Some of these thoughts are posted in "As If, C'est What?" my other public blog, so if you have read them there, don't bother with this lot.

I am almost bored of being at home all this time. I went into town yesterday to meet my best and oldest friend in Canada for a Thai lunch. I bought that Emilie Claire Barlow disc, but, playing it today, I realised that the manufacturer had inserted the wrong disc into the right jewel case. This has never happened to me before. Very annoying.

Today I went in early for an INR test as I had stopped taking Coumadin, (unnecessarily), for two days before oral surgery last week. It still bothers me and, since I am an absolute coward about pain, I'm still taking occasional Tylenol.

About the boredom, I have always maintained that a really good holiday is when you get bored of being on holiday. I am on strike for things I do not want and don't even approve of. I do see that the city's offers are unfair to new hires, but I would actually benefit from them.

The pickets, according to the rather conservative media I follow and according to my management wife, who has to cross them, are rude, obstructive, aggressive and generally out for blood. As long as I can avoid it, I will not join them, but I will stay away from work. I will make a sacrifice of income for the general good of less advantaged members.

However I feel love and loyalty for and to my City and I know that it cannot afford the reimbursements it has up to now offered to its employees. If we did get what the union is demanding our rates would have to rise substantially, which would be an extra burden on the working poor and pensioners. I've already belonged to one group and will, all too soon, belong to the other.

moi meme

Favourite Python sketch. What's your's?

I spent about an hour here, looking at some very fine photographs. I record it so that I can return and spend many other long hours.

Emilie-Claire Barlow:

"The Very Thought of You" Got it today Monday 29th. Much better on CD than the concert recordings on U Tube. Actually I discovered on Tuesday that I was listening to a different although similar artist. Anther time I got a disc of arias from the library, but the texts recorded on my computer were for another opera collection entirely, so I'm very familiar, (from my MP3 player), with about seven arias and no idea where they come from.

Are we there yet? Are we there yet?

I've looked at clouds from both sides now....

Today we had a street sale. I got out a box of old stuff and sorted it on the front steps, but no customers came by. It interested me to finally let go of some stuff I have been keeping for years. Toys from the children's baby years, gifts that I was not caring enough to keep out in the open, lots of wires and connectors, old headsets, extension chords, whole sets of fine colored pens and a fancy protractor I only used once. I also read old things I had written, (golly, I was sometimes so crazy), and looked at old photos. Over the years I have kept every passport I ever had and I still can't throw those away. I found an unopened bottle of expensive single malt scotch and my old tenor recorder, still in its cardboard box, which had collapsed with age, around it. I still vividly remember the shop in Soho, where I bought it for the then fantastic sum of eighteen pounds. Of course, it still has a wonderful tone, although my skill with it never caught up with its potential.

What happened to the avatars on comments? Did anyone else lose them?

Oleg Shyshkin made this very fine wrought iron sculpture, now covered in vines, that continually entertains me when I get off the street car after work. Last winter it kept me company, while I waited in the dark for the early morning transport , which, at that time, I did not yet fully understand. Here is where I found out about his other work.

Cold, rainy first of June.

And now we long for the summer. Not the summer of stuffy work rooms with air conditioning, which does not work, but the leisurely summers out on the lawn, down by the river or at a dance in the cool evenings. Renoir knew his buyers well. Picasso said that during the war people were starving for good food so that food was what he painted. So it was in the Paris winters, when the cobblestones were constantly wet and slippery and Renoir' s customers, like me, longed for summer days far from the drudgery of work and cold.