Further ramblings of a self-made pauper

Hello, Everybody Peeps!

I am touting shamelessly for source material and I am hoping you splendid people can help. Allow me to explain:

It occurs to me that the stair well of our house requires some sort of decoration; not just painting - though that is true and sometime in the Spring we will be getting all hot under the collar moving furniture and trying out colour schemes – but a picture or two. It occurred to me that it might be fun to have portraits of old generals and admirals staring imperiously down as one moves up and down the stairs. Furtle, to her great credit, didn’t demur on this point, but being a woman of sage perspicacity, pointed out that given the generally low level of ept in the house we would have them at best wonky and at worst shattered at the foot of the stairs very quickly. We are an enthusiastic if graceless pair of souls.

The idea is not entirely abandoned, though it requires some thought.

In the meantime – and this, I think we can manage without too many tears, is a medium-sized portrait above the stairs and facing the bedroom door well out of range of wagging tails and flailing limbs. The picture I have in mind is of an ancient and imperious dowager of the Aunt Agatha type (two mentions in as many days: third time will be the charm), staring with vague disappointment and distaste down her nose at anyone on the stairs.

This is my project for the New Year (once I have done some drawing I promised to do some months ago >ahem<). I have a mental picture that I shall be using as the basis of the portrait (I haven’t decided yet whether it will be paints or pastels), but I need some reference material and my Google-Fu is weak. The best I have found thus far is a photograph of Maggie Smith as the Dowager Countess of Grantham from the TV series Downton Abbey. It’s good, but it’s not quite the look I am after. I want something more obviously mid Victorian, with rather more fur.



Any ideas for decent reference material? I begs for help, My Dears, I begs for help.

Well.

Didn't take long for the bubble to burst did it? With all the unrealistic hype we get over English football, I should have been prepared in advance for England crumbling at the Ashes series, but for some reason I was caught off guard.

Not paying attention, clearly. Pretty much like the Test Squad...

Good morning, good morning, good morning, good morning *pause for breath* good morning. Are you well, today? You are? Splendid.

Here’s a thing to gladden the heart of anyone who never invested in the iPhone – since at least the last software update, it can’t cope with the end of BST. More to the point, a recurrent alarm not only goes off an hour after it is supposed to, but that means it is two hours later than it would have gone off under BST.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I love my iPhone and fully intend to upgrade to iPhone 4 in due course, but Mr Jobs’ boys certainly made themselves look like complete wazzocks with this little gaffe. Still, until they tweak the software, here is the fix for those of you who haven’t seen it posted up elsewhere on the intarwebs or any of the fine publications that are busily and happily taking the pee:

Clear all you alarms, even the non-recurring ones. Go into ‘Settings’, select ‘general’ the ‘date and time’ and switch off the ‘set automatically’.

Save and then reset your alarms. You should then be good to go.

I have it on the highest authority¹ that this will work. Anyway, I have tomorrow off, so if it doesn’t I’m alright, Jack.

Right. I suppose I ought to do some work, now. Don’t want to, but in the circumstances it would probably be politic to show willing. More later, perhaps.



¹You may know it as hearsay.

Yes, it should have been a goal. Yes, England should have been credited with scoring 2 goals, not one.

However, a 4-1 defeat was a rather kind result (albeit a record tournament defeat for England); if everyone had taken their chances and been accredited with goals, I suspect the final score would have been Germany 10-3 England. So, after four games in which the team barely raised themselves above mediocre, let's blame Capello only insofar as he slavishly used the 4-4-2 formation, and the England players, with the possible exception of Calamity James, for turning in displays that would embarrass a pub team the morning after a bender.

That was the Golden Generation, that was.

I am almost glad the goal was disallowed. Can you imagine the fantasies the media could have dreamt up if we had lost 2-1?

On the basis that I drew them in the sweep at work, I now transfer my allegiance to Ghana and Japan in that order, though I suspect that the trophy may have Argentina's name on it this year.

I decided this morning that rather than start the working day with my usual cup of lukewarm Nescafé rats’ pee, I would have a latté from the Costa Coffee that has somehow wormed its way into the building lounge area. I haven’t been down there since the latest bout of refurbishment completed, so it was only then that I realised that a) we had a lounge area and b) that Costa had sprouted mushroom-like in the atrium. I hadn’t appreciated either, just what a refit that part of the building has had. I wandered around the staff restaurant -we don’t have a staff canteen any more; we are far too classy for that (hem hem). It looks a lot like the way I imagine a communal restaurant would look like on the USS Enterprise (starship, not aircraft carrier).

It is interesting and probably symptomatic of then way life is evolving around here, that the public areas get glossier and flashier as the office areas get rattier and more crowded. By the time the next building has been emptied and the staff decanted in to this place, we will be in what is essentially a clerical rookery.

In other news, I have enjoyed myself greatly by banning certain unwanted hangers-on from my LJ account. It doesn’t stop them reading the public bits, but it does mean that they don’t show up on my friends list or be able to make comments on my posts. I have not got rid of everyone that’s friended me, but whom I have not friended back; just the ones that are clearly spam or too rude to be bothered responding if I say anything to them by way of welcome. That always irritates me. I don’t even care if someone never updates as long as I have the feeling that there is (or at least was) a person there, not just an application. Interesting to see that the two Russian accounts that appeared have not only gone but completely deleted themselves. I am leaving the third for now, because having looked at the journal, even though I can’t read a word of it, it does seem at least that it fulfils my ‘actual person there’ criterion. So hello, jaisonkrid.

Today is going to be a busy one.

Having announced on Friday that black is white, up is down and yesterday is today, we now have to make it so.

It seems that we are only allowed 1,000 tags on Live Journal, a limit that I have now reached.

I have looked at my tags page amnd most of them are only used once and some have not bneen used at all since I rationalised a bunch of variant texts. It seems that once there, the tags become immortal and cannot be removed. Or can they and it's just not obvious?

Anyone know?

What is the world coming to when a man can't go on-line and buy a monkey-paw back scratcher? Why, in the 21st century is this too much to ask?

There are back scratchers available on eBay and some have hand shapes of varying quality carved into them, but not one is a monkey paw. And I don't want one with a shoe horn on the other end. All I want is a scratcher about a foot long, with a monkey paw on the end, hardly an unfulfillable request, one would have thought, but there you go.