Wet days are for catching up with domestic stuff. I went into Colchester for a haircut. Admittedly that was booked in the middle of last week, so if it had been a lovely day for gardening I'd still have had to go, but it is always mildly satisfying to be able to catch up with things like that while feeling that the opportunity cost is pretty much nil. I bought a 2013 East Coast Calender by Den Phillips as well, while I was at it, and went to the bank. I parked behind in the car park behind the leisure complex in Cowdray Avenue, to avoid the aftermath of the water main that burst last night at the bottom of Balkerne Hill, and the sound of church bells ringing as I walked back across Castle Park in the light rain had a sort of melancholy charm.
By the afternoon the rain was seriously settling in, and the puddle in the drive that indicates we've had more than a sprinkling was beginning to form. I decided it was time to do my ironing, which had been piling up on the spare bed for quite a time. There was a lot of ironing, enough to last for the whole of Schubert's Death and the Maiden, and two Beethoven piano concertos. Actually, I think my iPod was doing something peculiar with those, along the lines of playing all the right movements but not necessarily in the right order, and I have just scrubbed them off my iTunes library and reloaded them from the CD.
Meanwhile the Systems Administrator was wrestling with new replacement technology, in the form of a laptop and a stereo amplifier. The SA's previous laptop failed spectacularly, or at least totally, two days ago. It didn't start playing up and getting cranky about things, but simply stopped. No lights, no action, no power, no nothing. It is now with a professional firm in Colchester to retrieve the data off the hard disc. By yesterday evening the new replacement laptop had wiped the SA's iPod, instead of reloading the SA's music library from the iPod to the laptop. By this evening the SA had managed to find the file where the laptop had put the library.
The amp died by degrees a few weeks ago. First one channel went, and then weird distortions started appearing on the other. It had done us well, since the SA bought it not long after we moved into our previous house, which dates it to 1987 or 1988. It was a Marantz, which came out well in hi-fi surveys in the late 1980s. Twenty five years later it still does, so the SA replaced like with like. The new amp comes with a remote control, and it is rather lux to be able to adjust the volume without getting up, going to the shelf under the stairs where the stereo lives, twiddling the knob and shouting to the person in the upstairs room to ask if that's OK, or if it needs to go up a bit or down a bit. The stairs would get in the way of the remote signal, but an infra-red booster station that we already had gets round that. As an added bonus it is possible to change tracks via the remote. The SA can't work out quite how the stack does that, but says that the amp and CD player must be able to talk to each other, in which case well done Marantz for maintaining compatibility between pieces of equipment bought a quarter of a century apart.
Now I have a technological challenge of my own, to update my iPod after copying some more Chopin and Dvorak into my iTunes library on the laptop. The iPod has been getting rather difficult about updating itself, so I hope that technological death is not going to come in threes.
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