Another bright morning and a cold day to follow it.
I think we just sat in the warm living room and looked out at the world outside for a while. We also stood at the back window and watched the antics of a couple of magpies struggling to find a way to get at the fat in half a coconut shell that’s hanging on the rowan tree. It’s a cheap bird feeder I bought intending it for the bluetits to feed on. However one of the wily magpies found a way to hook the string that holds the coconut with its claw and pull it close, meaning it could plunder the contents in comfort. The others were still flying up, taking a peck and falling back down. I think they expended more energy than they gained from the fat.
Scamp wrote a letter to the Gas Ombudsman, complaining about the terrible wait we’ve had to get a gas bill. Nobody seems to know why we’ve not had a bill and any correspondence we get for British Gas is basically a photocopy with the date changed from the last one. The smart meter is working for the electricity bill, but not for the gas! Maybe we need someone to come out and read the meter! We’ll see what the Ombudsman can do to jolly them along.
After lunch we walked down to the shops for the makings of a stir-fry and some potatoes to make Potato and Leek soup. There were a group of ‘workies’ cutting back the bushes at the front of the house. I didn’t envy them their work in the cold breeze that was blowing. We felt it too on our fifteen minute walk to the shops. I’d intended leaving the bags with Scamp on the way back and going for a walk in St Mo’s, but they were quite heavy, so I walked home with her and then went out again to see what I could find. Not a lot was the answer, although I did startle a deer in the woods. It saw/smelled/heard me long before I noticed it and it was away like the wind. I tried taking photos of some fungi but few of them were interesting, then I found a curvy looking flat topped mushroom just as the sun shone through the trees on it. I think I missed the best of that light, but was happy with the image I did get. That became PoD.
Back home the workies had finished and I could smell soup, so the potatoes had been used! I made a cup of coffee and uploaded today’s photos then worked on them for a while. Then I remembered, or was reminded by the computer that there was an update to the iMac’s OS, so I put it in. About an hour later I was walking past the computer and noticed the screen was still black with a white progress line half way along its slot. Not long after an error message flashed on the screen. The update had failed for some reason. On a normal week, I’d already have made a backup of the OS and would just have overwritten the OS with a new one, but I hadn’t made a backup and I didn’t want to risk losing the data as well as the operating system. I tried a Safe Mode start and everything was still there, but I decided I’d wait until tomorrow to do a backup and then replace the OS. Computers are a pain some times. Dinner was the stir-fry and it was quite good, but nothing special. Soup was kept for tomorrow.
Today was the last sketch in Inktober for this year. The prompt was Fire. Instead of an actual fire I chose to sketch the vehicle that hopefully would be responsible for stopping a fire. It’s based on a Dennis F8 Fire Engine 1955. The group this year with a couple of headbanger exceptions has been really good and well behaved. That made my life a lot easier!
I think a dance practise will be called for tomorrow. Other than that, we may well be sheltering from the predicted rain!