Rick's b.log - entry 2022/01/15

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FYI! Last read at 05:12 on 2024/12/18.

Am I a Plague Zombie?

Well, today is the first day of ~~the rest of my life~~ my self-testing to see if I have been blighted by the unforgiving plague.

I'm not in the clear yet, there's still a test to do on Monday, day five. But it's a good start.

Only one red line!

A cold night, but feeling warm in the morning

The coldest it got to last night was -2.5 at 5.30am. There's a nearby shroud of fog all around, the sort that reminds me of when I used to play SimCopter (the fog would be used as a boundary to what the renderer had to draw, thus only nearby buildings and map scenery were visible). As I write this, at quarter past two, the temperature has managed to crawl up to half a degree on the plus side of zero.

It's weird. I am sitting in my room writing this and I'm cold. Yet, I got up and fed Anna, did the test, and since I was happy about not being a zombie, I put on hat/scarf/gloves and went up to get the bin from the top of the lane (it was about half a degree below zero at that point).
Then I sawed up the stuff I cut down from the trees a week or two ago into manageable pieces, and finally scaped moss and weeds off of part of the driveway (the uncovered parking area), and swept all the detritus to a pile by the side.
I came in because I was really rather warm.
But typing? That's a lot less effort. The chocolate calories are being stored as fatty gunk rather than being burnt.

Where's my paper?

I was also waiting for the post while I was outside. A little yellow van that never arrived. When I asked about a missing newspaper last weekend, she told me that there was a problem with the delivery (namely, it didn't arrive). During the week I've had an empty mailbox twice, but I don't remember which days, and then two newspapers delivered the following day. I'm not sure whether this is a problem with the newspaper, as normally Ouest-France sends me a notification if they're aware of an issue, or if this is the postal worker deciding that driving a half kilometre down a crappy little lane and back is too much bother.
So I've signalled to Ouest-France that today's paper wasn't delivered.
I'm sorry that the house isn't right on the road to make it easy for the post, but actually the house was here before the road was. It was nearly on the road, a completely different road that doesn't exist any more, and is only just visible in satellite imagery...although years of intensive farming is making that fade away too.
But, you know, it's the job of a postal worker to deliver the post. Even to far-flung places like me. What they lose on a rural property, they gain in a lotissement where all the houses are side by side (and often, the mailboxes are grouped together in one multi-mailbox unit).

If you wonder why I'm thinking it's the post as much as the paper delivery, well, let's just say that I took out the newspaper in the first place because a previous postal worker (a decade ago) couldn't be bothered coming down, she'd stash the mail until there was enough to justify coming. Unfortunately this tended to make things go missing. Of five letters we sent ourselves from various different post offices (Vitré, Clisson, Vallet, and the two local ones), three never arrived. We made a complaint, but when you're complaining to the people who are the problem it's clearly not going to go anywhere. So I subscribed to the newspaper, and made a complaint for every non-delivery until it arrived daily.
It's been arriving on time pretty much since then, with the exception of days of industrial action, and a period when the post person was retired from the job and they had nobody to cover, and of course, a period in 2020 when everybody was freaking out over Covid and one sniffle meant an entire building would immediately self-isolate.
I'd like to believe that it's a delivery issue with the paper itself, like the van drivers are out protesting the sanitary pass. But...

I didn't bother going to Châteaubriant for the first weekend of the sales. A mixture of "too many people" and "too cold, don't get up early, stay in bed".

Domestic bliss ☺

It was nice when I came home yesterday, to take off my work clothes, put on what I wear in the house, and throw the stuff into a washing machine rather than thinking about handwashing it.
As I have a spin available, it is feasible to wash things on Friday to wear on Monday. When handwashing, I wasn't able to get out that much water so in the winter I had to think of alternating things. What I'd wash on a Friday or Saturday would be for the week after next.
I set the dial to two stops before the 40°C position, hoping for around forty degrees (an extra six minutes of heating). I measured it as 40.7°C, so pretty much spot on.

Just when you thought there was nothing left to take a photo of

Just when you thought that there was no part of the
washing machine that I've not yet photographed... ☺

Of course, best laid plans can still crash into roadblocks. As the video shows, things were hung up nicely, and then frozen. Oh, okay......

I have now dried the shirt and the jumper on the radiator, and the trousers to follow.

The cause of the IP cam's weirdness

I have also debugged what's been going wrong with the IP camera when I've set it up to watch the washing machine.
Periodically, the camera would whizz up to look at the ceiling, and then come back down to it's home position. I had wondered if this was some weird interference from being so close to a motor/heater and powered from the same cable.

Night vision mode.

Turns out, nothing so fancy. The cause was, actually, my weather recording software. There was a time, many years ago, when I set the camera up in the window, and every five minutes (as the weather station data is read), it would take a snapshot looking straight out of the window, and another one looking up towards the sky. This only happens if there is a reply to the IP address of the camera. And, as I said, it was so long ago I completely forgot about it.
It also explains the other unexplained behaviour, such as the image size unexpectedly reverting to QVGA, and the IR night-vision being turned off.

1230 :       REM Okay, now call the function to do the heavy lifting...
1240 :       PROCDoWeatherCollection
1250 : 
1260 :       REM Do image collection
1280 :       PROCFetchImages
1290 : 
1300 :       REM Now generate the HTML document
1310 :       PROCGenerateHTML

Hungry

What I'd really like right now is a nice big bowl of honey oatmeal, but alas, the supermarket was completely out of Quaker Oats. They had loads and now they have none. What? Was it on TV as "a great meal" or something?

I guess I'll warm up the oven and make dinner early. Fish (cod) and frozen veg.
Here's a picture of exactly that from the 11^th of December. Probably better for me than oatmeal...

Fish and vegetables.

Your comments:

Rob, 15th January 2022, 21:34

I think you embedded the wrong video... No worries; I found it. Very glad to hear you're not plague-ridden though!

Rick, 15th January 2022, 22:59

Thanks for the heads up.
Yeah, I copy-pasted the embed code from an earlier blog entry and forgot to update the video ID.
Duh! 🤦🏻‍♀️

Now fixed.

David Pilling, 19th January 2022, 13:03

Seems to have been some disruption going on with Oats - not the only thing where they apparently used Xmas to change packaging, clean the factory,...

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	Rick's b.log - 2022/01/15
It is the 18th of December 2024 You are 3.14.254.247, pleased to meet you!