Silly Sunday – November Nothings

~ tidalscribe.com

Random ponderings on First World Problems and out of world experiences.

Miserable November afternoon

Happy November morning, welcomed by a Robin singing his heart out.

It has been a discombobulating month so far. WordPress would not let me download new photographs; how could I go on any walks if I couldn’t use my photos! The naughty elf who runs WordPress seemed to be suggesting my gallery was too full. I deleted lots of pictures to no avail and causing havoc to my posts and pages.  To be fair to WordPress this was on my desk top computer which is still on Windows 10, now no longer supported, whatever that means. Cyberson2 had suggested I didn’t need to worry or at least there was no point in doing anything, as my old computer would not cope with Windows 11. He had downloaded extra protection when they were visiting recently… And hey ho, I have heard scary things about Windows 11…   So I created a test blog on my iPad and whoopee, pictures were accepted, so now I download pictures to the gallery then do my blog on the computer where my word documents are…

Anyway, back to real life. One of our local towns is in lockdown or gridlock… there are always road works somewhere, but this is work on the bypass that does not bypass the town, but ends at the roundabout. Only one side at a time is being closed over the next three weeks, but apparently locals could not drive or catch a bus with any hope of getting there. No problem for me, I don’t drive, don’t live in the town and I walk there.  But it turns out walking across the river to your writers’ group or coffee morning is not much good if nobody else is there. Like any group we arrive from all directions to a central point.

Meanwhile, no such problem in Southbourne for our monthly book club, only one person absent. The only problem being half of us had not read the book and only one person loved it, nobody else liked it! After the previous month’s enjoyable hardback in good print size, we were faced with a thick paperback in small print. This is a famous novel many people have loved over the years. Find out what it was at the end of this blog. With two lots of visitors staying and blogs to write, I started reading, but decided I must abandon it. I met one of the other members out and about and was relieved to hear she had not read it either.

It is looking like autumn, but too mild. I have just given my so called lawn its third final mow of the year. Talking of global warming, we seem to have heard too little about Prince William’s Earthshot prize and ten year project. While world leaders preside over wars and destruction, clever people are working and innovating to look after the planet.

And talking of the planet…

Years ago my husband came back indoors one night and said he had just watched the space station fly over Ken’s garage. He had asked another neighbour why he was staring above Ken’s garage. We hadn’t known we could go on line and track its many differing orbits. After that we were obsessed for the period it was passing over Southbourne, or Dorset or England…

The International Space Station, that shining beacon of humanity, science and international cooperation is coming up to retirement or abandonment. My scientific knowledge usually comes from tuning in to the middle of intelligent radio programmes, so it may or may not be true that a space station does not stay in orbit of its own accord and is reliant on the occasional blast of propulsion, worked by the Russians. To bring it down safely to some remote Mexican desert is not guaranteed, dependent as it is on international cooperation. Russia’s MIR was successfully brought down in the desert, but Skylab was scattered over Western Australia in 1979. To have a piece of ISS come down in my road would be blogworthy, but possibly more inconvenient than work on the bypass.

Possible scenario of bits of ISS falling on Bournemouth seafront.

The novel was Catch 22 and the person who loved it also loved my novella Pandemonica and gave it a five star review on Goodreads, so she is obviously a good judge of books...

Have you read Catch 22… or Pandemonica?

Have you spotted the space station or perhaps even been to the space station?

31 thoughts on “Silly Sunday – November Nothings”

  2. Windows 10 to Windows 11 was fairly painless for me when the time came. I recently experienced the WordPress “spam junk jail” status where all my comments became spam-worthy, but it fairness I must inform the Happiness Engineers fixed that issue fairly quickly…for now at least! Ya gotta love a book club that doesn’t read the book. That is a “novel” concept. “Third final mow” of the year made me laugh so hard. I of course have documented my interest elsewhere in getting that “final” mow just right. I will start keeping an eye to the sky for the ISS. It would be a bit more of an inconvenience than the roadwork being done here as well.

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  3. I know I read Heller’s book not many years after it came out. I was young and impressionable and think I liked the illogical rationality but sixty years later I remember next to nothing about the actual story. I was fascinated enough to incorporate Catch 22 into my vocabulary.

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    1. I’m guessing it doesn’t matter if you don’t remember the actual story Geoff, at least you have read it. For an author to choose a title that becomes part of world wide vocabulary, as well as yours, is rather clever.

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      1. It was over our way 8th November however I missed it but I will be checking in future I have never given it a thought but now its on my radar I can share it with Lily…although she may know as there is quite a lot online Thailand’s first research project on the ISS is a collaboration with NASA to study liquid crystals in microgravity…which again I had no idea but I now have the app and will be following…x

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    1. Thanks Pete, I’m seeing plenty of support for the book, not surprising as it is regarded as a classic.
      I always feel very indignant when technology doesn’t work – having been persuaded over the years to expand my tech horizons, I expect it to work and to work instantly!

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  9. I read Catch 22 in my teens, and the film adaptation is pretty good too, if you havent seen it. As for Windows 11, I upgraded to it (free) recently, and despite all my fears, it works fine. If you want to save space in your media library, get a free account on Flickr. Upload your photos to ‘Public’, then use the url of any photo you want to put on the blog post as a link in the text, and it appears when you save draft. I have been doing that for years now. There is a 1,000 photo limit on free Flickr, but I went up to the paid Pro version on Flickr, which is very reasonable. Best wishes, Pete.

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      1. I just clicked, ‘Update’ then ‘Download’ and waited, full of trepidation. It came back later, looking very much like W10, with tiny changes that were easily recognised. It saved all my favourites, my photos, my shortcuts, my passwords, everything. I am tech-averse, but even I could do it. Do it while it is still free.

        Best wishes, Pete.

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  12. I haven’t read Catch 22 for years, but I enjoyed it twice in the past. If you want a difficult experience with a Joseph Heller novel, I suggest you try ‘Something happened’. In my memory of it, there is only one event of note in the novel (the ‘Something’ of the title) and it doesn’t happen until you’ve read the whole book. 🙂

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