Bills Posts

After the excitement of Exbury yesterday, today, I tried to do as little as possible. I don’t know if my back is easier – by a small amount. It’ll just be a matter of time.

I have been having problems with my office chair, the gas cylinder has gone, and it is way too low. My thought was that I’d have to buy a new one not thinking that it was possible to change the cylinder. That turns out to not be the case.

Having watched a very quick you tube video, it appears straightforward. There’s one tool that I need to check on the cylinder has been ordered (£19.99) at that price it’s worth the risk to see if it works. The cylinder should arrive tomorrow, I’ll let you know how it goes.

Not only have I never been to Exbury Gardens, before today I had never heard of it. We wanted do something other than just got to the shops, we can do that any time. We wanted to just get out for a bit.

Elayne found the place, it looked interesting, so we thought we’’d give it a go. We are both so glad we went. We had a really good time.

We arrived got our tickets and had just enough time to get to the narrow gauge railway. For the 1145 departure, I reckon the trip lasted about 25 minutes, but it was fun and we saw a little bit of the garden.

We had a really good walk around, and there is still a fair bit that we have not yet seen. I can see that we will definitely are very likely to go back.

I’ve suddenly realised that it’s bit late, and that apart from writing about the sudden episode of very uncomfortable back ache that I’ve developed, I can’t think any topic for tonights post. So, we could be heading for another brief post.

I don’t know how I did it, certainly not an incorrect lift. But the frustrating thing is that whether I am sitting, standing or laying down, I am pretty much pain from apart from the occasional spark. But, transitioning between those states is painful, very painful. I can reduce the discomfort if I do the movements slowly and carefully.

What a pain. Literally.

Another B&W picture tonight, this one is of the Abbey at Romsey. There is a lot of history there. But the purpose of tonights post isn’t talk about that.

It occurs to me that recently, a lot of my posts have been placeholders, to keep the internal count in WordPress going. That means that the posts don’t have a topic, are typically one, usually at most two sentences long, pretty boring for my non-multitude of readers eagerly awaiting my every word. I confess that I do feel quite guilty when I do one of those.

I have also been keeping my post count going, as you can tell I am now at post No. 1257.

The question is; when I do a “placeholder” type post, do I deserve the post number? If I say, for example, that my next goal is 1500 posts, as of today, that is 243 days away if I maintain the numbering, but can I legitimately give one (or any number of those days) to a placeholder? Meaning it could take me (again, for example) 300 calendar days to reach that 1500 goal. Or does leaving the post count off, confuse things? I know it will confuse me. What do you think? A point of note, I am not going to go back over all previous posts and re-number them. I should have thought of this before.

After commenting last night that I hadn’t done mono for a while and using one last night I thought we might as well have a bit of a run of them.

I thought the lines in this one were quite interesting and I liked the clouds, so why not?

Sorry that this one is going to be a bit short.

I have used the colour version of this picture before. I think because I haven’t been quite as prolific with my camera recently for some reason I haven’t thought about black & white imagery until this evening for quite some time.

Then, as I say this evening I suddenly thought I haven’t made a b&W photo for a long time, and I like B&W, so I had a look at some of the pictures I have taken recently.

I took this photo and liked the light in the colour version. I like this one as much, but it has a more atmospheric feeling to it. The person in particular adds to the atmosphere.

For no particular reason, I have scrolled back through this blog. I thought that I would write about post No. 627, the halfway point to today, but actually, if I were to write it today, I suspect only a few things would have changed – it rained then, and it’s raining today, the major difference is that I didn’t go for a walk.

I went back to what I think of as the proper start to the blog was the day I committed to writing a blog post for every day of that year – 2020 – 2021, the first post was on the 14th of August 2020. I was so please that I did that.

I’m not sure that the quality of my posts has improved significantly, if at all. I also won’t deny that doing it has been a bit of a challenge in places. We are not quite off three and a half years, as it happens that will be before the end of this month – another milestone to mark.

I think that an ambition would be to find a focus for the blog. Perhaps the (I hope) the move to Dorset will give me that. There is certainly a sense of anticipation there. I do have thoughts for a couple of projects. Let’s see how things go.

It looks like this central line of tiles down the path points due west. I put the compass app on the phone on it and it gave 270 degrees.

Behind me when I took the picture is the millennium sundial. At the time of. The morning I was there today, there were not a lot of people around. Actually there were no people around. There were only a few people around on the. High street. To be honest, I hadn’t really wanted to get up, but pretty much forced myself to.

The walk to the waterfront was straightforward, I even followed my old path, there were a few people on the highstreet, not surprising really, it was a a bit later that when I have been there. Nothing at all happening in the harbour except the Gosport Ferry of course.

I did see one of my friends to say hello to, but that was it. I do intend to try and get out again this week.

I think it was the weekend before this one just gone we went into town, the first time in a few weeks I think.

As usual, we went in different directions. I have to confess that apart from something interesting to photograph there isn’t that much to draw me to the town centre, unless I have something specific to do.

The one thing I do quite like to do is look at the books in the various charity shops. Mostly, the shops don’t have a very good selection, not many books generally poorly presented.

In contrast, the British Heart Foundation had the largest selection of books that was fairly well organised. I’ve bought several books there

That weekend I was heading towards the BHF when I met up with Elayne, she told me that BHF had closed down. The shop had been cleared out. I was a tad disappointed.

Now, there is only The Works. By far the biggest selection of books in town, but none that I am interested in at the moment.

The thought occurred to me, that if I were ever to volunteer to work in a charity shop, it would be on the understanding that I controlled the book section. I would definitely organise the section by topic and then author alphabetically within the section, but are there areas I’d focus on. Science fiction of course, detective (especially local authors), and of course non-fiction.

But then I got to wondering how a bookshop works, especially second hand ones. Then I remembered Shaun Bethell, who runs the bookshop in Wigtown. He’s written several books about his bookshop, the one I read was quite amusing. I might read another one.

I quite like the idea of running a bookshop.

The Contentin makings its turn to the east to head towards its berth. This picture is absolutely nothing to do with the topic of today’s post.

Chocolate plays a continuing part in my downfall. I find it very difficult to ignore the stuff. Today hasn’t helped things. I have four chocolate eggs and their contents to eat. Now, I am determined to try and control my weight, so what am I to do?

I’m not going to throw them away, but I may very well give them away. This deserves some serious thought. What doesn’t help at all is that three of the four eggs have orange flavoured contents, which I love. It’s going to be hard.