Rick's b.log - entry 2026/03/15

Brrr!

I waited at the top of the road for my Picard delivery. I didn't get much this time around, just a little over €30 as that's the minimum for delivery.

Frozen food on a frozen day.

That photo is from a video I made, it's on my YouTube channel if you're interested.

After that, I had a strong tea and set about tidying up the back kitchen. Well, it's half tidy. The rest is sort of haphazardly organised on shelves, I'll probably need to go through it, but I now have a place to park the vacuum cleaner, the water bottles (instead of outside, after twenty-odd years), and in case it is necessary the incoming water pipe can be looked at. It is a copper pipe coming out of the floor. I have no idea where it goes or what it is connected to, as the pipe from the pump room is some sort of plastic that goes underground. It's a shame that when all this stuff was installed, there wasn't ever any trap or hatch installed for maintenance or inspection. But it wasn't me and it was a billion years ago. It may even predate me - some of the wiring does!

Following that, I noticed I was low on water, so I went up into town to my habitual supermarket to buy more water, and also a bunch of sandwiches and such as a reward for a job...done. Finding motivation for stuff like that can be difficult.

I had finished the mowing of my land, so finally as the sun was getting low in the sky I did up the driveway. Not my land, but nobody else ever does it. This was almost a mistake as there were clouds of mosquitoes prowling, but astonishingly they were a mere annoyance, they didn't bite.

The plan was to sit in bed, munch on all my goodies, and watch an episode or two of One Piece (the live action version). Here's what I had, you might spot a theme.

Do you spot a theme?

Problem was, I felt knackered, so by 10pm I just rolled over, pulled the blanket up, and fell asleep. At 3am I got up, drank half a litre of milk, and finally turned the lamp off.

Today I lay in bed until nearly noon. I wasn't asleep, I had been up for ages. I was browsing. I read a bunch of things on Wikipedia and TV Tropes, but I'd be a liar if I told you that I remember exactly what. Just a sort of wiki-walk through things that looked interesting.

When I got up, I felt like I wanted to "create" rather than sit at the computer. So I did a couple of hours on my ghost-jewel-art thing. At least, as much as my back was willing to let me do, as it's not a great position - what with the height of the table and my crappy eyesight...

Finally, some colours!

I wanted to sit outside in the sunshine, but that was stymied by the rather dramatically cold wind that was blowing. So I am sitting inside, and - well - I wrote a song. A humorous one, which I then fed to Suno. You can download it below.

So, now, here I am and it's just gone 7pm and I'm doing what I said I wouldn't do today, which is to sit in front of the computer. Oh well...

Once I have uploaded this, I think I'll go to bed with... [looks in freezer] [looks in fridge] Half a block of cheese and a rice pudding.
I have plenty of food here, but a lot of it means cooking - even if that cooking is "put in microwave for a while" and some days it's just really hard to find the motivation to do so. Actually, I think while I'm writing this I'll make a yakitori chicken noodle pot. That's just "add hot water, stir", I can manage that much...right Rick? RIGHT?!? 😓

AI music (3 songs)

The Candle Must Never Go Out (version 2)

Why Won't You Answer Me?

All of that aside, it's a pretty solid gothic/emo song. I'll let you listen to it to experience the story and how it unfurls.

What Happened Last Night

The song is a series of verses, with no chorus as it is building a story. The syllable counts of each verse are 4-4, 8, 4-4, 8, 12 for 44 syllables per verse.

I wrote the lyrics, Suno did the music and singing and... it's every bit as weird and amusing as it was intended to be. Suno was happy to pull this to a little under six and a half minutes and I love the end result. It's a little busier than I imagined it would be, but it's brilliant the way it turned out. For this reason, I'm not going to try to redo this song by giving an unusual spelling to force the pronunciation (I have done this with "wynd" when the AI used the wrong version of "wind") or replace it with a different word (like "amazed") because whatever turns out won't be this. And I really think this is great.

Enjoy!

As always, lyrics are embedded into the file.

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David Pilling, 16th March 2026, 22:52

Well done AI on the music.

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