Week 140

Monday 22 November 2021

• Booster jabbed with the Moderna – love the balsamic vinegar, now try the vaccine, right. The venue for this was a “Connaught Hall”, a sort of place where they might have line dancing classes and amateur dramatic productions usually, with the name Connaught all spelled out in grand Helvetica outside. And maybe if I’d asked someone the way there they’d have replied “practice, dear boy, practice”.

  The arm hurt for while where the needle went in, but really scraping my knee on the corner of a bed had more of a painful effect. I was delighted to at last be given an I’ve had my vaccination sticker, although it took me by such surprise that I wasn’t sure where to stick it.

• I’d like to buy a hat because my head gets a bit cold since I cut my hair. It’s slightly complicated by the head being somewhat of a sniper’s dream, and a lot of the hats for sale being one-size-fits-all (as well as having these weird tufts of pretend squirrel on them). Fortunately, Marks & Spencer sell hats in more than one size, and some of them look OK, although the more prettier coloured ones don’t come in the larger sizes. Cool story.

• Sold one old computer. Sticking to my guns and letting the auction bidding proceed beyond the best cash offer received was the right thing to do. Posting the thing cost more than expected, because the buyer wasn’t on the mainland and eBay’s recommended cheap delivery company doesn’t like that. Had a nice half hour standing in the Post Office queue (in the chilled beer section of Budgens), which is the univeral experience of going to the Post Office.

• Something was downloading lots of something in the background on this computer, which is enough to make an adequate 4G/5G connection unacceptably slow. Activity Monitor revealed only nsurlsessiond, an Apple thing used by all sorts of different things. Eventually I worked out, with help from Pi-hole, that the things being downloaded were podcasts, and reasoned that the thing downloading them was Overcast, an iPhone app one can install one one’s M1 Mac. So I stopped Overcast from downloading all of the podcasts in the background, and everything was good again.