The Bells Have Made Me Deaf

On my way to the beach is a cottage with two ancient springer spaniels in the garden. One is toothless and almost totally grey around the muzzle. They take great sport out of barking and tail wagging as we pass, usually from the safety of their dog run. Today must have been the Sunday outing and the two of them had escaped Colditz for the afternoon. However decrepid, this gummy beast decides to come out and pick a fight. Now my dog is no angel but he’s usually well enough behaved until provoked. That wasn’t always the case but since I had his nuts removed he’s become more compliant with my wishes… just not quite fully. Out comes gummy with it’s tail all awag and it’s gummy bark somewhat muffled by those great flappy jaws with no teeth to hold them to any useful shape that might enhance it’s efforts and make it sound more threatening and less comical. Instead of WOOF WOOF it wumpf wumpfed at us. ~Jack the lad here being ready for a bit of sport strained furiously at the lead and danced his usual excited circles of ‘let me at it’ almost tripped me and got stood on in my attempts to control his excitement. Wumpf wumpf wag wag…. ‘go home you fool… pick on something you can handle’. Wumpf wumpf! WOOF WOOF WOOF WOOF I finally get the hold of Para’s collar… he still dancing circles, unaware that the process is twisting his lead and making it shorter. He’s dumb enough to try the same thing while I’m holding the collar and garotts himself into submission. Wumpf wumpf…. a kitchen door finally opens and wumpf gets called and scolded for such naughtiness on a Sunday.

The tide is in. I take a few minutes to watch two small boats coming in and being dragged up onto the beach hoping that wumpf will be kept in for Sunday titbits until I get back up the road. No such luck. This time I have the collar before passing the house. Para glides past on floating feathery front feet, all his own doing. Will this dog never learn? At least this time we’re at the other side of the road. A whole 10 feet further away. It seems to make a difference. Wumpf and it’s pal stay in their garden and allow us to pass undeterred.

I meet my neighbour on her way to the beach with her weetchil, bucket and spade. Heading for some serious sandcastle construction in the chilly sunshine. I tell her to walk slow the tide is just heading out. First conversation I’ve had with her. Seems strange for living so close. They keep much to themselves as do I. Our greetings to date have been waves through windowpanes and passing vehicles.

Back home I’m teasing myself into the workshop ready to conquer. The dog is asleep on it’s back. Shameless and oblivious, walked, fed and content.

I caught up on some of a forgotten friend’s blog yesterday… someone I’ve never met, an acquaintance, a writer, a musician, a talented man. He sent me some of his poetry a couple of years ago which almost kick started a lost love of literature never really begun. I suppose all it amounted to was that he is good at stating the obvious in a lateral way. Things taken for granted until held in a new light. It wasn’t happy poetry. Observances of life, romanticised to read well but with none of the dirt removed. I went there looking for wisdom on the cartoon news.

I’m sick of hearing about it personally. Every time I read the news feeds there’s some other uproar in another country where people have died in protests about something that matters so much to the protestors that they’re blinded by their own hypocrisy. Suicide bombers in the name of God go kill their fellow man with love and a quick blast. (What God wants God gets God help us all) Some unlucky enough to only be maimed and not reap their reward. No instant gratification. No martyrs crown. I find it difficult to understand a mentality that takes the life of another and calls it good. Even in war men take life and suffer from remorse for the rest of their days. Having said that, I haven’t seen the cartoons nor do I wish to. Stupidity is rife, both on the side of the publishers and others to keep stoking the flames and on the side of the protestors to believe that upholding a regimen of death by terrorism is God’s will and something to hold dear. I doubt if that is a teaching of Islam.

Sunday. Working. Trying not to read any news. Trying to keep my blood from boiling. I really think these hair trigger people would work themselves up into a frothing frenzy of declaring war on the west over a cartoon. All those fanatical countries and their cohorts united in a pact of death or glory. Nuke nuke boom boom bye bye.

The birds sing on regardless.

Last night chatting with Joe we somehow drifted onto the Honda Ads. He’d never seen any, which surprised me. I had assumed that the entire planet would have been blessed with this clever advertising campaign, consistant in the quality of it’s ads for the the last 3 at least. There was the Cog ad for the Honda Accord. The Hate Ad for the Honda Diesel that asks… Can hate be good? Can hate be great? Can hate be something we dont hate?. The current ad for the Honda Civic is a choir doing all the sound effects for the car. This clever advertising may not make me go out and buy a Honda but passing on the info because I appreciate the efforts put into the production of their ads can only be a good thing for Honda. I’ll be eagerly awaiting their next.

Like a huge iced cake in a fairy tale this is the site of ancient Hieropolis in Turkey. The calcium springs here have been attracting bathers since ancient times. About 8 miles down the road is the ruins of Laodicea, a wealthy city but badly situated for water supply. They could either have the hot water from the springs which had cooled to lukewarm by the time it reached their bath houses…. and likewise the cold drinking water from the distant mountains was lukewarm by the time it reached the city… both being neither hot nor cold it was difficult to tell the difference and taking a draft of the wrong water would cause the drinker to spew it out of their mouth.

Modern day Pamukkale is a thriving village beside the springs. I stayed there for a few days enjoying the relaxed atmosphere and wallowing in the heated pools of mineral rich water.

The panorama was taken from just below the springs.
(Click for full size)

More info HERE

While chick peas boil and Windows Movie Maker runs a convert on Iver Hantin Echas (Ulster Scots programme) that seems to be taking forever, I sip a Bushmills by way of night cap and to ward off FR hypochondria. Disgusting stuff (the FR treatment… not the Bushmills. By way of contrast the Bush is rather sweet. Andrew was right). the FR the FR it leaves a sticky residue on the fingers and a pile of dust on the machine foot.

Kidney beans on the boil too. I’m having a beanfest with naan bread and home made yoghurt but the latter two shall have to wait until tomorrow to be made. The beans were steeped and couldnt wait else they too would do Mañana. I could sleep about now if these things would hurry up and finish cooking. Late night last and early to rise today means I’m around 4 hours behind with sleep or 1½ if you’re a normal person who sleeps normal hours at normal times and has a tidy house a tidy life and everything rosey in the garden.

Tyrel, if you’re reading this, I have no idea what bidding on a Dali means unless you’re buying something surreal. What is it? Qu’est-ce que c’est, ça? Do tell. Not a Dali surely…. an original Dali?? And you let the other guy have it? Please don’t tell me it was on eBay Yeah right…. a Dali…

And in other news… while the world goes insane over cartoons and free speech… a woman sneaks a voodoo head into the US in her luggage… yes a real human head with skin teeth and a lot of dirt apparently. Freshly dug with the morning spuds to ward off evil spirits. According to rumour it was the head of a 40 something person not dead more than a few years since… hmmm. She could do 15 years in prison… looks like the head didn’t do much for her. She should sue the voodoo man that sold it to her. What? No trade descriptions act for voodoo heads? Bummer!

The world is disturbing.

Last night I decided to be daring and fix the unfixable. My desktop computer has been refusing to let me do some techie things like change IRQ settings when there is a conflict. I recently installed a TV card in the hope of recording some stuff from VCR onto disk, but there’s an IRQ conflict which means I don’t get a TV picture on the monitor. I could still have recorded to disk with this not working but in my infinite wisdom, I decided to take bull by horns and fix it proper. I thought the problem probably lay in the BIOS set up and had a notion that the PnP OS was set to disabled which may have been why it wouldn’t let me change the IRQ settings. So in I go…. change the setting and F10 to save and exit. Blank screen. Whoops I did it again.

This machine is a bit temperamental. When I got it (second hand from a cousin) I had to remove the massive fan that sits over the CPU in order to get my hard drive into it. Well… as is the norm… some whiz kid in a computer shop had stuck the heat sink &; fan to the processor for a better cooling performance. They never seem to think that there may come a time when the whole thing has to come out again. The sticking part in itself wouldn’t be a problem but for the fact that the lever that holds in the CPU is inaccessible below this monster fan. So, I gently tried to separate fan from processor only to pull off one of the pins. Pentium 4 pins seem to be rather delicate anyhow. So then I have a processor with a pin missing and no chance of buying another….. hmmm fuse wire! I got some from my nick-nack box (inherited from my Aunt which she in turn inherited from my grandfather and which still had a nice selection of fuse wire in different weights something rarely seen these days). I found one closest to the size of the pins, cut a small piece and dropped it in the hole with tweezers.

So now on starting up it finds a hardware error, likely caused by the fuse wire… but it works. I just have to F1 to get past it. Only problem is when going into BIOS to reset anything… it goes all huffy and hangs. Last night was no exception. I got past it last time by removing jumpers and restarting several times, so it looks like I’ll have to go through the same rigmarole again. Needless to say, I got nothing recorded. I may fix it later on.

Sun is out, birds are singing… I’m going to the beach!

I’ve been waiting for a day with good visibility to try and figure out exactly what I’m looking at in Scotland. I know where the Mull of Galloway lighthouse is since it flashes at me at night and therefore where the Galloway peninsula is since it’s the bit above the lighthouse. The dilemma is with where it ends. Today I could see the hills of Dumfries and Galloway national park in the sunshine although I still couldnt fine the Ailse Craig or Paddy’s Milestone as it’s fondly called. Perhaps it’s out of sight from this angle. Apparently the stones for curling are quarried there. I’ve passed it by quite a few times on the ferry, gazed at it from Arran and also from the mainland shore. A great lump of granite visible from most of the east coast of Northern Ireland. Looking for it from the beach may have been the problem. Some height may give a better view over that meniscus of green sea.

Cold, dry weather. Much like the sort that comes before snow. February is the time for it but I hope it passes on. Delivered work to Bangor and collected some more. Finally bought my birthday treat on the cheap. No Remy Martin in stock so I took a litre of Bushmills instead. It’ll make a pleasant night cap to prepare for cold sheets until the weather warms up a bit. Some wine on sale too so I grabbed 3 bottles for a tenner. Chilean Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon and a Chardonnay. Lamb chops for dinner tonight with garlic and rosemary, creamed spuds, carrot n parsnip, brocolli and a generous glass of wine. I’m hungry thinking about it. Soup for lunch then back to work.