Two To-Dos

As I mentioned in my previous post, two of my goals are to update the church website and to sort out our garden. Each of these is a task with several subtasks, and as I may have a window of opportunity for dealing with some of these, here is the current state of affairs:

For the Church Website

I left this with the church calendar and sidebar up-to-date and the pages for discontinued groups disabled (meaning that at least there is no superfluous information on the site). My next steps are as follows:

1. Generate shell pages for all the new groups that don't currently have one.
2. Clean up the site menu - for some reason this is now not accepting updates, so I may need to generate an entirely new menu and insert that instead.
3. Clean up the "contact us" form and possible the maps.
4. Reach out to the various groups to get information to properly populate the individual pages.

For the Garden

This is the more likely to see progress in the near future. The steps for this one:

1. Dispose of the old gas canister. Since switching to the new charcoal BBQ, this is now superfluous.
2. Dispose of the old kids slide and seesaw - Funsize and Surprise! are too big for these now, and they've seen better days, so it's time to get rid.
3. Fix the stairs at the side of the house. The top step, in particular, needs properly fixed back in place.
4. Remove the lawn leading from the patio to the aforementioned steps, and replace with stones to provide better grip and/or drainage.
5. Fill to two holds Lion has recently dug into the lawn.
6. Fix the huge hold we dug for Lion's sandpit - this was a disaster that now needs undone. This requires laying a mesh, then a layer of small stones, then successive layers of soil until it's properly filled.
7. Reseed the lawn so it has actual grass rather than various versions of mud.

The BBQ will also need cleaned, and there's a certain amount of weeding and of cleaning up the borders, but I'm not capturing those are distinct steps - they're just general maintenance.

#11: "The Autumn Republic", by Brian McClellan

#12: "The Fox and the Ghost King", by Michael Morpurgo

Day 100: Update on Goals

Day 100, so time for the second update of the year. I should note that this is being written quite a ways in advance, and so may need an edit after the fact. Anyway, here goes:

• Books: The on-track target for day 100 is 9.86 books. I'm somewhat ahead of target on this, and so am pretty happy with it, all in all.
• Weight: There has been something of a reversal since the last update, and then a reversal of the reversal. All in all, not great but not terrible.
• Church Website: Eh. I've made an update or two to the website, but can't say I'm noticeably closer to completing this goal.
• Garden: The new goal for the year, this hasn't seen any tangible progress, but I do more or less have a plan on how to tackle it. So that's good, I think. Obviously, with the weather improving (hopefully), I'd expect to deal with this in the next six months, with the goal being complete before the clocks go back. We'll see if that happens.
• Blog: By day 100, I would expect to have posted approximately 33 times. I'm a bit behind target here, but expect to catch up in the next few days.

So that's that. Basically, everything is going nice and steadily. Can't complain... but no huge breakthroughs either.

Wonder Man

This was weird. I enjoyed it, but it was certainly weird.

"Wonder Man" is an 8-part Disney+ series about a super-powered actor trying to hide his powers in order to have a career (for insurance reasons, super-powered individuals cannot work in Hollywood), and Trevor Slattery trying to get past his previous role as The Mandarin. And the basis of the show is that unlikely friendship between the two actors.

I didn't care for the first episode. After that, however, it very rapidly found a groove, built largely on the chemistry between the two leads (Ben Kingsley, in particular, is always reliable). Though the single funniest part is an extended cameo by Josh Gadd in a flashback episode.

All in all, I recommend this. Though my usual caveat applies: if you have Disney+ then check it out; if not, don't subscribe just for this.

I'm also not entirely won over by the notion of a second season. The ending of this one suggests to me that any second season would be sufficiently different as to lose something crucial. I might be wrong, but...

#10: "Until August", by Gabriel García Márquez (apparently, the author concluded that this one didn't really work, and should be buried rather than published. While I don't necessarily agree with the second part of that, I'm afraid I do agree with the first)

The Last Voyage of the Demeter

This is a film I'd been wanting to see for some time, and we finally took the opportunity this weekend. It's a bit of a frustrating film - I enjoyed it, but also have to acknowledge that it could clearly have been a lot better.

Apparently, the film spent a lot of time in development hell, suffering multipel rewrites, changes of director and cast, and general messing around. And, sadly, it shows - it feels like it could have done with either one more, or several fewer, rewrites, a bit of tightening up. Oh, and some humour, at least in the first section.

The other thing to note is that we already know going in that this is a doomed voyage - even for the occasional viewer unfamiliar with "Dracula", the title of the film gives that away. So the film might as well lean right into that. It's a feature, not a bug, so perhaps the crew should acknowledge their fate a whole lot earlier and start making plans based on that fatalism. But that doesn't quite happen.

I don't really have much more to say than that. As I said, I enjoyed it, and it could have been better. Given the chance to view it as part of an existing subscription, I would recommend it as a decent use of two hours, but I wouldn't recommend subscribing just to get this film.

#9: "The Two Towers", by J.R.R. Tolkien

How to Create a Shortage

Here we go again: with the US attacks on Iran we now have the Strait of Hormuz closed, and some disruption to the global supply chain for fuel. And so now we have rumours of petrol shortages, which will no doubt be followed up with panic buying, actual shortages, and all the troubles that that entails.

And, as usual, there's no need for it. We actually have plenty of fuel (for now, at least), so if people just keep calm and carry on things will sort themselves out. (Now, if the disruption carries on too long, that would no longer be the case. But that's a longer-term problem.)

But of course, that's not what's happening. Instead the media are playing up that fear (since it's the story), which means everyone needs to act (because you can't afford to be the one person who runs out), which means that there's a run on petrol, which means there's now a shortage.

Which is really frustrating - the issue isn't a lack, but rather that the rate at which people consume is faster than the rate at which the pumps can be restocked, and so we run out. At least for a while. And then there will come a period where the pumps are restocked and everyone has a full tank and egg on their faces.

In the meantime, though, we're still stuck. As I said, you can't afford to be the one person who runs out, so you need to play the game the same as everyone else. And so we create a shortage. Great.

Paging the Tooth Fairy

Rather shockingly, Surprise! announced to us on Monday that he had a wobbly tooth. This morning, he announced that he no longer had a wobbly tooth.

This is even more of a shock than when Funsize announced the same three years ago - it all feels rather too early for us to be at this stage, though he is very close to his fifth birthday. Anyway, the upshot of this is that we'll once again have to call on the services of the tooth fairy.

Thanks Donald

Two years ago, we found ourselves coming to the end of our fixed mortgage deal just as there was a spike in interest rates. So we took our a two-year fix, in the hope that they'd come down again in that time. And that was fine.

And, indeed, the plan looked really good until about two weeks ago - the base rate had dropped to 3.75% with a further reduction expected this week and then, hopefully, at least one more in the months to come. Which would have been good.

Right on cue, therefore, this situation with Iran kicked off. Which has of course disrupted the oil supplies, leading to an immediate spike in prices, and in turn a rise in inflation. So the expected rate reduction didn't come, any prospect of further increases has evaporated, and indeed it's likely that the Bank of England may well start raising the rate again (because of course the thing to do in an impending cost of living crisis is to pile on a load more misery - that'll teach the plebs to want such fripperies as petrol to commute and food to eat).

And, just for fun, we're also coming to the end of our current deal on gas and electricity...

Oh well, I guess things could be a lot worse.

The Drift

It has been a frustrating week. On the face of things, it's all okay - things are just proceeding onwards, there was an issue but there's a workaround, and there are things to do but no immediate crisis. And yet... it all just feels like a big drift. There's a bunch of stuff I'm waiting on, and no signs of anything much happening until then.

Which all feels a bit odd, but it all does definitely feel like it's waiting for something to happen.