying food I seem to be incapable of moderation. For Margo expressed a wish for a nice roast chicken for the Christmas feast, and with a smile on my lips and a song in my heart off I duly trotted to Maison Bertrand to get a week's worth of protein ... like chunks of pork for which the pig in question no longer has any particular requirement, tail end of beef fillet which apparently nobody but I really want, for they hock it off at - literally - half-price ie 17€/kg and I have no objection to that, rack of lamb, escalopes de veau ...
And they had some grain-fed, free-range chickens: or more to the point, chapons, and not thinking of the downside I bought one. But let it be admitted that 3kg of castrated rooster is a bit much for two ... hence Rick and Mary's presence. Still, given that the purchase was not, for once, a spur of the moment thing for that night's dinner, I had the time to brine it for a day or two and, having hoiked it out of its bath, brush the skin with molasses and leave it to dry. And very nice it was too, after a suitable amount of time in a hot oven: as tender and moist as one could wish, with crispy skin ...
The leftovers - for there were some lots - found their way into chicken and bacon pie, with decent suet pastry just as god intended, and three nights later the dogs were happy beasts because leftover leftover leftovers is just a bit too much.
One might think that this would have served as an object lesson but alas! this turns out not to be the case, for I promptly re-offended a week later, buying 1.5kg of a pork rib rack. Which also spent a few days in the fridge, having been well-rubbed beforehand with gros sel, sugar and loads of pepper ... I boned it out, as one will, before serving with slices of fried and caramelised apple and as luck would have it Caroline and Philippe were around to help demolish the meat and gnaw on the ribs - much appreciated.
... somewhat (a lot) later ...
D'you know, it's kind of hard, under the circumstances, to feel much enthusiasm for writing. Some of you lucky b'stards live in places relatively untouched by COVID: sadly, we do not. Our first lockdown started in March 2019 and lasted three months: then we got June/July off for good behaviour only to go back into another lockdown, and as I write there is still a 6pm-6am curfew which does - as you might think, and as was intended - cut down on social interaction. It is getting to the point where one might reasonably ask if it's not better to possibly die from COVID, or to almost certainly die from ennui. There are friends we've not met up with for four months.
And although I'm not a particularly sociable man - most of my experience with crowds involving the question "how do I get the fuck out of here and onto the periphery?" - let it be said that one of my simple pleasures involved heading off to the excellent boulangerie at Ferrals to pick up a few baguettes and then stopping off on the return trip at the little bar at Fontcouverte for a glass of white vitamins and a cigar on the terrace, under the brilliant blue sky and the shade of the plane trees, watching everyone else enjoy themselves. This is now a distant memory, and it hurts.
Have I mentioned that there are friends I've not seen for a long time?
Also, I've not taken the camera(s) out for yonks?
You take care ...
Sunday, December 6, 2020
Back In The Jug Agane ...
Not as much of an embuggerment as trying to get used to Blogger's new interface, which is outrageously annoying and sufficiently different from the old one that I had come to know and - if not exactly love - then at least accept.