Family, Photography and other misc news
Family related posts; generally only of interest to fellow members of the Brown Clan and relations by Marriage into this mad house.
I love going to the cinema but rarely find the time now. Its also far less enjoyable, our local major multiplex is soulless and very expensive.
The last film we went that we really enjoyed was Joss Whedon’s Much ado about Nothing which was played at a local college.
I would love to see the new Starwars movie so I am hunting down small local theatres in Lincolnshire that may be showing it.
I love music, and used to play the guitar and currently play the banjo and piano. I now have my Hifi setup in the end room which has been turned in a music/library/studio room.
I also have some decent powered speakers in my office linked to my MacPro and my iTunes library which mostly consists of ripped CD’s. Where we listen to the most music is in the kitchen which with our love of cooking and baking we both spend a lot our time.
For my birthday last year we have had a Sonos One in here, its pricey for what it is but does perform very well and needs little else to make it work. It came with one years free Deezer subscription which is now coming to an end, and so I was pleased to see that Apple music in beta has now arrived for the Sonos. Once my Deezer subscription expires i’ll give the Apple music a trial and see how that goes.
The think to remember with most of these streaming systems is you need to invest in the time and energy to let the service learn about your musical tastes. Of course once a service is setup how you like its hard to move and go through that again which is what most of them are hoping.
The weather has been unseasonably warm recently and on a recent commute into Lincoln, I took the back country route. I was surprised and pleased to see a pickup truck parked up, and behind it a young man in a deck chair playing the Banjo in the sun.
It was such a surprising thing to see in the countryside of Lincolnshire.
It has been a busy weekend, Saturday had us rained out, so all the plans for the garden went on hold. The evening was spent up at A&E with Caroline’s dad. He was kept overnight but released on Sunday afternoon.
That gave us Sunday morning to dig up the winter potatoes. We were not expecting much but was pleasantly surprised. To test them out we did a nice salad for lunch with potato salad as the star.
In the now free plot we dug in some compost from our well manured compost heap, another benefit of keeping chickens; and planted next years onion crop and two varieties of garlic, which will be a first for us.
I get a few people tell me there is no point in having Solar Panels in this country, too wet, cold and cloudy.
It’s true in the winter I’ll not be generating much but in the Summer I consistently top 0.5 mega watt hours a month.
So this Monday morning at dawn, I was quite supposed to see in the low light and thick Autumn fog the system was producing 60 watt hours which was more then enough to power our lights if not the kettle for morning coffee.
As the light levels climbed we nearly got to a kilowatt hour in the morning fog which I was very impressed with.
Every little helps.
I see that HSBC Halifax Group cards are now working with ApplePay. We are now less then a day away from the release of OS 9 so the banks have taken a year before the majority of UK customers can use Apple Pay and we still have some of the big players like Barclays holding out.
If you only check my blog every couple of weeks then you will not have noticed but if your one of my more regular readers who checks every few days then you will have noticed theres been a bit of a gap with no posts and now a huge flurry of catchup posts.
Well basically, after getting back from Orkney I started to feel a little under the weather, then after the weekend it hit me like a tonne of bricks, and I have spend fours days in bed with a blanket over my head not wanted to have anything to do with the world.
The fever, chills, constant headaches have now passed to the point where I can face a computer screen for at least a few minutes in every hour so I have been posting a few updates.
Just to quick snaps of the end room, now with three large book cases at one end. This means we can finally unbox our books that have been in storage or blocking up the wing hallway for the last two years.
Not only that but I have unboxed my hi fi so we now have music in there. Currently only two sources set up, CD and a wired input from my iPhone. I am thinking about moving the main Apple Wireless Extreme from the living room into hear and getting a newer model for the living room.
Well thats it.The holiday is over and we are back home and back to the routine of work. While I took my wildlife kit I did not manage to get any great shots this time unlike my week on the Shetlands in 2013 but it was a great holiday nevertheless with some fantastic live archaeology being done in front of our very eyes and new discoveries being made.
If your into archaeology, wildlife or even scuba diving, the Islands of Orkney are one of the best places in the world to visit.
For this this visit we concentrated on the archaeology and while we visited and entered the tombs of Maeshowe which was as spectacular as we remembered once I had managed to climb inside, and also the site of Skara Brae were the stone age (neolithic) homes are remarkably preserved.
But for us the highlight of the trip was the Ness of Brodgar, this site was discovered just after our last visit ten years ago when the local land owner went to plough this field for the first time. Immediately he hit stone and after the geo-physics had been done it was revealed that the whole site was covered with the remains of stone buildings.
For the last then years for the the eight weeks of summer they did at this site and discover more, its one of the great finds of prehistory in the world, a temple complex over five thousand years old.