Tag Archives: quizzes

Getting Used to my New Mondays

13 Replies

I forgot to add photos to the last one. Sorry about that. It’s been that sort of day. I probably won’t do it now.

I read a book on how to be more productive in my writing yesterday. I then read another about how successful writers organise themselves.  Modern ones seem to have computers that aren’t linked to the internet. Having spent the early part of the morning sleeping and the later part on the internet, I started cooking. Then Julia came home.

So far, writing hasn’t figured in my day to any great extent. You can read a book about something but it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. Take decluttering for example. That’s not going well. It’s not even going well enough to be described as “going badly”. It’s just, in truth, not going at all.

There are quizzes on tonight, so I won’t lie about all the effort that will be made tonight. I will go and watch TV with Julia now and relax. On Tuesday I will start my self-improvement campaign.

Coming back to this post, I have to admit that I slept through the end of Only Connect and the beginning of University Challenge. I will use the I-Player to see University Challenge, but won’t bother about Only Connect.

When Julia came home she brought a rack of ribs in sauce and some large prawns in sweet and sour sauce. They were on offer at M&S. This is fine, but we now have the problem of fitting them into the menu plan. They are currently in the freezer. Then one of the neighbours rang and asked if we could use a beef and onion pie and some cauliflower cheese. So we ate that tonight (with some added sweetcorn) and will eat hash tomorrow, curry on Wednesday and Vegetable Stew on Thursday. Batch cooking is all very well, but it doesn’t sit well with random buying.

I hate to think how many calories and chemicals there are in the rib sauce, and can’t help thinking that my plan to eat mainly vegetarian, and mainly unprocessed food has gone astray. On the other hand I do like ribs in sticky sauce.

I heard a robin singing last week – spring is on the way, though we do have an Amber Snow Warning for next week.

A Bad Start, but it Improved

10 Replies

Moorhen at Arnot Hill Park

Today started badly. I woke up, noted the degree of daylight coming through the curtains and checked that Julia had already got up. I was just deciding to turn over and snooze until the alarm went (which I estimated would be quite soon), when Julia shouted up and asked if I was getting up. It seems, after I looked at the clock, that I had set the alarm for the wrong time and should have been up ten minutes ago. It’s not a good start to the day.

Then I realised, as I set off, that I had forgotten my glasses. Fortunately I have spare pairs. My arms have been getting shorter over the years and I can no longer hold things far enough away from my face to let my eyes focus. It’s very annoying, as nobody warned me about this. I’d have carried weights around if I’d known I would need to stop my arms shrinking.

Arnot Hill Park, Arnold, Nottingham

I arrived at work, trying to act as if I was bright and early, switched everything on and started getting the things together for parcels. The spare glasses I keep on my desk have tortoiseshell frames and seem very bright after wearing black frames. The first twenty minutes felt like I was staring through a luminous orange porthole. Fortunately my eyes soon adjusted.

Last night I had a problem with my injector pen. I couldn’t get the plunger to click and release the needle, which was a bit annoying.  This was multiplied by the feeling that it was caused by the abundant nature of the fat pad I was trying to inject into. The trick, for those of you who don’t know, is to pinch some abdominal fat and inject into that instead of the abdominal muscles. It’s much easier with the needles that you press yourself because they don’t need much pressure. However, they don’t seem to do the arthritis drugs in that form – they come in a massive spring-loaded contraption that has to be pressed firmly against the injection site. When you press hard enough the plunger trips the release and what feels like a massive needle is driven into your flesh. It’s actually quite a fine needle, it’s just the strength of the spring that makes it feel so bad.

Arnot Hill Park, Arnold, Nottingham

In fact, after I failed to trip the spring, i pressed it against a piece of plastic to see if it was working. It was. It narrowly missed my finger and I sprayed immunosuppressant all over my hand. I also ascertained, to my surprise, that it is a very fine needle.

The rest of the day, I’m glad to report, was better than the start. We made last night’s stew into soup and had it with crisps and a pasty whilst watching quizzes on TV. I am better than some of the Mastermind contestants on general knowledge (though I am sitting comfortably at home), got a few of the links on Only Connect (though some were childishly easy tonight) and then entered the world of University Challenge. I still think the team members are part of some freakish experiment, but I did manage to get a few right, including one or two that they got wrong. However, many of the questions went right over my head, because the world of University Challenge is very different from the one which I inhabit.

Mallard

That’s it for now. I will post some photographs, do a bit of reading, attempt to write a few tanka and then go to bed.

 

My Shrinking Life

12 Replies

Time for some speed writing. It’s quiz night on TV and there are only 14 minutes until Mastermind begins. I’m going to have to be quick to do 250 words in 14 minutes, quicker still if I want to get the links done.

Has your world got smaller since Covid? Mine has. We hardly go anywhere. I feel older, more vulnerable and less inclined to mingle. So we don’t go out. Our shopping is ordered on the inherent. We even get takeaways delivered. As a result I have very little to write poetry about. I know staying in didn’t do Emily Dickinson any harm, but I don’t want to be Emily Dickinson.

It’s not just psychological, there are good health reasons for staying in. I take ten pills a week and give myself an injection once a fortnight to supress my immune system. It pays to stay in, particularly when there’s Covid about. Of course, when your wife picks it up at work and brings it home, all plans grind to a halt.

However, when you look at the blog, it has also shrunk in scope. I used to talk about all sorts of thing, but now there’s some moaning, some poetry and, once in a while, some soup. It’s definitely much reduced from the days of compost, bread and guinea fowl.

I watched a magpie yesterday. It was trying to find water in the gutters. I couldn’t be bothered to photograph it or blog about it. It really was quite acrobatic and deserved better coverage. This is what has happened to me.

Ah well – 260 words and two minutes to spare.

Magpie

Spring is Here! Probably.

10 Replies

It’s been a bit cold today, which is the story of our spring – one false start after another. Despite everything, the blossom is out now. The sun made a bit of an effort today and the world looks like a sunny fairyland. Most of it, to be fair, happened on Sunday. The day may have been dreary but the blossom had an inexorable drive to open. This makes things easy – I can merely re-use pictures of blossom from previous years.

I sorted things out this morning, using my desk space at work. It’s small and cramped, but it’s larger and less chaotic than my home equivalent. I’m tempted to drop the solicitor a few lines af advice regarding the quality of their website, and the dreadful design of their forms but have noticed before that people don’t often appreciate my attempts to help.  Anyway, why give them something for free. When did you last hear of a solicitor doing something without expecting payment?

There are quizzes on TV tonight and I particularly like to see if I can beat the contestants on various things. I don’t understand all the questions on University Challenge, but I do like it when I can show my mastery of a subject compared to the gilded youth of the student body (though some are nearly as old as I am). They couldn’t, for instance, identify the voice of Elvis Costello last week, which was noted on Twitter by  number of people. It’s nice to feel superior.

On the other hand, when they ask questions on physics or enzymes I don’t actually understand the questions . . .

Blossom at Wilford

Reading, Quizzes and Chocolate

9 Replies

Julia went to the chip shop to get tea. I made dessert. It was fruit and nut chocolate served with a cup of tea. In other words, cooking was minimalist tonight.

watched Tenable tonight. It’s back on at a better time and as I slept through Pointless I needed some quiz input. I was awful on Wham! songs and European football. Pop music and sport aren’t my best subjects. Fortunately I redeemed myself on Dogs. I was pretty good on Kings of England (I still thing the question setters were wrong to exclude Edgar the Aetheling, as he was elected, even if he wasn’t crowned. However, on a quiz where a contestant can only name two of the first ten Kings after 1066, this is probably a step too far). My work on US states is paying off and I was able to name the ten that begin with T or N. I can do the English ones that begin with N. but completely forgot Tyne and Wear. Probably because I don’t see it a s a proper county.

Don’t ask me about Scottish, Welsh and Irish counties – I am even worse on them.

After that I sat at the computer with the intention of writing classic literature. I ended up reading blogs, playing games and thinking deep thoughts.

All this took so long that I am only just finishing the blog post for the day. I did think about ending with a joke about procrastination, but that will have to wait.