h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

[Nick - happy 50th to Milady, a day as depicted by Wowbagger]

http://public.fotki.com/RevNick/family-1/cheryls-50th-birthd.html

Morning all.

Happy Birthday to Mrs Nick. Nice Wowbagger pictures.

Definitely nice wowbagger pics.

Tod, I'll cover for you in the rift over the weekend. And now I must get on with my chores.

(Wowbagger had links to family pics, the B&B, the restaurant, ... and every piccy obviously hand-done. That 'southern-plantation' place as a B&B, transplanted here in the 1940's, he did it to the perfect 'T' idea ... Inside and out ... I was far beyond impressed)

Is everyone still off playing with squid?

*Pokes about in kitchen, finds slab of cooking chocolate, a saucepan, a grater, a whisk, the rum and a bottle of rich, creamy milk, and sets about making hot chocolate with a kick, messily, under the patient and benevolent eye of Matina, who can tell when someone has had a b*gg*r of a day and needs to be left to get chocolate on the counter in peace*

Anyone else want some while I'm at it?

Yes please! That squid adventure will go on for a year, mark my words. Salonistas do not hurry when they are adventuring. Tea breaks. Badinage. Consultations regarding rules of continuity. Someone goes away for a week IRL and everyone else hangs about waiting for them to come back and finish slaying their dragon or whatever.

Speaking of going away for a week IRL...

I'm off to adventure in and around Yellowstone Saturday morning for a bot more than a week. I will have my iPhone and laptop but don't know if/when I will have service. I know there is service up there but my carrier does not have any cell towers up there.

*Passes out mugs*

I love the way the Salonistas adventure. I watch them through this strange little lurking spy-glass, and chortle my head off.

I have an ambition to go to Yellowstone one day. I mean, a volcanic caldera 44 miles across? Wow. With added wow. And wolves.

Don't forget your picanic basket GDZ!

Husband still not home from work. I can either start on the icecream or go to bed.

Glad the first year review went well Z, and at least you know you won't be quite as distrcted for year 2.

Am mourning the passing of the age of the space shuttle. A shuttle! Into space! Maybe we can all go!

*pops into the kitchen (because you can be in two places at once) and gives Agapanthus a squishy hug, and helps with making the hot chocolate in a non getting in the way sort of fashion*

hope everything is okay.

mini

The picanic basket is under lock and key kelli!

This afternoon I was organizing some stuff to go to the pageant jumble sale , and the cleaning lady pulled some old filing cabinets -- drawer units, really -- off a closet shelf and put them where I could clean them out before donating them. They were originally filing drawers for 3.5" diskettes, and then I used them for zip disks.

I don't know what someone would use them for now, but they're still quite usable for... something about that size. Maybe they can go to work in some guy's shed.

Anyway, I pulled the drawers open and found loads of 3.5 diskettes from the 90's, along with some zip disks, which I don't even have a drive for anymore.

I threw everything away except for about half a dozen 3.5's -- a copy of Wordstar 4 dated 1/1/90, a paint program I helped work on in 1988, and a disk labeled simply "Can't live without". I bet there's a copy of go.com on it. Um, dot com meant "command file" back then.

3.5" diskettes? Oh, you modern beibg. When I started on PCs, it was 5.25"...

(with much thanks to Monthy Python's Yorkshiremen - anything to brighten the fact that I am now heading out with the dog in a rainy morning instead of being under my duvet...)

Any chance of while you're at it, Ag and mini?

*kicks a "b" out and eases an "n" in its place*

I used 5.25" quite often as a youngster. I once saw an 8" in a demonstration of what NOT to do to a floppy diskette.

This last shuttle was one where Twitter really came into its own; my cousin was there watching , and he was tweeting and ringing me directly, but I was also following the real-time reactions using the hashtag #STS135. Oh and the astronauts had twitter accounts too.

One thing cousin David mentioned to me was how bad the mosquitoes were, even at 4 am. And I thought - how on earth (ha!) do they make sure that no mozzies get into the rockets and payloads and all those big big vehicles? Anyone know?

[]

Reading about squids as well

I am stuck at home being unwell. I shall have to brace myself shortly to go to the chemist and collect my prescriptions, or I will be even more unwell tomorrow. The chemist is about 100 yards away from our flat. This is no big deal. *sobs pathetically*.

Meanwhile, feeling rather mopey about the discontinuation of the Space Shuttle program. End of Era etc. etc. Not to mention the interesting irony of NASA now needing Russian help to get to their own orbiters. What on earth would Nixon have made of that?

And the Russian space capsule is based on a design even older than the shuttle.

Ag, you can do it, get to the chemist even if it's all you do today.

We're currently sat in a traffic queue coming off a motorway. We'll sit in the queue for another mile or two till we get to the grounds of the big stately home like everyone else, we're off the the RHS Tatton Park flower show. It might not have as much prestige as Chelsea but it's a lot easier for MC and me to get to.

Enjoy you trip to Yellowstone GDZ somewhere I'd like to go.