Not only the final day of October, but also Halloween and the last day of Inktober 2022.
It didn’t start well. At 7:30am our next door neighbour started banging nails into his wall, which is also our wall. I think he got a new hammer for his birthday and wanted to see how it worked. No point in complaining. He trained as a lawyer and became a taxi driver, or that’s the impression he gives.
It was hot last night, I was actually sweating in bed, in October. That’s just not natural. All the news reports are telling us that this weather is not normal for the time of year. Excuse me, but some of us have lived in this country for a few years now and know how hot or cold it should be, we don’t need some teenager to tell us. Y’see that’s what happens when I get woken up early by a hammer wielding ex-lawyer who’s banging nails into his wall. I just end up grumpy for the rest of the day.
Lunch was roast beef with garlic and coriander. It sounds awful, but usually it tastes really good. Not so today. The smell was starting to make me sick, but luckily I didn’t go through with it. I did chuck the offending remainder in the bin.
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On the first of each month I back up my photos for that month onto a big 2TB or 4TB external hard drive. Today I thought it would be a good idea to check that everything was working after the upgrade of the OS. It wasn’t. The problem was I couldn’t see the external drive on the computer. I read about lots of different ways to circumvent the problem, but none of them worked. About an hour and a half later I found the solution. The drives were made by Seagate, and with no fanfare, I stumbled upon a patch on the Seagate site. Installed it then restarted the machine. It worked a treat. Both my external drives worked perfectly. It’s just another case of Apple wanting you to use their external drives and putting blocks in the way of you when you try to use PC hardware.
</Technospeak>
Later in the afternoon I went for a walk in St Mo’s, partly to clear my head and partly to get a PoD. The PoD was easy. I found a patch of Candle Snuffer fungi on my way to the park. Another name for it is Stags Horn fungus, (Xylaria hypoxylon). I can almost see the Stags Horns, but have no idea what a candle snuffer looks like. Anyway, PoD found. I also got a very wide angle shot of a tree with a carpet of leaves beneath it. Look on Flickr for it.
When I got back I wasn’t feeling great. Sore back, a bit tired and aching. I took a couple of paracetamol with a cup of tea and didn’t feel much better.
It being Monday, dinner was pasta with tomato sauce and some bacon for extra flavour. Best I’ve made for ages, and I was beginning to feel better after that. Maybe the heat during the night, maybe the dodgy roast beef or maybe just being a bit cold coming home in the gloaming. I’ll take another couple of paracetamol before I go to bed.
So this is the last day of Inktober 2022. I’ll miss it. I always do, but it’s not been the same this year. Too many folk just dumping their paintings and photographs into Inktober and thinking they’ll get away with it. They won’t. They didn’t. Some complained and some just shrugged their shoulders and went to find the next new group. This is the first time, or maybe the second that I’ve had to ban someone from Inktober. I did it with mixed feelings, but they knew the rules when they joined.
Anyway, today’s sketch was of Matilda the tractor driving hen. There a nice wee nonsense story about her on the Inktober 2022 page on Flickr.
Some tidying up of photos and stuff tomorrow. Some messages to get at the shops. That’s about it. Not a lot, but enough to keep us both busy.