Sun Back - #AnimalAugust #14

Last night there was another Windows update , but this was a five minute one so I'm OK with that. Just wish that they were all that easy.

After the deluge that night the sun looks to have returned and it's a beautiful morning. This has continued so far and is looking to be a nice day after the greyness earlier in the week.

While I didn't feel liek doing any walking, that has picked up so I'm back on target for my steps.

I'm enjoying "Venus On The Halfshell" although Mr Farmer takes every opportunity to drop in a single entendre . On slightly unusual thing , is , I know it's a 1970s copy, but the pages are on quite thick paper, and I keep thinking that I've turned multiple pages, but I am re enjoying the book.

I also keep dipping into "Small Dreams of a Scorpion" with Milligan veering from funny / absurd  to serious and thought provoking.

TV wise I am on the final series of Veep and despite everyone being particularly awful (like the American Republicans and the UK Tory Party) it is very funny and incredibly well written and acted. Sometimes you see actors being particularly obnoxious , but generally that shows them just to be excellent actors.

Once I've finished that I do have "Silicon Valley" to be getting on with , which also has it's share of obnoxious characters.

For #AnimalAugust I can share "Five Years Time" by Noah and the Whale , a particular favourite of mine in it's almost flung together feel.

Have a brilliant Thursday.

The New Time

One of the problems with getting older is that the days seem to get shorter and you seem to have less time to do things, well that's how I feel. A number of people with children want to get the children back to school mainly because they are missing their friends, and of course looking after young children 24/7 is not an easy task.

The thing is that six weeks of lockdown for a six year old is a fiftieth of their life , where for me it's one five hundredth so it seems a lot longer for them that it does for me although the actual time is the same.

I am now trying to find a way of perceiving time in the same way that a child does and see a week's holiday or even a weekend as a long time. A weekend is around 62 hours from work finish to work start for most Monday to Friday workers and we should be able to see that as time to enjoy and do things.

I'm often reminded of "The Eighty Minute Hour" by Brian Aldiss where the controllers speed up clocks when we are not at work and slow them down when we are at work, and if that were happening  would we know?

People often waste weeks wishing for Friday , I used to be like that but now think "What Can I Do Today?" . If you are always looking forward to Friday you effectively throw away five days of your week , and the weekend is only two days so that makes your time seem to fly by.

My aim is not only to slow time down , but to do more in that time. I often am bothered by going for
walks because , by it's nature, that takes time, although usually I listen to music while walking as they are complimentary activities and listening to music can almost make the activity go faster. The paradox is that you want to finish your walk , but you want to enjoy your time doing it and if time speeds up you feel you are losing out.

Matt Haig wrote one of his excellent books "How To Stop Time" which also took this as part of his premise, and his self help page from "Reasons To Stay Alive" is excellent , so I am now FEELING TIME as well as taking my final part in the #maywriteabit , because tomorrow is the first of June.

So what song should we go with , there are many songs called "Time" , Pink Floyd and David Bowie come to mind, and even "Five Years Time" by Noah and the Whale and "Minutes" by The Human League came to mind.

I decided to go with "The Waiting" by Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers as it is sort of appropriate for the position we are in now and does contain a lot of pertinent lines to the lockdown situation.

Connect

There are lots of ways to instantly connect with people today and most of the time it is instant only determined by whether who you are connecting with are not doing something else. Tonight in Settle I saw an impressive sunset which I shared on Instagram and therefore Facebook and my eldest daughter saw and loved it.

Sharing photographs with friends and sharing them with the world can introduce you to more people and potential friends. Although I lose count of the amount of social media options that we have, but as a kid my options were phone call, letter writing and face to face and that was about it.

I have friends in Scotland, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, The USA and Canada and probably lots more countries, and now the ability to instantly contact most of them if I should want, and they can contact me, and this option is open to anyone who embraces digital channels.

We can still write letters and call via landlines, and face to face is still the best way to communicate and is my preferred option.

On the blogging front I'm hoping to hit 366 posts by New Year's Eve ,if I don't do it this year I probably never will. I know I used to post some one line things but now I tend to do 250-300 words per post so that's going to be eleven thousand words before the end of the year, though if I could start writing the novel I want to write I would be producing that many words a day at least.

So what song should I share with you? Given that we should treasure our past and embrace the future I'm going to go with "Five Years Time" by Noah and the Whale which I love every time I hear it.

Virgin On The Ridiculous.

Two years ago I did a post a day in May, this May I've posted virtually nothing.  Things are still happening but today my time has just been eaten up with work and a getting a new TV device and router installed by Virgin, followed by a quick trip into town, which became not so quick , and it was raining , but c'est la vie.

We are all resistant to change, though I like to think I'm open to it, whether it's a new job , new bus route , new phone or whatever, but with the installation of the TIVO I was thinking I'm going to have to learn how to use it, and like a typical man haven't bothered with the manual, the writings to small anyway. I looked at the online and discovered it has an Ethernet cable which means I can connect it to my network but I'm not sure what that will let me do.

Anyway this gets me into the thing where once you take the plunge to do something new, there's usually no going back and sometimes it's only taking that first step that gets to into another world of possiblilities.

That sounds grandiose , but it isnt . I got a TIVO box because it will save me £15 a month on my TV outgoings, as well as increasing my storage capacity by 200% as well as yet undreamt of extras.

Anyway it's good if you can do new things, and I'm lucky enough to have the opportunity, so I've done a post about something not too interesting but , I thought I'd let you know. Have a great night everyone.

Included the Noah and The Whale song cos I've always loved it and it has lovely sentiments.