Lathany

At Kew today.



The weather was great, the Christmas at Kew displays clearly ready for the evening and the cakes a bit substandard and expensive.

I wasn't careful enough this morning and fell over on the ice. It still hurts. 🙁



Here's something I never spotted in work before, but saw today when I was in the main lift area.

I've been for a walk along by the river.

This morning, I tried to get a picture of a moorhen. But the moorhen wasn't having any of it. So here's a picture of the walk instead.



We're creeping closer to Xmas and I still feel as though there is lots to do. But then December is always like that.

At the start of this morning's walk.



Freezing but beautiful.

These days I try to get out for a short walk round the block twice a day. It's not great exercise, but better than nothing. This weekend I noticed several houses that already have their Xmas decorations up. I wonder if it is lockdown influenced, or if it's just been getting earlier for years.

Over June, we watched the first, and only, season of Constantine. I'd not come across the character before (although I had heard of him) and I didn't know what to expect. As it turns out, I liked the concept and really liked the series. Matt Ryan does a great job of the title character and the supporting cast are decent too. I think my main complaint is that it could do a better job of consistency with the various artifacts. Instead, there's a new one every week, but it would have been better if some of them had reappeared (other than the map). I'm sorry that there weren't more seasons.

Being on leave around the weekend of 7th and 8th July, I did a couple of glitter tattoos. This is the butterfly.



And this is the dragon.



I'm getting better at applying them and both are still very clear and glittery.

Finally, last week I went to a meeting in a building I used to work in both before and after I had the twins (between 1997 and 2007). I walked down from my current workplace and it felt like walking into the past. The roads haven't changed at all. The building has changed a little bit - but not that much. It was very odd and gave me a huge sense of nostalgia.

Today there are no trains from Ashford. So I'm arranging to take a day of annual leave.

Yesterday, the Trebizond GMs had a meeting at our house. Reeve was his usually self - he purred around them, sat on a lap for a bit and then savaged two.

After the meeting itself, two of them - Gemma and Hanbury stayed for dinner (despite being the two savaged by the cat) and the topic was mainly boardgames. However, this diverged briefly onto the time when Hanbury played Queen Victoria. I commented that I thought we had a photo of it. Hanbury asked if he could have a copy.

Today I remembered and had a look for it. It doesn't appear to be in the main set of albums. So I decided to hunt through the cardboard box of other photos. Couldn't take long, right? I only need to find the set and then just look through that.

Turns out that I have rather more pre-digital photos than I thought. Actually, the job still didn't take that long, although I added to it by deciding to throw out all the bits I didn't need any more - all those plastic outer packaging leaving just photos, negatives and the little folders they come in. I finished the box without finding any pre-twin photos. I pondered this for a while, then realised I have a bigger cardboard box on the other side of the room. I decided that was a job for another weekend.

It did, however, prompt me to take photos today though as the park was sunny.



And I'll find Queen Victoria on another day.

Well, it's pretty quiet at the moment, although only until the duo return tomorrow. In their absence we've had some late mornings (not having to get up for the school bus) and visited Kew (cake, snowdrops and an orchid display). February in general has been quiet socially which, as work has been mad, was very welcome. My only busy weekend was last weekend which featured Folded Edge on the Saturday and a visit to Cambridge on the Sunday.

Folded Edge was a fairly thoughtful session, for us anyway. We landed at our planned destination (which, by our standards, is a small triumph) and then stayed there all session. We saw Treasure's father (or, at least, Sen, Treasure and I did), Sen had a meal with a contact whilst no-one shot at him (again, unusual) and we mostly solved the ghost ship problem. Mainly by figuring out more about white space. Also, the crew finally had That Conversation About The War - overdue since the prelude. I guess I could sum this one up as the session where no-one tried to kill us.

My train reading covered one new book before I returned to re-reading Brookmyres. The book in question was Pariah by Dan Abnett set in the Warhammer 40K universe. It's first of the Bequin trilogy (aka Ravenor vs Eisenhorn). It was pretty good overall, although I spent the first two-thirds feeling that someone was re-writing history. I'm looking forward to the other two when they come out.

I'm still waiting for Jonathan Boakes to release Blackenrock, but in the meantime I've been introduced to Funcon's (Tørnquist) The Secret World. My first MMO, it was suggested by a combination of chrisvenus, ao_lai and Alistair J to fill our Wednesday evenings which we previously uses to play Diablo III, Diablo II and Titan Quest. I found it hard to get into (probably not helped by having never touched a MMO before), frustrating in places (bugs and problems with lots of people attempting the same mission) and very addictive. I'm now both soloing and playing a party character and both belong to the Templars faction. TSW is based on the idea that there is another face of the world attached to the normal one where magic and stuff happens. I'm currently kicking around Kingsmouth ignoring Lovecraft references and beating up zombies. In short - I'd recommend it.

After some months (years?) of considering it, bateleur and I added The Wire to our Lovefilms list (we always wanted to see it, but it was a question of whether to buy or rent). Two discs (five episodes) in and it's very good. I'll write a review at the end of season one.

Oh yeah, and if anyone wants to see Reeve in the newspaper, he's at the top here.