The concert was very good. It turned out that the Dvorak was his cello concerto, with Natalie Clein. I love Dvorak's cello concerto, and I've never seen Natalie Clein before, so that was an unexpected treat to happen on a Saturday night in Ipswich. In the second half we got Tchaikovsky's first symphony, which the conductor assured us was very rarely performed, and it was delightful.
There will not be any pick axing today, or any gardening at all. I think the joint of my left middle knuckle is inflamed, though not infected. At any rate, it is sore, worse today than yesterday, but before taking it to the doctor I probably should try resting it. I can't imagine the GP would bother referring it to a specialist (I believe Chelmsford is rather good at hands) when I hadn't even tried giving it a day off to see if that improved matters.
In the meantime, let us add the salutary story of the new bedside clock to the saga of the plumbing. The radio part of the Systems Administrator's clock-radio stopped working, so the SA went to a shop and bought a replacement, incorporating a digital DAB radio. It was quite cheap. After it was installed on the bedside table I noticed a bright unearthly gleam shining on the side of the pillows, when I went into the bedroom after dark with both hands full of a basket of laundry which prevented me switching on the light at once. This turned out to be the new clock. The old one had those red LED strips that fit together to make clunky rectangular digits. Old fashioned and inelegant, but casting very little light. The new one had a liquid crystal display, able to spell out much more information about what the digital radio was doing, but casting so much light in the process that you could see to match up pairs of socks by it. The SA has cut down the amount of light by sticking tape over most of the display, so that you can just see the time in the middle. I don't know who made the wretched thing, but it doesn't appear to have occurred to them to test it in an actual darkened room. One advantage of buying domestic electrical goods on-line is that you can read the users' reviews first, since we won't be the first people to have noticed this design defect.
It doesn't only happen to cheap clock-radios. The SA's brother used to work for a small British manufacturing company that made electrical components for the Eurofighter (or Typhoon, or whatever they call it nowadays). They received an order for some LEDs to go on the cockpit control panel. In upmarket manufacturing circles the brightness of these things is accurately measured in lumens, and they queried the technical specification because the LEDs seemed rather bright, but they were told to stop questioning the customer's requirements and get on with it, so they did. So did lots of other suppliers, as it transpired.
Everybody shipped off their components and a demonstration control panel was built and installed in a flight simulator, and a military pilot came along to test it. Tested it in daylight conditions, all fine and dandy. Tested it under night conditions, great. Then the poor test pilot put on his night vision goggles, and they switched on the test rig, and his eyeballs nearly exploded as the unbearable brightness of dozens of wrongly specified LEDs burst upon him, magnified to intolerable luminosity by the night goggles. Told you so.
Addendum The SA has fitted the new component to the upstairs loo and turned the water to the cistern back on. When the tank finishes filling it now makes a small, strange wailing noise, as if a seal were giving birth in the bathroom.
Showing posts with label light. Show all posts
Showing posts with label light. Show all posts
Sunday, 27 November 2011
Monday, 21 November 2011
another quiet day
The dog had an entertaining start to the day. She was playing the rat game, rummaging around the office whimpering as if she had detected some rodent intruder, but each time the gardener lifted up the clutter at the place where she was looking nothing emerged, or scuttled away, and the dog went to whine somewhere else. I thought she was spoofing the boss, and he agreed.
My start to the day was less entertaining. I found some gentians that were going mouldy, which I deadheaded and cut back, as something useful to do while I was waiting for the manager to finish checking the emails and come and tell me what I should be doing. He marched up after a while and asked who had put the shrubs into the tunnel where the magnolias used to be. This was one of the things on his weekend list of things to do, and I had done it, so I said so. He said that they were going the wrong way, as he had wanted the alphabet going downhill away from the central aisle and not uphill towards it, and would I like to switch them all round. Thank you very much. It didn't say that in his instructions, and there is no logical reason why the alphabet should go one way or the other, given that in different parts of the nursery it goes both ways. I worked jolly hard over the weekend, labelling and moving a huge number of plants with a hand swollen to the size of a small potato that hurt every time I knocked the back of it on anything, and taking horsepill antibiotics that made me feel like crap. I said so, emphatically.
Afterwards I felt vaguely remorseful, but only vaguely. He is the manager. He must be paid a lot more than I am, and gets better terms and conditions, and for that he is supposed to supervise and motivate me, not start my week by moaning that instructions that only existed in his head hadn't been followed. Then I switched the pots around.
One of our regular customers came in, asking whether we could fit one of the trained espalier apple trees in her car. I suggested taking the empirical approach, and measuring the tree and the car to find out if it were theoretically possible. The tree turned out to be 48 inches wide and 67 inches tall including the pot (there's my cover blown. I have dutifully blogged all year in metric, but I think in feet and inches. Sorry. I can cook in metric but under stress can imagine 8oz better than 250g). The car turned out to be a Nissan Micra, and was 52 inches wide. A distance of 67 inches from the inside of the tailgate would put the top of the tree somewhere above the handbrake. I said that the tree would go in the car. The only slight difficulty was that the door of the Micra was several inches narrower than the width inside the boot, but the tree just slid in on the diagonal, after I'd cut off a bit of one of the supporting canes. It was protruding beyond the branch tied to it anyway, so she won't miss it. Whether and how she will ever get the tree out again at the other end is another question.
Somebody rang up asking if we had any Parrotia persica. After a little searching around I found some nice plants for a relatively modest price. It turned out that he was a tree officer, organising a memorial tree that somebody wanted to donate to a local park, and between them they had decided on a Persian ironwood. He was keen to have more exotic trees in the park, and pleased with the price because his donor was on a limited budget. I thought how unlikely, and how delightful, that in these cash strapped times a council still had a tree officer who was willing to work with members of the public, and put the time and effort into sourcing unusual trees. A colleague recently started a marketing initiative, sending out a list of rare woody plants we can currently supply to arboretums and large gardens, and I suggested the tree officer should add his name to it. I guess that you become a tree officer because you like trees, but you probably spend a lot of your working life after that dealing with ones that are suspected of becoming unsafe, or undermining foundations. Being allowed to plant new trees instead of delivering the fatal verdict on existing ones must make a nice change.
The electricians arrived to instal new lights in the central portion of the shop, which meant moving various tables of breakables so that they could get the scaffolding in. New lights were sorely needed. The old ones consisted of three gigantic bulbs in metal casings that always filled up with flies in summer, only intermittently all came on at the same time, and cast the same amount of depressing and insufficient light as energy saving lightbulbs do in the home. Putting up the new lights caused us little inconvenience, apart from the scaffolding and the noise of cordless drills and screwdrivers (marvellous inventions), but unfortunately by the time they were ready to connect the new lights to the mains and disconnect the old ones, which entailed switching off the lighting circuit for obvious reasons, it was already mid afternoon. The shop with no lights at all was extremely dark, and I think the electricians struggled to see what they were doing wiring up the new ones. I couldn't really see the till either, but by then there were very few customers. The shop illuminated by the new lights looked much more welcoming, and very, very bright.
The day's takings were pitifully small, though there will be some invoices to come for various deliveries. Maybe it is the economic apocalypse.
My start to the day was less entertaining. I found some gentians that were going mouldy, which I deadheaded and cut back, as something useful to do while I was waiting for the manager to finish checking the emails and come and tell me what I should be doing. He marched up after a while and asked who had put the shrubs into the tunnel where the magnolias used to be. This was one of the things on his weekend list of things to do, and I had done it, so I said so. He said that they were going the wrong way, as he had wanted the alphabet going downhill away from the central aisle and not uphill towards it, and would I like to switch them all round. Thank you very much. It didn't say that in his instructions, and there is no logical reason why the alphabet should go one way or the other, given that in different parts of the nursery it goes both ways. I worked jolly hard over the weekend, labelling and moving a huge number of plants with a hand swollen to the size of a small potato that hurt every time I knocked the back of it on anything, and taking horsepill antibiotics that made me feel like crap. I said so, emphatically.
Afterwards I felt vaguely remorseful, but only vaguely. He is the manager. He must be paid a lot more than I am, and gets better terms and conditions, and for that he is supposed to supervise and motivate me, not start my week by moaning that instructions that only existed in his head hadn't been followed. Then I switched the pots around.
One of our regular customers came in, asking whether we could fit one of the trained espalier apple trees in her car. I suggested taking the empirical approach, and measuring the tree and the car to find out if it were theoretically possible. The tree turned out to be 48 inches wide and 67 inches tall including the pot (there's my cover blown. I have dutifully blogged all year in metric, but I think in feet and inches. Sorry. I can cook in metric but under stress can imagine 8oz better than 250g). The car turned out to be a Nissan Micra, and was 52 inches wide. A distance of 67 inches from the inside of the tailgate would put the top of the tree somewhere above the handbrake. I said that the tree would go in the car. The only slight difficulty was that the door of the Micra was several inches narrower than the width inside the boot, but the tree just slid in on the diagonal, after I'd cut off a bit of one of the supporting canes. It was protruding beyond the branch tied to it anyway, so she won't miss it. Whether and how she will ever get the tree out again at the other end is another question.
Somebody rang up asking if we had any Parrotia persica. After a little searching around I found some nice plants for a relatively modest price. It turned out that he was a tree officer, organising a memorial tree that somebody wanted to donate to a local park, and between them they had decided on a Persian ironwood. He was keen to have more exotic trees in the park, and pleased with the price because his donor was on a limited budget. I thought how unlikely, and how delightful, that in these cash strapped times a council still had a tree officer who was willing to work with members of the public, and put the time and effort into sourcing unusual trees. A colleague recently started a marketing initiative, sending out a list of rare woody plants we can currently supply to arboretums and large gardens, and I suggested the tree officer should add his name to it. I guess that you become a tree officer because you like trees, but you probably spend a lot of your working life after that dealing with ones that are suspected of becoming unsafe, or undermining foundations. Being allowed to plant new trees instead of delivering the fatal verdict on existing ones must make a nice change.
The electricians arrived to instal new lights in the central portion of the shop, which meant moving various tables of breakables so that they could get the scaffolding in. New lights were sorely needed. The old ones consisted of three gigantic bulbs in metal casings that always filled up with flies in summer, only intermittently all came on at the same time, and cast the same amount of depressing and insufficient light as energy saving lightbulbs do in the home. Putting up the new lights caused us little inconvenience, apart from the scaffolding and the noise of cordless drills and screwdrivers (marvellous inventions), but unfortunately by the time they were ready to connect the new lights to the mains and disconnect the old ones, which entailed switching off the lighting circuit for obvious reasons, it was already mid afternoon. The shop with no lights at all was extremely dark, and I think the electricians struggled to see what they were doing wiring up the new ones. I couldn't really see the till either, but by then there were very few customers. The shop illuminated by the new lights looked much more welcoming, and very, very bright.
The day's takings were pitifully small, though there will be some invoices to come for various deliveries. Maybe it is the economic apocalypse.
Saturday, 15 October 2011
et in arcadia ego
It was a very beautiful day, with strong light that made the Verbena bonariensis look almost fluorescent, and virtually no wind, and I made the most of it, crawling around weeding. I realised how low the sun sits in the sky at this time of year, as for a large part of the morning it never made it above the little oak tree and the hedge, and I was in shadow as I pulled creeping sorrel and goose grass seedlings out of the island bed in the back garden. There was a heavy dew last night, and my gloves were soon soaked. The BBC keeps reporting that various newspapers are carrying stories of cold weather to come, and even snow by Monday. I find that unlikely, but am aware of how valuable each day working outside is. There have been years when I've been able to carry on right up until the New Year, but the Systems Administrator has warned me that the recent warm and settled weather is linked to jet stream patterns that could bring another cold winter if they persist.
As we were sitting in the kitchen eating lunch we heard a strange barking sound, and our ginger came rushing away from the sitting room and scuttled out of the cat flap. This was odd enough to make us go through and check what was going on, but there was no strange creature to be seen from the sitting room windows, only the big rangy tabby sitting on the window sill, dribbling and looking anxious. As he often dribbles and looks worried this wasn't a clear sign of anything, but we went outside and had a quick look in the garden. Nothing. Not even the neighbours' airedale, which has a wandering tendency. Maybe it was a dog. Maybe a fox? A muntjac? We both heard it, and it got an odd reaction from the cats.
As I weeded, a small bird or birds flitted about, sometimes very close to me, but never in my direct line of sight. I presume a robin or robins, since they are the boldest around people and understand weeding and worms. The strong sideways light is beautiful but also casts a sinister aspect over the landscape, and I don't think it's any coincidence that Halloween, All Hallows Eve, and the mythology of dead souls walking the earth falls at the end of October.
Later on I moved to weed in the front garden so that I could supervise the chickens. I pulled up a half-dead lump of thrift to find a small toad, which began to back away from me, blinking. I admired it for a moment, then moved it to sit beneath a large clump of ornamental grass, where it might feel safe and I wouldn't accidentally kneel on it. A toad, a familiar, a very appropriate find for such a day.
Addendum I found one person who liked Autumnwatch, a twenty-something journalist writing for the Telegraph, who regarded it as an acceptable substitute for the now axed Top of the Pops. The Systems Administrator and I have given up, and bought a boxed set of all six series of The Sopranos, which should keep us going. After episode one I'm hooked, and there are 85 to go.
As we were sitting in the kitchen eating lunch we heard a strange barking sound, and our ginger came rushing away from the sitting room and scuttled out of the cat flap. This was odd enough to make us go through and check what was going on, but there was no strange creature to be seen from the sitting room windows, only the big rangy tabby sitting on the window sill, dribbling and looking anxious. As he often dribbles and looks worried this wasn't a clear sign of anything, but we went outside and had a quick look in the garden. Nothing. Not even the neighbours' airedale, which has a wandering tendency. Maybe it was a dog. Maybe a fox? A muntjac? We both heard it, and it got an odd reaction from the cats.
As I weeded, a small bird or birds flitted about, sometimes very close to me, but never in my direct line of sight. I presume a robin or robins, since they are the boldest around people and understand weeding and worms. The strong sideways light is beautiful but also casts a sinister aspect over the landscape, and I don't think it's any coincidence that Halloween, All Hallows Eve, and the mythology of dead souls walking the earth falls at the end of October.
Later on I moved to weed in the front garden so that I could supervise the chickens. I pulled up a half-dead lump of thrift to find a small toad, which began to back away from me, blinking. I admired it for a moment, then moved it to sit beneath a large clump of ornamental grass, where it might feel safe and I wouldn't accidentally kneel on it. A toad, a familiar, a very appropriate find for such a day.
Addendum I found one person who liked Autumnwatch, a twenty-something journalist writing for the Telegraph, who regarded it as an acceptable substitute for the now axed Top of the Pops. The Systems Administrator and I have given up, and bought a boxed set of all six series of The Sopranos, which should keep us going. After episode one I'm hooked, and there are 85 to go.
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