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FYI! Last read at 18:25 on 2024/11/21.

Moo!

Coming home from work, I could murder a teabag. We reach our little town (pop. 200, barely qualifies for a name sign, but we have a church and a bar that's open once in a blue moon...) when... there's a great big cow in the road. Just... you know... wandering around. Looking for trains, perhaps?

It is like some sort of weird butter advert.

Cow at night.

Mom's not sure what exactly to do, so I suggest 112, the European emergency services. Knowing how some nutters drive, you don't want to smack into a bovine backside at 60mph in the early hours. Could right ruin your day, that.
The operator takes it well, tells us to call the local gendarmes with: appellez dix-sept, you... call... one seven... okay?

So we call 17 and, eventually, speak to a gendarme. Who asks the location. Asks what the problem is. Asks which road, as if our not-town has much of a choice of roads. Never asks our name.
Then hangs up on us. Gee, inspires such confidence, that.

So we waited, for like twenty minutes, in the hope that cows in the road might be considered a traffic hazard and somebody in a little blue car might turn up.
Then mom got fed up, single-handedly herded the cows back (eh!? a hidden talent!) into a field with the others. Might not have been the right field, but they were off the road. We found and set up a string fence, then went home.

So that's what we were doing in the dark of night this morning.

And I bet the gendarmes never turned up...

Cow picture public domain, USDA, from Wikipedia
Night sky graphic from ShiftedReality.com.
Lame cut'n'paste job and image tweaks by Rick.

 

I'll cross that bridge when I come to it

Mom has just come in and said what a stupid phrase that is. No idea why that was percolating around her mind, but...
After all, she has a point, you can't cross that bridge before you get to it, and crossing it after is wasting time. So it's true, it is a really idiotic phrase!
Cute bridge.

Mom, by the way, objects to the above bridge image, saying it is too cute and dinky (isn't that the point?) to take seriously, and that I need a real bridge. So here's a picture of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge...

Bay Bridge.
[movie afficionades might recognise this as the bridge that gets nuked (along with much of the rest of Baltimore) in the movie "The Sum Of All Fears" - mom, a native Baltimorean, suggests that this isn't necessarily a bad idea! ☺]

Cute bridge from Pixdaus (Google links directly to image, so attribution unknown)
Bay Bridge from City-Data.com.
Crop'n'scale by Rick.

 

BSOD?

Mom using a typewriter.Just thought I'd mention, as I type this... Mom is sitting opposite using an Imperial 200 typewriter that I got from a charity shop (years ago) for £2. Thanks to inky.co.uk we even managed to find an original black/red ribbon for it (a bit steep at circa £6 apiece, but it exists which is more than can be said for ribbons for my old dot-matrix printers or spares for the laserjet!). Mom uses it to write letters, and gets on with it just fine. No longer being confused by the Ctrl key which hides a myriad of bizarre functions, including the miraculous ability to wipe everything in two keypresses (^A then any other key). No more worries about battery life, whether the signal is strong enough, has the disc been defragged, are we in the right user profile, is the anti-virus up to date, what else is running (enough memory), bugs, quirks, and all the nonsense that we geeks just accept as being a matter of course.
And it will never ever blue-screen because some tired or wired programmer pressed the '=' key once instead of twice, making a comparison an assignment, which has no effect until someplace else when... bang! System panic, guru meditation, unhappy face, address exception, beep! beep! beep!
Oh, and that letter you were writing? Collateral damage. That means it's gone. Just like that. Oh well.

No, you don't get that from a typewriter.

 

Your comments:

Rick (by mobile phone), 2nd September 2010, 23:30
Sent using my mobile phone. And Virgin just interrupted my GPRS session to tell me I have a week left on my credit (and thus resets my GPRS byte counter & another €0,15 down the toilet... don't miss a trick, do they?).

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