Friday The Thirteenth

I have never been superstitious. Touch wood I never will be. However there was a moment today when I felt that Friday The Thirteenth might not be my lucky day. It started very well indeed. I woke up. So far, and allowing for the odd change of time when travelling when I lived in New Zealand and Scotland, I have woken up on 27,676 mornings. So I am always thankful when the trend continues. I know that one day it will not. I suspect on that day I shall be truly p****d off. 

Anyway by the time I had abluted it was 0730. I looked out of the kitchen window to see my bushes being cut. I can no longer reach the tops of the bushes

to cut them so a local handyman was commissioned. He had already finished making a great job of replacing my ancient gutters. His next job was to increase the concrete area which is my wheelie-bin store. I built it for three bins and we now have four.

So far the day was having a great start.

I was meeting a friend for coffee at 1030 so decided that, as it was a truly beautiful morning, I would go into town and get a few odds and ends, go for my walk in the woods and be at The Woodlands in perfect time for coffee. As an aside, as I thought I had an infection where I'd had a partial extraction on Tuesday, I'd pop into the dentist first for antibiotics. 

Apparently that meant seeing a dentist again. My dentist wasn't available but at noon another dentist could see me. At noon, Friday The Thirteenth kicked in. The rest of the tooth had to come out. The rest of the tooth displayed a marked reluctance to obey. Having had two extractions in the last year I've had no pain from either. This afternoon nearly five hours after the extraction and painkillers taken I am in pain. I don't like toothache.

Mind you I did manage to spend much of the afternoon in the garden. So life isn't too bad.

Getting There

YP wrote a review recently of a book written by a map obsessive. It was interesting and most who commented (I read it after YP's next post had been published so didn't bother commenting) were, like me, very much lovers of maps. Indeed if it hadn't been for my love of maps and my knowledge of glaciation I would not have done so well in my Geography GCE 'O' Level back in the dark ages. 

The author was also obsessive in his hatred of satnavs. I have never quite understood why  so many people think that it is a virtue not to use satnavs in the same way that they feel superior to us mortals who use smart-phones. I have even been told satnavs are dangerous. They are not. The  chap I caught driving down the M6 in the middle lane with his road atlas on his steering wheel however was, I would suggest, exceptionally dangerous. 

My brother and a late friend who lived part-time in France both have/had a remarkable talent. A talent that I very much coveted. They could look at a map and memorise their chosen route. Put the map away and in the case of my late friend, drive all the way from Scotland to wherever he was going in France. I, on the other hand, have aphantasia. I cannot memorise images. In the 'old days' before satnavs I used to spend ages making flip boards so that I could get into my car on Lewis and navigate myself to the Poitou-Charante. Now I set an address into my satnav and relax. I have been using one since the early 2000s.

I have, of course, heard of them taking people down unsuitable roads and software used does vary. I have driven all over the UK, through and France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy with never a blip that I can recall.

Hybrid Powered Cruise Ship

Last week MS Fridtjof Nansen arrived in Stornoway. I believe that she was on her maiden voyage. Stornoway is a popular destination for cruise liners and many of them are specialist 'explorer' cruises. By any standards her accommodation looks luxurious. What made her stand out in Stornoway apart from her striking shape and colours was the fact that she is a hybrid ship. 

The residents of Scotland in general, and Scottish Islands in particular, are well used to hearing about hybrid ferry vessels. They were commissioned by Calmac for Island ferry services some years ago and are now running several years late and millions over budget. It may be several years before they are in service and in the meantime the existing fleet is struggling.

Hybrid power is particularly suitable for ferries and, as many operate in densely populated areas (eg Hong Kong) the less (fewer?) the diesel emissions the better. 

The reason that I mentioned her explorer cruises was that on the morning I was having coffee with friends in The Woodlands when we saw a posse of cruisers going up the path past the café with a leader, placard identifier held high. When a second group went past we realised that this placard business was for real and was obviously so that the groups (of 20 or so) wouldn't get lost amongst the hordes of natives. This was a first for Lewis we believe.

Spam and Clouds

Today I noticed a comment from a Chinese blogger. It was a perfectly satisfactory and 'real' comment so I actually replied even though the person concerned runs what looks like a perfectly respectable and legitimate on-line shop and is, presumably, simply trying to increase whatever the on-line equivalent of footfall is. A while later when going through blogs I realised that this was a spammer  who was rather more subtle than others. A comment was often 'borrowed' from elsewhere in the comments and used. It was only because I recognised one of the comments that I realised it was a duplicate.

Spammers are certainly going through a prolific phase at the moment and there will be times when I'm not in Blogland for a day or two when they will appear on my blogs for a little longer than I would like.

However I am not going to use comment moderation (unless comments are for a post over a couple of weeks old where I might otherwise miss them) because I think it ruins the whole conversation aspect of blogging. I don't want to comment in isolation and I'm sure that some of my readers don't either.

Nothing to do with the minutiae or mechanics of blogging I saw this cloud formation over the middle of The Minch a day or two ago. I'm not very knowledgeable about clouds except a select few like Lenticular Clouds. These over the Minch are, I think cumulonimbus capillatus anvil.