Ever since we lost Bob last spring, Elvy has been a single cat. She's enjoyed undivided attention and a clear run of the house, and she has become a fine affectionate friend.
This weekend, however, saw a small addition to the household. Elvy's not too chuffed about it.
We named her Rosie - both me and the seller agreed that it was a Queen, there being no signs of the tell-tale Tom bits...
but one of those bits dropped during the night and the next day the vet proclaimed that she is a late-dropping he.
So now we've named him Loki, after the the Asgardian God of Mischief.
If only I could do that, the task of editing all of the blog's image, image-link and mouseover URLs (to reflect the changes associated with migrating all of my pics out of the failing SmugMug and into WordPress) would probably be a doddle. As it is, it's a tedious manual-edit jobbie that's taking me ages.
Two months in and I'm still not a quarter of the way there. It didn't help that a fortnight ago WordPress updated to version 3.9 and the thing fell apart because of the limitations of the bundled "upgraded" TinyMCE visual editor which had been gelded of various features that I need to do the editing. The techies at BlueHost did a restore from a their monthly backup to get me back onto WP3.8.3 with the previous TinyMCE... that put me back in control, but it undid a month of editing and scrubbed a month of uploads.
So, expect this place to be a mess while the transfer is in progress. I reckon I have about 6,000 URL edits still to do, so it's going to take a long time.
FWIW, I did try reversing the polarity of the neutron flow but that had no beneficial effects. The sonic screwdriver...
I never bothered with a Styptic Pencil when I used to wet-shave, but of late it's been handy to have around for those minor nicks and scrapes on various bits of me. Being on Clopidogrel and Aspirin means that even the smallest cut can take over three hours to stop bleeding, but one application of this stick stops most leaks within seconds. Stings a bit, though. Costing less than two quid, weighing only 12g and lasting for many years, it's a worthwhile addition to a first-aid kit regardless of background afflictions.
I've changed tack on tick-removers. For years I'd been using a Care Plus Tick-Out, it was good for pulling out the big ticks but iffy for the tiny ones. Now I'm using the O'Tom Tick Twisters that I liberated from the cat's med-box, these babies cope with all sizes of ticks and are a lot easier to use and to clean. Two sizes per pack, a choice of colours, piss-cheap from the vet's, and only 2g for the pair! What's not to like?
Sometimes a bit of idle surfing can get you to where you didn't realise you wanted to be...
During a short "free period" I'd been poring over some maps. Real maps. Big flappy unruly Ordnance Survey paper sheets. If you remember these things, you'll remember the faff involved in folding them away neatly after use. You'll likely also remember that repeated use destroys any stressed/strained intersections of folds.
Anyway, duty called so I put away the maps. Some DIY was required, a drill was necessary, and the all-singing, all-dancing one that I'd bought for my Dad (so that I could borrow it permanently) was, for some strange reason, at my Dad's place. No matter, a detour to the local Lidl during a cardio-exercise walk resulted in the acquisition of a cheap cordless jobbie.
Back at the ranch I did the DIY and decided that the cheap jobbie was in fact quite good. So good that I looked into buying a spare battery-pack for it. At some point during the web-search I got distracted by Wikipedia's page on Li-ion batteries and found myself reading about their flexibility (see here).
Yeah, I know it's been done before, but I've a mind to give it a try for myself on a newish real map once I've ironed-out all of those standard-issue O. S. creases. I might start with a Memory-Map printout and work my way up from there.
There's not much to report here, no stargazing was done - poor seeing and too much haze for visual observing of faint and/or fuzzy targets. The Moon was about the only thing worth pointing the scope at. Suffice to say that 26 slightly hazy .avi files were taken, stacked, trimmed and stitched to make this image:
Moon (13/03/2014 @ 22:00 approx). 26 panes stitched with iMerge.
Each pane is ~300/~3000 stacked frames. DMK mono CCD camera on the GSRC6M.
