Theres something of a recurring theme in my social interactions at the moment – they all seem to start badly but pick up just as I’m about to give up and go home.
Saturday I arrived outside a development of flats in Bishop Stortford to find that I didn’t know which door I should be knocking on, and that the two phone numbers I had were both remaining unanswered. So I headed into town, to at least explore the place before heading home. A quick browse of the magazine shelves in Smiths was all it took to summon up Ben and his young lady (whose name I can’t spell…), and we quickly hatched a plan to obtain some ingredients for soup before the arrival of Ben and Tamora.
After watching master-chef Ben prepare and serve superb soup we headed out for a walk – there aren’t many people for whom a bridge over the M11 is a destination. It was well worth the wading across muddy fields, over streams, through brambles. The bridge itself is relatively unremarkable, however its location is perfect for watching the incoming stanstead flights and for overlooking the south-side of the exit junction for the airport. Poor Tamora couldn’t believe we were all enjoying standing on an exposed east anglian roadway on a snowy february evening.
Our navigation back to civilisation took us through Bedlam and rather closer to the Essex border than we had anticipated – there seems to be little respect for the speed limits in this area, people in such a hurry to get back to their boy racer homelands.
For the evening we found an Indian restaurant without any veggy options, so headed on down the hill to the telelephone place, which turned out to be quite a nice Thai restaurant, if a little over populated with hanging plants.
Then last night I arrived at the Calling rather early, and found myself sat in the corner contemplating, amongst other things, why I’d bothered to come out so early. This kind of thought pattern isn’t a good thing and leads you to all sorts of depressing realisations about the state of your life. I won’t be early again in a hurry. As it were. It wasn’t so bad once I’d figured out other people had arrived.
And today I figured out why I couldn’t see anything on my new computer any more – the graphics card seems to have given up the ghost. So I headed out to get another, after trying an old 8Mb RagePro I had hanging around, which was, in its day (8 years ago) not a bad card. I’m now running around 4 frames per second on last years model MX4000 where I was getting 40fps on the shiny new X600. At least its rendering, I suppose, better than the Rage. But blimey, does it make a different to the noise given out by this machine – I knew it was the noisiest bit but I hadn’t noticed quite *how* noisy.
2 days and counting….I’m expiring prematurely. Looking forward the freedom. Anyone about daytimes next week?
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