{"id":2910,"date":"2021-08-16T20:32:15","date_gmt":"2021-08-16T20:32:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/?p=2910"},"modified":"2021-08-16T21:54:30","modified_gmt":"2021-08-16T21:54:30","slug":"monday-16th-august-2021-day-518","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/2021\/08\/16\/monday-16th-august-2021-day-518\/","title":{"rendered":"Monday, 16th August, 2021 [Day 518]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today was quite a dull, cloudy and not particularly warm Monday morning so it was not a day\u00a0<\/span>for too much lingering in the park or anywhere for that matter. Meg and I decided to go down into town by car because we needed to make an optician’s\u00a0appointment with the optician who has been testing Meg and I for years now. We\u00a0got the appointment made without fuss and then I made a\u00a0favourite foray\u00a0into Poundland<\/em> where I bought some\u00a0cleaning products and one or\u00a0two items for Mog’s Den.\u00a0<\/em>We had rather a hurried lunch because we knew that our\u00a0chiropodist was due to call at 2.00 pm in the afternoon. I had bought a huge cauliflower over the weekend and\u00a0didn’t want to cook it over the weekend lest it smelled the house out (a\u00a0potential problem with\u00a0cauliflower) I overcame this to some extent by adding a\u00a0layer of brown sugar on top of the cauliflower before I steamed it and had the kitchen\u00a0window wide open. I made a cheese roux to go over the cauliflower and I am not sure that I made it correctly as I haven’t made a roux for a year or so. I started off with some melted butter and then added the grated cheese and some full-cream milk but I substituted some white gravy\u00a0thickening granules instead of flour which I think now was a culinary mistake. However, it tasted OK and used it together with some carrot-and-peas\u00a0mixture accompany the chicken breasts of which I cooked half yesterday. All of this was quite tasty and\u00a0everything would have been OK but our\u00a0chiropodist,\u00a0uncharacteristically, arrived at our house about\u00a0ten minutes\u00a0earlier than anticipated and this really messed up our luncheon\u00a0timetable. Meg had her dinner after she\u00a0had received her treatment and I ate mine far too quickly than is good for me, trying to get it eaten on time.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

This morning, I put into\u00a0effect something I have been meaning to do and today was the day. After about 56 years of reading The\u00a0Guardian, I have finally decided to cancel my\u00a0<\/span>subscription. I get the \u00a0Times<\/em> and the Guardian<\/em>\u00a0every day and I tend to read the Times<\/em> quite carefully but the Guardian<\/em> only in a more cursory fashion. I am\u00a0rationalising some of my expenditures to fit in better with my anticipated saving and spending plans and I reckon the \u00a354.00 I spend each month can go to a much more worthy cause. I often read the Guardian’s<\/em> News<\/em> headlines and Comment<\/em> section but I am pretty sure\u00a0these can be accessed via the internet so I am not really losing out. What was interesting was the fact that the sales team at the\u00a0Guardian<\/em>\u00a0subscription department \u00a0tried to keep me within their scheme by offering me a half\u00a0price deal for three months but I was not to be tempted. I have a term (time\u00a0limited) assurance that is due to run its course by the start of December so that is a bit more money that can find a better home. I did feel a slight pang of regret after ending an association that had\u00a0lasted so many decades but now is not the time for undue sentimentality.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

This afternoon was not devoted to anything very much apart from a doze and a read. Naturally, the news media is still full of the news of the fall of Kabul which is so redolent of the images that we remember of the fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam war. On\u00a0the occasion, though, there were\u00a0scenes of hundreds of\u00a0desperate citizens trying to escape the clutches of the Taliban and trying to get into the\u00a0plane by whatever means they could. There were some rumours that some desperate people hung onto whatever they could from the plane’s\u00a0fuselage and fell to their deaths once the\u00a0plane had taken off. The scenes from Saigon were of\u00a0people trying\u00a0desperately to climb into helicopters whereas this time it was\u00a0transport planes but the motivation was the same. Everybody is speaking of the speed of the collapse of the existing\u00a0Afghanistan regime and, according to reports, even\u00a0then Taliban themselves were\u00a0somewhat amazed \u00a0at the pace of events. Of course, the interesting question is whether ‘the leopard has actually changed its spots<\/em>‘ and whether there will be reprisals galore\u00a0for having collaborated with the\u00a0Americans or whether the Taliban are going to offer a different public face to their reputation since the 1990’s.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

In the late afternoon, I popped into <\/span>Mog’s Den<\/em> to do a frenetic 15 minutes of weeding. I reasoned that if I removed the\u00a0largest and more persistent of them, I\u00a0would solve the problem getting worse. For the more minute weeds, I am going to use a combination of vinegar (acetic acid) and washing up liquid (just a splash) This is an incredibly effective low-cost and\u00a0ecologically friendly weedkiller. The\u00a0acetic acid in the vinegar dries up and\u00a0desiccates the plant whilst the bit of washing up liquid helps to reduce the surface tension and therefore makes the whole solution that bit ‘wetter’ \u00a0A bit of hot sun an hour or so after spraying is ideal for this system to work completely effectively.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today was quite a dull, cloudy and not particularly warm Monday morning so it was not a day\u00a0for too much lingering in the park or anywhere for that matter. Meg and I decided to go down into town by car because we needed to make an optician’s\u00a0appointment with the optician who has been testing Meg […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2910","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2910","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2910"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2910\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2914,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2910\/revisions\/2914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}