There and back again

Kevin and I returned (I was going to say "triumphantly" there, but I guess "tiredly" would be more appropriate) from the Lake District at the weekend, after a lovely week. For all that it rained — and at times it rained hard — it was a really nice break for both of us. Our flat was well-situated, being approximately two minutes' (or less) walk from anywhere in the town; handy for the butcher's and the baker's (although we didn't find a candlestick-maker's).

We drove around a little, saw a couple of lakes, had a little cruise down Windemere, ambled through Ambleside, poked around Carlisle Castle, weren't tempted by the gift shop's Genuine Replica Roman Coins, saw about 300 dogs during the week (and Kevin exclaimed at every one :-) ), bought some yummy local fudge (of which I still have some left, surprisingly), visited the Pencil Museum (got free pencils), visited the Cars of the Stars Motor Museum (didn't get free cars), visited the Puzzling Place museum, with stunning holographs and an 'anti-gravity' room (floor at an angle, made it extremely difficult to walk properly afterwards), played crazy golf (once on the crappiest, rustiest course in Britain, and again on a much nicer course — in the pouring rain), saw many cows and sheep as we drove along (at which, respectively, Kevin moooed and baaaed out of the window), didn't manage to go to the quaint local cinema 30 seconds from our doorstep (but were okay since we brought, and rented, DVDs), did manage to stay away from both points of public internet/email access (even though one such was about 15 seconds from our doorstep), bought some books, and introduced Kevin to the delights of Cadbury's chocolate twin-pot desserts (the ones with chocolate dessert in one compartment and, say, bits of Flake in the other).

That is all. Photos to follow.

Coincidences

Okay, this is strange.

Last week I read An Equal Music (another one of my "everyone should read" books), which is written from the narrative viewpoint of a violinist in a string quartet. One of the more significant (from the story's point of view) pieces that they play is Bach's Art of Fugue.

To my knowledge I've never heard the piece in question, so I was fairly interested when I read a Metafilter thread about it. A poster also provided a link to the Art of Fugue in MIDI format which was, needless to say, expectedly awful but somehow enjoyable at the same time. It inspired me to trot off to the iTunes music store for the first time, and browse for it. Having selected Bach as the artist I clicked on random albums and previewed random pieces, and then found one which I liked enough to buy - Bach's Concerto for 2 Violins in D Minor.

This morning I was reminded of the fact that Fionnaigh's been interviewed for BBC Radio 4 regarding a poem she'd written about Bach's Concerto for 2 Violins in D Minor. Completely slipped my mind (well, the specific piece at least), but I was struck by the chain of coincidence at hand.

Your weekly update

Yeah, yeah, holiday photos. They're coming. Soon. Well, soon-ish. Well...

Okay, sometime in the not-too-distant future, you'll get to see some of them. Depending on your definition of "distant", that is.

Kevin reminded me the other day that there's ten weeks left before I head up to the Midlands for university. Ten weeks. Before now I hadn't even truly thought of it as a real event that was going to actually happen - it was just this thing at a vague indeterminate point in the future. Now it has a number, and the number's going down all the time (see, it's 9½ weeks already). And now I feel like it's hurtling towards me (or the other way around), and I'm panicking a little at the thought of being badly struck down by Kevin-separation-anxiety (which hits me, to some extent, every week) and wondering whether I can pause the countdown somehow.

Anyway, other things:

• I have Gmail (but no invites, yet). I eventually managed to import all my old email from Eudora, but only by redirecting it there, which means that all my emails have the wrong timestamp on them now. I'll probably redo it if Google ever implement an appropriate import function, but for now it means I can super-speedily Google-search for useful things like my Newzcrawler registration key and so on. Which is nice.

• I won another Discworld competition, in addition to the three? four? that I've previously won. The prize (okay, it was a runner-up prize) was Truckers on audio book, unabridged. (Yeah, I know that's not a Discworld book. It was a Discworld Monthly competition though, so it counts.) This means I'm going to have to update my 100 things too. (I should probably rewrite my About page as well, which is almost 18 months old and horrendously out of date).

  I think this brings me up to ten Discworld audio books in total, none of which I've paid full price for. There were the three that I bought as MP3 files on CDs (during a briefly-lived ISIS experiment). There was The Light Fantastic, which I saw in WHSmiths for 50p. There was the one that was free in MP3 (or WMA, or something) on the front cover DVD of a DVD magazine. There was the one that I think I got second-hand from someone, and there's the four, to date, that I've won. (Oh, there were those other 26 that I won, but they were all the unabridged 2-cassette Corgi editions, which really irritate me when I listen to them because my mind has to keep filling in the gaps they leave.) ISIS really aren't doing too well off me, are they?

  This is getting a little ridiculous. Once I've grabbed Truckers from cassette to MP3, would anyone like it?

• You may remember that I work in Farnborough. In fact, I work very near Farnborough's airfield. Where the Farnborough Air Show is held. Is being held, in fact, this week. With big fighter jets and commerical planes flying overhead impressively.

  It's very very noisy at work right now. In fact, while I was waiting for the bus to the station this afternoon, a jet that flew over was so loud, several car alarms went off due to the vibration.

Job efficiency

This morning a cleaning lady came into the office to vacuum. As she was hoovering round my desk she told me to brush some lint off my trousers, explaining (to my bemused look) that she's a bit fanatical about her job.

I'm a little unsettled.

Snapshots

So here they are, the exceedingly late, oft-promised holiday snaps from Keswick. Except that they're not terribly good since firstly, they were taken on an instant disposable camera, secondly they were scanned in once we got the prints back, and thirdly, I'm not much good with a camera anyway, let alone photo editing software. Still. There we are :-)

The upper end of our street, with Cumbrian hills in the distance

The local river. Or possibly stream. Whatever. We played Poohsticks.

An alleyway with some Cumbrian hills in the distance

A car park with some Cumbrian hills in the distance

Possibly the most interesting of the many, many, similar pictures that were taken of Cumbrian hills. I like to call this one "More Cumbrian Hills".

Derwent Water, the local lake

A photo of Kevin with his eyes shut. (Accidental, one of many.)

Some swans and cygnets on Lake Windemere, to whom we were throwing pieces of bread.

Seagulls circling and poised to attack us since we had food. Don't take sandwiches to Lake Windemere; the seagulls will get you.

The fossil fish that Kevin bought me in a really cool shop that we found (I bought my Dad an ammonite as well)

Carlisle Castle, slightly lopsided

Kevin taking a picture of Kevin taking a picture, handily reflected in the wing-mirror.

And now that I've filed the photos here, I can forget about them. What a wonderful thing external memory is :-)