WYSIWYG

For very many years one of the things that my brother (CJ) and I have done when having breakfast or morning coffee in each other's company is the Times 2 Crossword.  Now that my Sister-in-Law (Jo) has arrived on Lewis she has joined us. 

Today, when Jo and I were doing the crossword, one of the clues produced the acronym WYSWYG from the clue "What you see is what you get." When I said that, Jo was unimpressed. She had never heard the term. Later CJ was similarly unimpressed and had not heard the term. 

It seems to me to have been around for years and was in common usage. Am I alone? 

It poured all morning. The view through the window rather reminded me of an Impressionist painting.

Today was a day of food preparation, cooking and baking. I have a rather too many courgettes(zucchini) from my polycarb so decided to make carrot and zucchini cake. It was rather overdone despite giving it less time in the oven than the recipe said.  CJ and Jo like salads so I made a bean, pulse and many other things salad to go with the evening meal. A bowl of humous followed and a tray of cornflake crunch. Then my fail-safe desert/pudding - an Amaretto syllabub - to finish off. 

The Thinker

I've titled this 'The Thinker'. It was taken at Brunch where CJ and I sometimes have our coffee and a bacon roll. CJ wasn't sleeping. We were having problems with the last crossword clue. We spend a lot of time doing crosswords with our coffee.

I'm home. In fact I've been home since Friday evening. CJ and I arrived after a week's journeying from his home on The Wirral, via his daughter, son-in-law and grand-daughter in Exeter, thence to the Lake District, Anna's in Bishopbriggs (Glasgow) for a couple of nights and a night almost on Skye. 

Since then we've been catching up with some relaxation, coffees and crosswords at The Woodlands and I've nearly filled a wheelie bin with weeds from the garden. 

Before all that I spent some time in Glasgow and then a week with CJ and Jo when we went into Wales and Chester.

Three weeks. Such a long time. Such a short time.

However I'm hoping to be back in Blogland more now that the dust has settled. After all there's certainly plenty to write about as well as catching up with your blogs.

The SI Unit of Magnetic Flux

One of the things that CJ and I enjoy is doing crosswords with our morning coffee.  We usually do the Times 2 general-knowledge crosswords.  However when we were in Chester I left the book in the car.  At The Patisserie Valerie where we had coffee and cakes there was a Daily Telegraph for customers use and I knew that it had a large weekend general-knowledge crossword.  So we decided to do the top third.  All was going reasonably well until we arrived at the following clue: SI unit of magnetic flux density.  It is one thing not knowing the answer to a general-knowledge question however it is entirely another when the question itself is entirely beyond one's comprehension.  In this case neither of us had the vaguest idea what magnetic flux density was never mind what an SI unit was or was likely to be called.    

Having admitted defeat I decided to Google it (aren't modern smartphones wonderful?) only to find that the answer "weber" didn't fit in with the starting letter T which we knew to be correct given that the word eight derived from the clue to 18 across: ..... days a week (Beatles' Song).

Adrian, engineer, sorter of photographic problems and solver of cryptic crosswords has now enlightened me: it's a Tesla.  

16 Down: Humiliating disaster (6)

Coffee at The Woodlands this morning as is our habit.  Crossword as is our habit.  Feeling that we were on a real high because we finished the first crossword before we even started our coffees we decided on seeing if we could finish two crosswords before we finished our coffee instead of the habitual target of one.  We got this far with no problem and then disaster struck.  We were stuck.

Bummer.

I Nearly Did It

Gaz and Carol bought me a Times 2 Jumbo Crossword Book earlier in the year.  I really enjoy doing crosswords with my morning coffee or lunch.  I have just completed No. 56.  Well, almost completed.  The thing about general knowledge crosswords for me is being able to complete all the questions to which I know, or should know, the answer.  There are, however, answers which I will never get however much thinking I do.   In those circumstances I just grin and bear it and look the answer up.  With such large crosswords I rarely get 100% of the answers although I did manage a complete one earlier in the week.  However No 56 defeated me by two questions: An Australian Fish in 10 and an old chestnut which defeats me every time: A Long-short metric foot in 7.  The answer to the first was BARRAMUNDI and the second was TROCHEE.  I'm hoping that now I've blogged about it I will remember 'trochee' next time it crops up - as it inevitably will.

I’m Ashamed

I have been having difficulty with the Times 2 crossword.  This is NOT, I hasten to add, The Times Crossword which is cryptic and completely beyond my comprehension.  Although I did once get a clue – about 30 years ago!  Anyway one clue on Monday for the Times 2 was ‘Successor to Julius Caesar’. Hmm.  Claudius lived about then.  Correct number of letters.  Fitted with two of the other clues I had.  Gave it a shot.  Later having almost finished it I had to re-examine it because what I thought was the answer to one of the other clues wouldn’t fit.  Eventually I decided that I didn’t know (mind blank time) and looked it up in one of my many reference books.  I take the view that in an emergency one can confirm or find information using a book.  It’s only cheating if you Google it!  That’s what you do when you realise there’s no hope!

The list of Roman Emperors didn’t include Julius Caesar.  Huh!  Julius Caesar was a Roman Emperor.  Wasn’t he?  No.  He wasn’t.  Apparently.  I am totally ashamed to say that I had never realised (or if I ever did know, I’d lost the knowledge long ago) that the Roman Empire started after his reign.  Julius was Caesar of the Roman Republic.  He was followed by Augustus, who was the first Emperor.  I’ve spent ages this morning reading it all up on Wikipedia.

So now I know.

First Defeat

When we have our morning or afternoon coffee CJ and I do a crossword: usually the Times 2 straightforward general knowledge crossword. It is exceptionally rare for us to be defeated ie for us not to finish the crossword by the time we have drunk our coffee. Although occasionally we do have to drink fairly slowly! However a day or so ago we suffered our first defeat of the season. The silly thing was that, although we had forgotten that a circular painting in relief was called a tondo, it was quite unforgivable not to have remembered Hobbes. Oh dear. Age cometh not alone!