Wot a Picture!

So I thought today I would post early because it's more than time I got to write something positive and if I get in early then the day has had little or no chance to dissolve around me*

Here's the picture

 

I don't think the photo quite does it justice but you'll get the overall idea.

 

 

We bought it at Glyndebourne. Apparently every year they have a competition for young artists aged 16 - 30 which is tied into one of the operas for the autumn season/tour and they exhibit the best ones in the Opera House. This years theme was obviously Madam Butterfly, and as always with these things some you like and some you don't and some we  differ over. But we both fell in love with this one. We also knew that when the living room was redecorated we were going to have the perfect place to put it, so we bought it. It was Not Cheap, and between buying it and having it delivered we were both a bit anxious about whether we would have gone off it. Happily we hadn't, and equally happily everyone who has seen it has admired it. I'm not the sort of person who needs her artistic choices validated by her neighbours ( I don't think) but it is nice when people come in, see it for the first time and say what a beautiful picture it is.

 

Amazingly enough the artist was only 17 when she painted it last year. She's hoping to go and study Fine Art and I keep meaning to get in touch with Glyndebourne to ask if they will send on a letter of thanks and a photo of the picture in situ. No doubt I'll get around to that in due course.

 

* You would not believe the palaver I had to go through to upload this photo - normally so straightforward, today - not so much.  I even had to get the OH to sort it out, so the hassle-some week continues. 

 

 

 

Try Again Tuesday?

How do we feel about Try Again Thursday, which may well follow Wash Out Wednesday the way this week is going so far.

Actually, to be fair I have managed some work today, and I've even been quite pleased with it. Sadly outside of that we've had a lot of hassle.

John Lewis got in touch to say that they wouldn't be able to install the new washing machine after all because they are unable to install machines which do not have a 13  amp socket into which said machines can be plugged. They helpfully pointed out where in the tiny-winy print in their terms and conditions this clause is hidden. They offered to refund our £25 charge for installation.

 

(A question occurs. If all they do is plug the machine into the socket in what way is this worth a £25 installation fee in the first place? The answer is probably something to do with plumbing I know)

 

( A further question might be, that if they do not in fact install wired in washing machines what on earth was all that claptrap served up to my son yesterday about how a more highly qualified person would be needed and yea, even forthcoming,  in due course)

 

We  found a website that for an eyewatering fee  despatched an electrician this afternoon , to replace wiring in thingummy with the necessary 13 amp socket. We now just  have to wait yet again for John Lewis to find the time to send out their pluggers in. Sorry. Installers.

 

In the middle of all this the OH got a strident e-mail from SSE asking for an up to date meter reading. The website to which this message was linked would not accept the log in details for our Hydro Account, Hydro now being part and  parcel of the SSE empire, and it took the best part of twenty minutes to find a place where the meter reading could be entered. To add insult to injury, this being the adjustment month, they sent a meter reader round to the house recently, so they should have this information already. If I were dealing with this, I would have rung them up to ask why they wanted us to do the  reading and what had happened to the one done by the guy with the little meter reading machine. However, given that it is managed on line and I am by way of being an impatient Luddite, I do not deal with this stuff which is probably just as well for my own nerves and blood pressure to say nothing of everyone else's.

 

Ah well, as Scarlett said,  tomorrow is another day. And I can only hope it will be a calmer one.

One of those days ...

I got up with great enthusiasm this morning ready to tackle my short To Do List. I say short, and it was but it comprised time consuming things.

 

Ironing for example. Which is one of those things that could be taken to mean, get to the bottom of the basket, and might be something I do regularly on a Monday. It's not. It's not regularly on a Monday and getting to the bottom of the basket isn't a regular feature of my ironing life either. And some days it could equally mean that I'l be satisfied if I clear a duvet cover from the pile.

 

Another one on the list was Walk. Again this could be to the bottom of the drive and back (further than you might think, but hardly a challenging distance ) or it could be to the end of the island and back (ha, ha)

 

And of course the Daddy of them all was Work. The idea was that the other stuff would get whipped through and most of the day would be spent hunched over a hot computer while I added swathes to the Great Work. I would then rise, satisfied with my progress at 5.00 pm and tick off 'Work' from my list with a feeling of  a job well done.

 

It didn't happen like that. People came, some to the door, some rather further. Time went. It became too cold and too dark to go out for a walk. Inspiration eluded me. No, let's be honest, the ability to put together a coherent sentence about George's poetry eluded me. I couldn't quite summon up the enthusiasm to seek out and print a copy of Gerard Manley Hopkins' The Windhover, which I wanted for comparison purposes. This was largely because I do not like, and have never liked, the poetry of G. M. Hopkins because, and, regular readers, laugh all you like at this, I have considered him as someone who wrote to show off how clever he was ever since I was first forced to consume The Windhover in a 'Poetry Lesson' at Junior School. However I feel there may be points of comparison with George's poem Solan, so I really have to look at it.

 

In the middle of talking to the people who came rather further than the door Son no 2 Skyped from Glasgow  to say that the men who had delivered his new washing machine and were supposed to install it having first un-installed the old broken one could not in fact do so, because the old one, rather than having a plug to go into a socket, was in fact directly wired in, and the men who had been sent were not sufficiently qualified to deal with this. We now have to wait until John Lewis Glasgow has a man available  with the correct qualifications to Deal with Wires. Which is all very well but Son No 2 needs to do some washing. He has been without a machine for the best part of two weeks already. Push comes to shove he will have to go to the Launderette, which I know won't kill him but is a hassle.

 

Then I foolishly managed to accidentally sign out of Google when I came to try and write a (totally different) blog post. Naturally enough I could not remember my password, despite giving a go to all the variations I could think of on the basic ones  I normally use. Eventually Google got sick of me trying to remember it and asked me to re-interpret in normal type several sets of hieroglyphics. I know these are used to defeat robot users, but the sad fact is they regularly defeat me too, and in the end the goblin in the machine allowed me to press a Help button and sent me a reauthorisation code ....

 

It was all of a piece with the rest of the largely non-constructive day. Still as Victoria-from-the-Shop said as I gave her some money and fell off the chocolate wagon, 'There's always tomorrow. Try-Again-Tuesday.'

 

So there you go. Try Again Tuesday it is. Or will be, tomorrow.  

Yeah, well, was down the pool, innit?

Amazingly I took myself into Kirkwall for a swim today, having found a collection of colourful swimsuits in various places,  and indeed various sizes. One of which even fitted.

 

I went to one of the special sessions they have the big, the old and the infirm, feeling that I can tick 2 out of the 3 boxes any day of the week and the third one now and again. It's several years since I last went swimming and that only lasted for about 3 weeks because the friend I went with then discovered something else to do, and before that it had been decades - literally. So I wasn't expecting too much of myself.

 

I wanted to do ten lengths and I did ten lengths. I did not manage even one  whole length without stopping but whereas when I started I was stopping twice a length by the end it was only once. So that was progress I thought.

 

Sadly I cannot go to either of the BOI sessions next week as they only have them twice a week and both days I am otherwise engaged. But the idea is that after that I will certainly try and go at least once a week.

 

After the swim I went off and bought myself some new trainers so now I can ring up and arrange my gym induction. It's not so much that I'm keen as mean. I'm paying the council regardless of how often I go and if I don't get myself sorted I will never go and then it's just a waste of money.

 

In the shop where I got my trainers I also bought the OH a wallet. I'd meant to get him one for his birthday but forgot. What can I say? It's two days after Christmas. Things get overlooked. Anyway it was a lovey wallet and he liked it very much but sadly after all his cards were put in it it would barely close. Cue for buying a new card holder I suppose.

 

In other news - there is no other news. I have spent all week working on my thesis and sadly I think that's going to be the burden of my song for the next few weeks and months. It's not that it's not enjoyable, to an extent. But it would make a boring blog. 

 

Tomorrow or the next day - how you can go off knitting.

What an Anti-Climax!

Well I was all poised to bring you the horrors of my full supervisory meeting which was scheduled to take place this morning but it had to be cancelled. Two of  the participants, though willing enough, were also poorly and as such unable to cope with the  temperamental technology that is misbehaving Skype so after numerous failed attempts to connect and 10 minutes of time we could all have found a better use for, we gave up and rescheduled for next Friday.

Of the two people who were sick, one was male and one was female. I leave it to the judgement and discrimination of my readers to decide which of them said 'I feel like death' and which one said 'inflated congested left lung, have been taking pills for a week with no effect'.

I took advantage of my early release to wander over to the Leisure Centre and sign up for the Council's new Active Life Scheme. Twenty quid a month and all the classes, gym sessions, and pool time you want. It wasn't until I had paid a tenner for what is left of this month that I realised that I have no trainers, having chucked out the last lot when I stopped going to the little gym on the neighbouring island of South Ronaldsay because it got to the stage where it was only staffed in the evenings. It takes a mini earthquake to get me to the gym in the mornings, nothing was ever going to convince me to go there at 8 o' clock at night.

 

So I will need to get some new trainers before I can book my gym induction and take up Body Bounce or whatever they call it. I daresay bits of me would bounce, which is a lowering reflection, but that doesn't mean I couldn't try and get to the pool. If I can find my swimsuit.

 

I know I don't make resolutions but this is the year I get fit, lose weight and just about finish the Ph D. Honest.

Project 60 Number 41 - Princess Mononoke

I said once that if I wanted to be funny I could just fill up Project 60 baking lots of stuff I'd never baked before, and the same could be said of classic films that I've never watched. There are lots of them and I daresay finding twenty would be child's play. But again as I said with the baking, that's really not in the spirit of the project so I chose one as representative of all those wonderful films that  I should have watched by now but haven't, whether through ignorance, accident or design.

 

I'd never even heard of Princess Mononoke until a few years ago when it suddenly  kept cropping up in TV countdown programs ( the OH is addicted, and we're at the age where we can happily watch them more than once safe in the knowledge that we have already forgotten what made the top five) and magazine listings of the 100 Films to see Before you Die type. I mentioned it separately to both my sons and they both told me it was brilliant and I should certainly watch it.

 

Somehow I never got around to it. It was Japanese, and a cartoon, and given my well known loathing of cartoons as a form and my particular dislike of the faces in Japanese ones with the big eyes and the little snubby noses,  initial ignorance was topped off with deliberate avoidance until this Christmas break.

Then Son No 2 suggested that as he had a copy of it on DVD and it was just sitting there in his bedroom, we might watch it together and, tempted though I was just to carry on not watching it, I summoned up the spirit of Project 60 and agreed.

 

And it was OK. In addition to the fact that it was a cartoon it also had holes in the plot you could drive a tank through and endless unexplained leaps in the story. And because I know little or nothing about the Japanese culture of gods and demons I was a bit at sea with those elements. However,  given that son no 2 is a big fan I managed to bite my tongue and not make too many sarcastic comments pointing out the weaknesses in the storyline as we went along.

 

Like several other things making up this project it's a case of  'Glad I did it, wouldn't do it again'.  

Looking Forward - 2017

First of all a Happy New Year! We're now just about 14 hours into 2017 and so far all seems well. I'd like to think it will stay that way. Coincidentally we had a New Year e-mail from Son No 1 remarking that however awful some of the things that 2016 brought to the world he and his family had had a good 2016, and he was hoping for more of the same in 2017.

 

I've been saying for a while that 2017 is gong to be a quiet year, a year when we stay in Orkney more, the year when I really knuckle down and make my thesis the most important thing in my life for a while. And if that isn't paving the road to hell with good intentions I don't know what is.

 

See it goes like this. You start off with saying of course we'll stay in Orkney  more. Because apart from the trip to the Conference in Vancouver in June and a brief visit to Stockholm for Jenufa in April we have nothing planned. But then you hear that a good friend is curating an exhibition  at the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds to commemorate the centenary of the Russian Revolution starting in March and you're going to be invited to the opening. And there's the Edinburgh Yarn Festival in March which you have promised to go to with a friend and which happily coincides with the Scottish Opera Edinburgh performances of Pelleas and Melisandre. And there have to be research trips to the National Library and the Edinburgh University Library, so that's looking like a trip south and a week in Edinburgh/Glasgow. It seems the stone for George will be laid in April - March is too tight for the stonemason apparently, which in view of the forgoing is a real shame ...!because I can't not be there for that.  And then the Gaskell Society Conference is in July and I'll want to go to attend and as it's in Portsmouth it would be silly not to use the occasion to visit friends and family in the Suth West. There's a ruby wedding party in Derby in August and in September I've been invited to a Leeds Russian Departmental Reunion for those of us who graduated between 1975 and 1978, and although I'm havering about going I'm well aware that this may be my last chance to see some of the people who taught me all those years ago - two of them have passed on already.

 

So that's how quiet the year looks. But hey! what in all of that  could I pass up?