Collared dove at Rainham earlier today.A mixed bag, this weekend. Busy, yet unrewarding.
Thursday night saw my computer pop up with everybody's favourite pant-staining warning message, something about a fatal or critical hard drive failure. So, not a good night. With a little help from a friend and liberal application of Puppy Linux we were able to browse the drive freely, recovering all of my data, but the Vista install was broken beyond repair. I read later about a new piece of malware that simulates a HD failure and while I don't know if that's what my system succumbed to it wasn't booting at all, which I class as slightly worse than "shitted up", at "proper fucked".
Friday night was a work night out, and so messy. They always are. It was a colleague's last day in work before getting married, payday, and the end of the first week at the new office so it all got particularly drunken. An indication of how good/bad (unsure) the night was was the worrying absence of my bank card the following morning. The wallet and other cards were all fine, just the important one was gone... great. Being fair to Lloyds, a bank who I tend to dislike, I'll give them credit where it's due for the excellent service on the phone when I called to stop the card - genuinely excellent.
Saturday was a day of recovery, shopping in Lakeside for a new suit and a copy of Windows 7. Inthe evening we played possibly the weirdest gig we've ever done. It was a quiz night fund-raisery thing, with a band between rounds. A very odd concept, leaving us concerned that not only did we not really want to play it but that the audience might not want us there. Still, it was strangely enjoyable once we'd got over the atrocious acoustics in the room by simply turning everything up to 11 and trying to drown out the echoes and reverb. I'm not sure that it worked very well, but by that point the audience and us had drunk enough for it to not really matter. The more I play through the new amp the more I like it - an excellend purchase.
Today was another slow start before we headed for an afternoon stroll at Rainham. Birds were thin on the ground, but we only got as far as the woodlands before having to head back. A cettis and two singing blackcaps were the best birds. I've spent most of the afternoon backing stuff up and installing Windows 7. It's up and running now, but I've lost so much software... I think the next few nights will be quite busy on this front.
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The new work patch is amazing, in that relative way that inner-London urban patches are. The list is up to 23, which compares very well with the 25 in total that the old one managed. I've not found blue-tit or magpie yet, both of which I expect I'll get without any real difficulty. Highlights during the first week were finding a home-made coke-bottle bird feeder just round the corner, a group of 6 sand-martins upriver on Friday, a cormorant trying and failing to eat a huge flatfish and what was probably a black-headed gull with white wings. It didn't feel entirely good for a med gull and Mr Occam and his razor tell my it's more likely to be a BH gull. It wasn't flying quite right and it didn't show the "blunt" wingtip that, to my eyes at least, med gulls show, but it was stunningly pale... Bah. It's always nice to have something tantalising that get's away at the start of a new patch though, gives you something to work towards. One of these days where the low tide coincides with an early morning stroll I'll get a common sand or a redshank on the foreshore, I'm certain of it.
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Time to get Steam and games re-downloading... this will take DAYS.
1 comments:
I was probably leaving as you were arriving. Cordite was a good call, the other side was rubbish with no water.
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