Bills Posts

I’m hoping this works; https://wordpress.com/post/localitystories.com/2174. That’s a cross reference to the link I am thinking of writing about tonight. That’s one of the frustrations of posting to this blog – will what I write about work? 

What do I mean by work? Well, make sense – ignoring my typos and occasional bad English, and they happen because I am a very poor proofreader. I usually know what I want to write and am keen to get on with it, and then don’t always check to make sure it says what I intended, see, that is one of the powers of Grammarly, which I have installed. It told me that I had made four errors in this paragraph, which I have now corrected.

Write, on with the topic. Post 590, was written on 25 Mar 2022, nearly two years ago. I was concerned then, and remain concerned about rough sleepers. The ones I speak to I wish well, but can do little about, but on nights like this and last night both of which were and are stormy, I’d hate to be in their position. During the COVID lockdowns, the local council put resources in place to keep them warm and secure. I don’t know how much that cost, but I know it was appreciated. I hope they are all OK.

For the first time tonight, I actively thought about giving up this blog. Perhaps when I reach the 1200th post. But then I started thinking, why am I even considering this? What is going on here?

Then I got to thinking about what is the blog for, if not mine to express my thoughts through the medium of the written word. Now, I will admit that I haven’t been very good at doing that, but there you go you see, me running myself down – why. This blog is now so close to achieving 1200 posts. Clearly something is driving me.

No, then, I don’t think I am going to give it up. Perhaps I should go back a bit and have a look at some of my earlier writings, and think about what I can do to invigorate myself even more.

I’m going to keep it going. Let’s see where we go next.

The phone, my phone has a superb camera. Whilst I may not actually, lets be honest whilst I am not anywhere near a good photographer, that doesn’t stop me from producing photos of an almost excellent technical quality. But, that is entirely down to the camera on my phone and nothing at all to do with me.

The phone makes having a camera with you pretty much all the time awfully, awfully easy. But with all that is positive about having an excellent camera I suffer from a degree of dissatisfaction. Using the phone as a camera is good and easy, but I quite often find myself yearning for a proper camera, that is not bulky and light, and easy to use but over which I can easily control. Unfortunately, my Nikon D5300 meets none of these in my view.

Every so often then, I end up doing a search on mbp.com, the website to go to for any second-hand photography equipment needs. Their selection is huge, and their costs are reasonable. I haven’t found what I am looking for yet. But I shall keep on looking.

We went to Dorset today. Family business – won’t say any more about that. But for lunch we went to a local pub that we have been to several times and know quite well. They always serve delicious food. Today, I had Pork and Stuffing pie, it was delicious.

The pub was the Sailors Return. There’s quite a story to the pub, and if you get a chance I can’t recommend it strongly enough, the setting alone is enough to warrant a visit nestled as it is in the vales and rolling downs of the dorset country side, not far from the coast in the village of Chaldon Herring, near Winfrith Newburgh. 

I can’t think of any Dorset countryside that doesn’t captivate me but the gentle ( and not so gentle) rolling hills of this area will be a delight to explore. 

Not these birds, gulls. Although a man almost at the bottom of the garden does feed gulls. Quite often I see half a dozen or so on his roof. Actually, I quite like that he does that.

He also has a flag pole and always has a flag up. It’s quite useful for wind strength and direction.

The bird table is something that we both enjoy. It’s lovely to see birds coming to it through the day, and of course they are not neat & tidy eaters so a fair bit of food gets thrown on the floor. It’s that which is a bone of contention.

Another problem that has arisen in the past was when I was putting out a normal seed mix. Of course, the thrown about seeds started germinating. All sorts of weird mostly grass was growing. I managed to stop that by using a no grow mix. That has worked well, but I think that there must see some seeds that the birds don’t like, because there has been a fair bit wastage.

I have significantly decreased the amount of wast by moving to an exclusively sunflower hearts and mealworms – the starlings love it. So, unfortunately do the pigeons. But that has left me with another concern; the grey wagtail which has been visiting us for at least three years now apparently doesn’t each sunflower hearts. I’ve felt quit guilty about that, so made sure I accidentally deliberately spilled some mealworms. I’m buying some no grow, no waste seed I’ll put a bit down for the wagtail every day.

I have a bunch of magazines to read. The dilemma is that I don’t want to interrupt my reading of the book I wrote about yesterday. The Magazines are;

• B&W Photography
• RadCom
• Dorset

I’m not sure what order I’m going to read them, and I probably won’t every article.

What do I get from these magazines? Well, the obvious answers are information and education, these are obvious, but also inspiration as well. The problem is though that as inspired as I may be, I rarely realise that inspiration which is, to say the least, frustrating.

I have a video running on youtube at the moment, called standing with stones. I’ve watched it a couple of times now, so obviously I think it is very good. But each time I watch it I pick up something different, and I find it relaxing. 

I haven’t been for a walk today, in fact over the last two days I haven’t left the house. Once again I stress that I am not agoraphobic, even just thinking about going outside doesn’t bring me out in a cold sweat. 

In fact the first sentence of this post isn’t strictly accurate I have been outside, I just haven’t left the confines of our plot. I’ve put the bin out and I go out every morning to record the weather and feed the birds (and the squirrels – but they are not the intention). I still can’t get up in the mornings, perhaps it is SAD (seasonally adjusted syndrome) who knows.

I promised a while back that I would write about the current book. Ali Abdaal is a YouTuber, here’s his channel; https://www.youtube.com/@aliabdaal He’s a doctor who turned to YouTube because he was driven to. Anyhow, his videos are mostly about productivity and other aspects such as procrastination. I enjoy watching them and would definitely recommend them.

He’s written a book, “Feel Good Productivity”. I am presently on page 212. The book is an easy, informative, and entertaining read and I would recommend that. One area he commented on, which I found interesting were goals, particularly NICE goals. I have to admit that I found the idea fascinating. NICE goals are different to SMART goals. For example; you might have a goal of losing 20 pounds over the next three months, that would be a SMART goal. Its NICE equivalent would be to exercise for 30 minutes daily, focussing on activities you enjoy and are manageable. I know which goal I prefer.

The book is peppered with other useful hints and tips, and the experiment cases he provides make very interesting reading. I’d recommend the book.

I don’t like them. I never have. Don’t ever ask me to do the “face your fear” thing which involves handling a really big one (I can’t even bring myself to write the word tarant…..). So I’m usually a bit nervous when I encounter one of the beasties.

Luckily, I managed quite a few years ago, to cure myself of the inclination to squash them as soon as I have seen them. I would now much rather capture it and release it in the garden, so that it can find a new home (just hopefully, not back in doors).

You can imagine my mild distress when I heard the call last Night; ”Bill, There’s a spider in the kitchen” luckily, Elayne had caught it and was bunched up under the glass. As usually, I found a thin but fairly firm piece of card that I could use to slide under the glass which I can then turn upright. I’ll only uncover it if I am confident that the spider can’t climb out of the glass – I’ve never found one that can.

I can’t resist looking in the glass with an expected feeling of revulsion which is when the other characteristic of my phobia kicks in. I’m not that bothered by small spiders, only big ones. This one is really quite small. I’m almost sorry for it and inclined to just let it go, but Elayne won’t have it, put it out is the command.

Also, the spider is of a species that I don’t ever recall seeing before. It’s all black! That sets alarm bells off. I know it’s not a black widow (shudder) as they have red markings on them, but this could be a false widow (I have no idea what they look like, or at least I didn’t) so I took a picture, and then let it out in the garden.

Today, I looked it up. It was a black lace weaver. Apparently quite common in the UK. Why have I never seen one of these before?  Not afraid of it now.

The view across to Fawley from Hamble

Sorry, just keeping the count going. Really late tonight.

I think this is a facility for showing people what it is like to be in a lifeboat being dropped into the water. The facility is in Warsash the opposite side of the river Hamble, from where I took this.

I almost missed doing a post tonight. I was thinking about thing and reading the latest book. I think I may post about that tomorrow.

In the meantime, it is nearing midnight again and to make sure I keep the count going here is another brief post.