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May 2023

June 3rd, 2023 · Posted by Skuds in Life

I really should try to find the mental energy to write here more than once a month, but meanwhile here is a summary of the recently-finished May. It was a good month. Any month with three bank holidays in it can’t be anything other than a good month!

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April 2023

May 1st, 2023 · Posted by Skuds in Life

With the days getting noticeably longer and it feeling like there were a few days without rain, I can only blame laziness for the fact that I walked a lot less in April than in March – nearly 60,000 few steps overall and only reached 10,000 steps on 3 days. As I only even got in the car three times and only went out on the bike three times, it sounds like I spent a lot of time indoors during April.

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March 2023

April 1st, 2023 · Posted by Skuds in Life

Apparently the wettest March for a long time, and it felt like it. It was a relentlessly depressing dampness all the way through, but with sufficient breaks in the weather for me to get out a bit more – and at least it has been getting a bit warmer.

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Not shopping locally

March 8th, 2023 · Posted by Skuds in Life

The other day I realised that my slippers were falling apart. With all this working from home, combined with trying to stay in the warm as much as possible means that I get a lot more use out of slippers than in the past.

After work yesterday I decided to go out and buy some new slippers and I visited three shops within walking distance: TK Maxx, Next and Sainsburys but came home empty handed. In the whole of Sainsburys’ clothes section there were just two pairs of slippers, one in size 7 and the other size 12, so no use for my size 9 feet. TK Maxx was no better and Next was even worse.

So I returned home and ordered a pair of slippers online for delivery today, then thought for a while about cause and effect. Are the shops’ inventories so poor because so many people are getting everything online or are people going online because the choice in the shops is so poor? Or is it a bit of both in a constant, escalating feedback loop? Or is it just bad weather in Morocco like it is for tomatoes? (Allegedly. Nothing to do with Brexit obviously)

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February 2023

March 3rd, 2023 · Posted by Skuds in Life

Another month where I didn’t do a lot or go out much – too bloody cold for me!

I did actually drive the car for the first time in 2023 – only for about a mile to pick Jayne up from work, but it still thwarted my ambition to go a couple of whole months without driving. I did manage to get out on the bike a couple of times and not just around the block a few times to keep the battery charged up. I went over to East Grinstead for a record fair and also went to Guildford for a hospital appointment.

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Just a test

March 3rd, 2023 · Posted by Skuds in Technology

I did that thing you should never do the other day. I tried to fix a trivial error by tweaking settings a bit, without backing the site up first and broke it. At my age I should know better. Broke it to the extent that I had to ask for everything to be restored from the host’s security archives. And then tech support said they didn’t need to do it as everything looked to be loading OK now.

Maybe the manual hacking around in the database that I did (knowing it would all be over-written) actually fixed it after all? No idea, but this is just to see if posting works OK and the original trivial problem has gone away too.

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Paranoia time again

February 6th, 2023 · Posted by Skuds in Life

Tomorrow I have my regular three-monthly-ish post-cancer outpatients appointment – the first one in almost two years that will be face-to-face rather than on the phone. Back in September I had an annual CT scan to make sure everything is still OK and I have spent the last three or four months happy because I hadn’t heard anything from anybody. I always figure that if they found anything nasty they would get in touch and not wait until the next regular appointment. Basically I work on the assumption that no news is good news.

This morning I had a call asking where I had the scan done because they haven’t seen the results. This is not entirely surprising because it happened before and is a consequence of me electing to get the scans done at my local hospital and not go all the way to Guildford for it. The trouble is that it is a different trust and they don’t seem to do anything with the results pro-actively.

Cue 24 hours of panic. I am actually 99.9% confident that it will be all clear again, but somehow that 0.1% manages to take hold of the pessimistic part of my brain, probably because the whole sequence of chemotherapy, operations and recovery was so traumatic that any doubt triggers a sort of PTSD. I am seriously thinking that next year I will make the one-hour journey to Guildford for a five-minute scan just to avoid all this stress.

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Ten years making all the difference

February 5th, 2023 · Posted by Skuds in Music

I was looking at some of the releases over at SuperDeluxeEdition today, and two in particular caught my eye. One was the 50th anniversary special edition reissue of Elton John’s Honky Chateau, and the other was the 40th anniversary reissue of OMD’s Dazzle Ships.

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January 2023

February 1st, 2023 · Posted by Skuds in Life

This year I have been trying to keep track of what I am up to. Not keeping a diary as such, just noting down various stuff. The reason is that when it comes to the end of a year I look back and can’t remember much of anything.

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All wrapped up

January 14th, 2023 · Posted by Skuds in Music

I have inadvertently become one of those people who keep their vinyl LPs in plastic sleeves.

This is not because I am precious about my small collection. I have always looked after records, or tried to, but have never been distraught if the sleeves got a bit tatty. Admittedly vinyl costs so much now that I can better understand and sympathise with the idea of keeping the sleeves in as near mint condition as possible, but I am really trying to not become obsessive about it.

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