He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy!

I love the look on that poor dog’s face - “Such a big bed, and I’m only allowed this little corner? Do something!”

She was quite a character.

A long-dead cat for your pleasure. She arrived on my doorstep a starving kitten; after extensive travel in New Zealand she went to live in Canada, where she apparently lived to a ripe old age.

The thing is though, I might want to sell before I die. I’ve got a good 20 years in me!

I kind of like it too. When I was 12 my parents asked what colour I wanted my bedroom painted. “Purple.” They painted it off-white. I’m over 70 now and still have never had a purple room. My kitchen is pale grey ffs.

Off to look at paint charts …

I met a couple in Vanuatu - one of the world’s most language dense nations - whose mother tongues were mutually unintelligible, so they communicated using the country’s official language, Bislama. A lot of bilingual people don’t speak English. Plenty of Eastern Europeans don’t speak English (unpopular during communist rule) but speak say German or Russian as well as Serbocroatian or whatever.

That’s wonderful and you are heroes.

A funeral I attended recently had a plywood coffin and a bunch of felt-tip pens for people to write messages with. At another one a while back, the coffin was wickerwork.

I want this too. I saw a documentary about a dying man who took this option. They interviewed him about the decision, then after his death filmed medical students dissecting him (from a distance, it was discreet) and interviewed them about the experience. They were grateful for his gift, and incredibly respectful when speaking about him.

The thing is, the inside of a body looks nothing like the nice tidy diagrams. It’s a mess in there! I’d like these kids to practise on dead me before they start cutting into live people.

I actually knew someone who died of that parrot disease. Psittacosis? He caught it off a budgie.

Here it is: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psittacosis

I’m trying both Outlook and Proton. I’ll probably go with Proton, but aaaaargh, the thought of all the tedious work involved… I’ve got better things to do!

I stopped using Chrome a while back, but still use Gmail because I’m lazy. Every time I crank open Gmail in another browser, Google whines at me to use Chrome. That grizzling pop-up is now the main reason I don’t use Chrome, and it will eventually drive me to migrate away from Gmail. DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO!

Two things helped me: learning not to listen to the “noise” (it’s not truly noise, it’s a kind of nerve damage), and hearing aids. When I first put the aids in the tinnitus vanished. The downside is that all the work I’d put in to not listening was overturned, because I “heard” the sounds again when I took the aids out. Still nice to have that respite though.

Training yourself to not listen to the racket isn’t easy, but it is so worthwhile. Turn your attention away to something else - a smell, a photograph, your pet, anything. Focus away. Just thinking about tinnitus is making it “audible” to me, lol! It’s not real sounds, it’s your poor abused nerve endings firing off random signals. White noise works for a lot of people, but it never has for me.

Visit https://tinnitus.org/ for more info. There’s a download section where you can get a pdf of a scientific paper describing the method.

My bad knee is now titanium and my good knee has become my bad knee.

AI is so bad at hands.

I was adopted by a stray kitten and had her spayed when she was old enough. A friend told me I had taken away her “choice” to reproduce. I asked her how many of my cat’s hypothetical offspring she was willing to adopt - there would be I guess an annual litter of four or more to choose from. Yeah no.

In the end I moved countries and gave the cat away. I would never have another one, nice as she was. There’s a family of voles living in my garden, half a dozen frogs in the pond and lots of birds visit my trees. I support them mainly by leaving them to go about their business.

He's the reason I left the Co-op Bank - he was chairman. I figured if they had a loon like that at the top they couldn't be trusted with my money.