It’s new day, it’s a new world. Well, same as yesterday. Just a little bit older and a little bit more, if that makes sense. Where do I get this stuff from?
Birds were fairly vocal during the hobble to the shed this morning. Same yesterday. It’s a bit early for them to be getting excited. Spring is a long way off. Still January innit. Fresh snowfall still expected on the slopes. No meltwaters filling the rivers and gulleys coming down off the mountains evoking memories of new awakenings. The heating is still on.
I have been eyeing an apple tree or two en route to the shed thinking there was more pruning to be done. Will have to see how it goze. Certainly been starting to think about onion planting. More about how to get bigger onions. It will be all about furtiloizer. We have never approached it scientifically. The books telly you to dig in some well rotted compost in the autumn. Bit of well rotted manure if you have any. We didn’t. The raised beds have had some wood ash scattered on them so that will help.
The shed is very bright this morning but that is largely to do with the fact that the low sun is reflecting off the bathroom window providing additional illumination. Nature eh? Dontcha love it 🙂
I dunno if you find this interesting but last night I was reading about a day in the life on a farm in Wales during the 18th century. The dairymaid would get up between two and three in the morning to do the milking. Urgh. Imagine that in January on a hill farm with no heating and just a flicker of light to work by.
I guess most of a milkmaid’s work was done by feel anyway 🙂 Reminds me of the time we visited @Chris Conder’s farm and saw the milking in action. Fully automated including the allocation of feed mix to the coos on an individual basis. The cows even knew when it was time and made their own way to the milking shed. Took the romance away from farming, if there ever was any.
It’s probably only us non farmers who have ever looked upon the lifestyle as romantic. Ah the healthy outdoor existence. I think I’ll just go and scatter a bit of feed for the hens. They’ve been so good with their egg laying. Then I’ll take the horse for a run out before coming back from some home-cured bacon with fresh bread made with our own flour. Oo arr. I’m sure it must be still like that, mostly. Probs 🙂
Anyway back to reality and amazingly a pot of tea has just appeared on my desk. Just to the left of the keyboard. Nothing ‘just appears’ of course. It is all part of a well coordinated plan. Teamwork at its highest level. Needs to brew for five mins for the perfect cuppa to be achieved.
We have different experiences with tea brewing. We once had some friends around and THG brought in a pot on a tray, leaving it on the coffee (tea?) table to nip and get something else from the kitchen. By the time she came back the friends had poured the tea, Totes dishwater. They never used a pot and just left a tea bag in a cup. It is never as good.
My sister Sue is not a tea drinker and in an effort to declutter her kitchen has disposed of her little used tea pot. In fact I think it must only be THG and I who ever used it. We had to resort to the dunk in cup method last time we were down.
There are some places you just have to take your own teapot along with you. Not a biggie. It’s like taking extra teabags when you go to stay in a hotel. The staff that make up the room typically have no idea that the main event is English breakfast tea. Mint, camomile and other green varieties are all very well but not for volume consumption. It is easy enough to get more teabags from the hotel reception but just less hassle to take your own. Usually we pinch some milk from breakfast and keep it in the room for the day.
When we stayed in The Soho Hotel during trefbash last December there were no tea and coffee making facilities in the fairly expensive room. No problem said reception. Someone brought up a tray. Even calling for more milk and tea bags was no problemo. It is only when we checked out I clocked the fact that they charged us £3.50 every time we called down for more supplies. Hey…
In other news I upgraded my Google storage from 2YB to 5TB yesterday. Was at 80% capacity which Google regularly reminded me of. Then yesterday for some reason my phone photos didn’t back up, or at least not immediately in the time I was looking. Whether it was a coincidence or not but as soon as I expanded the capacity, hey presto they were backed up.
I still had 200GB of free space at the time which I figured would keep me going for a while. Now I have 3.2TB free space. The upgrade seemed to have a few AI goodies thrown in which made me think I should have been using the tech to help with copying nonconformist church locations from a book into sheets.
It was phenomenal fair play. I gave it clear instructions and in seconds Gemini did work that might have taken me a day to do. I did need to make a few corrections but that seemed to be down to the quality of the photos of pages. They weren’t all perfectly flat. I had tried using macros in sheets but they were more hassle than it was worth. The data being presented was not uniform having been scanned in a photo and the text lifted and pasted into the sheet.
AI is good for repetitive actions that also require a bit of interpretation but in my experience doesn’t replace the creativity of the human mind. Not yet anyway. I suppose if it ever gets to that point we all pack up and go home.
Ciao amigos. Tea to drink.