Another dilemma. Lego are releasing a Sherlock Holmes set:
I don't particularly have any strong affinity to Sherlock Holmes - whether it's the books, the films or the TV series. However, do I need to get this to maintain my London/British collection of Lego sets? Or is that too contrived? I could go either way on this...
I got my car serviced yesterday - an always less than pleasant experience. And, once again, came away with a feeling that I've been fleeced out of my money. The price of a service has definitely gone up - and will probably get significantly higher again when all the auto tariffs come into effect. Perhaps next time I should use an independent mechanic rather than the service department at the dealer where I bought the car - but it's difficult to find a trustworthy one. But I suspect my landlord might be able to recommend someone. But I don't find it coincidental that the day after I got my car serviced, I got a low battery warning on my car key fob. Did the cheeky bleeders switch out the battery in my fob? That would be low.
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13
With Liverpool crowned champions, these are the the number of times that different clubs have won the Premier League since it was formed (e.g. Leicester and Blackburn once, Man Utd 13 times). And, as someone with a Math(s) degree like me should know, also happens to be quite a well known sequence of numbers - the Fibonacci sequence (which for the uneducated is when the next number is the sum of the previous two). I became aware of this little factoid courtesy of the BBC website. However, there is one little problem - the Fibonacci sequence starts with 0. The BBC article neglected to mention this. Therefore, making this "coincidence" absolutely meaningless and making both the article and this post a total waste of time. Sorry.
Someone has been commenting on my posts over the last few days. I don't know if it is someone I know or someone I don't - but I don't care for it. I can't tell if the tone is jokey or not. Either way, I've hidden comments from my posts going forward. If it's someone I know then shoot me an e-mail. If it isn't, go find someone else to troll.
Hooray, we're off to Wembley. Again! It's only a shame that I didn't get to watch the game - I had totally forgotten it was on today. But I did watch the highlights. And it seemed like we deserved the win. Nice. Now I absolutely have to make sure I watch the final. Surely we won't get a better chance at winning our first major trophy. And then watching all our best players get sold to bigger clubs.
My kitchen stinks of peanut butter. And I don't even like peanut butter. But it is a necessary sacrifice, because I've set up some mouse traps in there and I use the peanut butter as bait (it is widely considered to be the best bait). And it worked, because this morning one of the traps on the kitchen floor had caught a mouse. So my fears were confirmed - glad to have caught this mouse, disgusted with confirmation that this vermin has been scurrying about and leaving poop on my kitchen counter. I've already spent quite an extensive amount of time thoroughly cleaning my kitchen floor and surfaces, and I'll sure I'll spend more time on that this weekend. It's not the first mouse I've encountered actually inside my house - there must be an entry point somewhere. I have no idea where that it is - maybe behind one of the appliances where I can't see it? - but it is extremely unsettling. It must be from somewhere with access to below the house, because that's where I've captured plenty of mice before when they were bothering me by scratching behind the walls. I don't know if it is just the one mouse causing me all this grief this time, so I am going to leave my traps out for at least another week or so just in case there are others. But fingers crossed I have eliminated the problem. At least until the next time.
I acquired the following card recently:
My first official 1/1 trading card! A truly unique "black diamond" card. You get a lot more of these in sports trading cards - so delighted I managed to get a James Bond one. These are the holy grails for collectors. And it didn't even cost me as much as I feared. Though a lot of my autographed cards are worth a lot more.
Noticed several small black pellets on various kitchen surfaces today. I'm worried it might be mouse droppings. I'm hope I'm wrong, but I don't know what else it could be. All I know is that I need to clean all my kitchen surfaces quite thoroughly, and then put down some mouse traps. I feel violated.
A quick comment on The Last of Us - the best video game to television adaptation out there. I think I'm just getting over the trauma from Sunday's episode (second episode of second series), which delivered the biggest shocker I've seen on TV since The Red Wedding. I won't play spoiler by revealing the twist, but even though I knew it was coming it didn't make it any less shocking. This is a damn good show. But I have no idea if it can maintain the greatness after this. But this show is SO much better than The Walking Dead, it's most obvious contemporary, and much better than Fallout - another big budget video game adaptation that I've kind of given up on halfway through the first series. Highly recommend catching it if you can.
No Easter Monday off for yours truly. I'm honestly surprised that Trump hasn't made it a federal holiday. He would like nothing more than to blur the boundaries between church and state. And it would appeal to his fervent Christian conservative supporters - who inexplicably still support him despite everything. And that word "everything" covers an awful lot of things that appear hateful and sinful.
It's a good time of the year for sports. We have the NBA (basketball) playoffs and NHL (ice hockey) playoffs (with Seattle not making the hockey playoffs, and in light of recent tensions, I am very much supporting the Canadian teams). It's crunch time for the Premier League (the fight for European places is tight. The less said about Palace's league form the better, but I think that's because we have the big distraction of the FA Cup semi-final coming up). The AFL (aussie-rules football) season is up and running (it's high up on my bucket list now to see a game in person). The baseball season is up and running (and my team, the San Diego Padres, have started strongly - though it's an awful long season so I wouldn't read too much into it yet). I even watched some golf last weekend (though it only reminded me how much I hate golf fans, golf coverage and Rory McIllroy).
I realized today that I have lived longer than JFK did. Which is surreal. And makes me feel incredibly old. Though it is surprising just how young JFK was when he was president (especially considering how old the current and previous president are). Perhaps this is because people looked a lot older back in the 60's. I guess that shouldn't come as a surprise since these people lived through or even fought in the Second World War. Nonetheless, it feels very weird. Arguably I haven't achieved as much in my lifetime as JFK did. Hopefully there's still time to change that. Not.
I still have a lot of concerns about my job future, despite my manager insisting that I shouldn't worry about anything (at least this year). At this point, I'm almost hoping to get laid off so that I can enjoy a prolonged holiday. Especially since it seems that things are about to get exponentially more stressful at work. I've already had a busy start to the year, but it appears that it might get much worse soon as I take on more tasks as resources get shifted about. The next step in the streamlining of our department is apparently to get rid of all the contractors, hence the increase in workload. Sadly this is something I think they have to do before they can start laying off full-time employees next...
It's kind of sad how reliant we are on modern technology. And so it proved today as my entire company (one of what must have been thousands of other companies, and millions of people) was affected by a global outage in Zoom. It meant that I, like everybody else, was totally unable to host or attend a Zoom meeting - our default meeting platform. This is a disaster, particularly as a remote worker who doesn't do face-to-face meetings anymore. Fortunately the outage didn't last long, but long enough to have to cancel a meeting. And it was an unfortunate reminder that we are at the mercy and whim of these technology companies and their awful CEOs.
One of my regular places to go for a hike is Bridle Trails State Park. When I'm not busy, I might go there once a a week - it's not too far (about a 20-25 minute drive away), has plenty of parking, doesn't normally get too busy, you can combine trails to make a decent length hike, and is reasonably flat. But I've been quite busy with work, so I guess I haven't been there for a while because a few things struck me when I was there today. One of them was the sheer number of fallen trees. There seemed to be so many. I know we've had some windy weather at times, but I didn't think anything that bad recently. The trails were clear, but all the cut-down remains definitely affects the aesthetics of the park. Nevertheless, it is a good time of year to go there. The noise of birds and birdsong was the loudest I've ever experienced here, and makes for a really pleasant soundtrack to your hike. I watched some of the Masters over the weekend, and it sounded exactly like the artificial sound of birdsong that they pipe into the coverage. Also, one of the trails is called the trillium trail, and it was nice to actually see some of the distinctive three-petal flowers along the side of the trail. I don't think these are native to Europe or the UK, so here are some photos (my guess is they start white, but turn pink before dying).
I really don't want to like this. I'm a big fan of the original, and this reboot is clearly a major sellout. But, much to my chagrin, the teaser trailer is quite funny. I'm prepared to give the film a chance if the official trailer is also funny.
I nearly forgot to post something today. I got distracted by losing lots of eBay auctions this evening. I seem to be getting outbid on an awful lot of trading cards nowadays. Particularly cards from the new "Black Diamond" set released recently. This is a premium brand whose cards tends to be of much higher quality than regular ones. They also, apparently, tend to be much more in demand by collectors like me. You know you're going to be scrapping for any card you can get when even the base set is released in limited numbers. And with so many variations of each card, this set is an absolute nightmare for a completist like me. I should probably resist spending too much money on these, but sometimes I just can't help myself.
I may have a newer iPhone now, but I've hardly taken any photos with it yet. And this is something I would like to change. It's mainly because I haven't been to anywhere new for a while now. Or not even anywhere particularly photogenic. I tend to stick to the same old places to go for a hike. But maybe at weekends I should try to be a bit more adventurous and go further afield. I'm sure there are some new trails to discover. And certainly there is a lot more of Washington State to explore.
I opened a new savings account this week. Nothing particularly special about that - I just wanted some of my money to earn a bit more interest, certainly compared to where the money was in my current account. But which bank did I go with? Well I guess I was feeling a bit patriotic, because I plumped for Barclays - one of the UK's "big 4" and a British institution (after all, this is the company that only happens to sponsor the Premier League). It's a place that I've never invested any money with before, even when I lived in the UK. But their (US) savings account offered a competitive interest rate, and it appealed more than any of the other banks that I had never heard of with similar accounts. I don't think they have a big presence in the US (26th in a list of largest banks in the US that I saw on Wikipedia), and I don't imagine that's going to change much under the current "America First" administration.
Somehow clips from the World Championships in Tetris have crept into my YouTube feed. And I don't know if this is really a brag, but I think at my best I was as good as these "professional" Tetris players. I used to spend hours playing Tetris - first when I had a Gameboy, and then on my iPhone/iPod. They say that it takes you about 10,000 hours to master something - and I reckon across the years I must have spent close to that much playing Tetris. So yes, I think I was a really good player. Probably not so much nowadays - I haven't played it for a very long time. But perhaps I should. I don't think it would take many hours to get me back to my best - and I reckon I could take on these spotty Asian teenagers and win me some prize money. In these times, it might be good to find an alternative income stream. Though I suspect this is extremely wishful and unrealistic thinking.
Well you just knew I had to get this, even if it's the worse-looking of the 3 Lord of the Rings Lego sets so far.
It's not just my savings and my retirement that is being badly hit by Trump's ill-conceived tariffs, but - arguably worse - it is also my James Bond collection. For example, there are a number of James Bond trading cards I want to bid on this evening on eBay. But they are being sold by a Chinese seller. Does that mean that I will have to pay tariffs on my purchases? I have absolutely no clue. And it's that uncertainty that is so infuriating. I've already lost out on a number of other auctions because they come from a Chinese seller and so I am bidding a lot lower than I normally would. I haven't had any problems receiving items from China before - indeed a couple of items arrived just a couple of weeks ago and I didn't have to pay anything extra on them. But will that always be the case? Particularly if Trump seems particularly keen to ramp up the tariffs on China? It makes me nervous bidding on any of these, and the possibility of having to pay extra (like a 104% tariff?!?!?!).
It appears to be that time of year when spiders come out of hiding and show up everywhere. Got freaked out yesterday by the biggest spider I've ever seen in my house yesterday. Not something you want to see when you get up in the morning and open the bathroom door. No capturing this spider - not that that is something I do much anyway. No, this was an immediate squash situation - and boy, it was so big that it left quite the mess that I had to clean up afterwards. Now I've upset the spider gods I'm probably going to be plagued by lots more spiders, and lots of big ones at that.
It's coming up to Easter, which means acquiring some unhealthy food items. Firstly, I might have to go the British shop to get some egregiously overpriced chocolate Easter Eggs. Something that Americans surprisingly don't do - you can get Cadbury's Creme Eggs (though sadly produced by Hershey, so the taste of the chocolate is far inferior) but not the British-style hollow chocolate eggs. And then there is another item that Americans don't do, and that is hot cross buns. And I have a craving for them this year. It is sometimes possible to find them here, but only from the more pricey grocery stores. And I remember from previous years that I had to search around to find some decent ones. Is it worth the effort? Probably not, but what the hell.
I'm not a prolific cook but that didn't stop me from buying a vegetable cutter/slicer recently. And it's been a godsend. I don't know why it took me so long to get one. I've also bought myself a rice cooker (thought I'd get one before the tariffs kick in), so I look forward to trying that out as well. It would be nice to expand my culinary capabilities, but I'm not holding out hope.
The 2nd most expensive trading card that I've ever purchased got delivered this week. I probably overpaid, but whatever it's done now. Let's consider it an investment (and in light of the last few days, probably a better investment than any of my shares).
It was "Liberation Day" yesterday according to Trump. The only thing that was liberated today was my retirement savings and all the profits in my stock portfolio. One of the big reasons why Trump was elected was that it was thought he would be better for the economy. I think we can all agree that has not proved the case. His administration's pig-headed haste to introduce tariffs that nobody wants is a disaster for the global economy. And his election promises to lower grocery prices proved predictably empty. It's clear we're heading into a recession, and the worst is that it was (and is) totally avoidable. And even if we avoid a recession, the world is going to become a lot more expensive and unemployment is on the rise. For all of Biden's faults, at least he left the US with a relatively strong economy. But it appears that Trump and his administration are doing everything to run it into the ground. When his policies start to affect my retirement, then I start to worry.
Turkish proverb: "When a clown moves into a palace he doesn't become a king, the palace instead becomes a circus"
Oh no, what to do. For the first time, all 6 of Sean Connery's official James Bond films (i.e. not including Never Say Never Again) are going to be released on 4K Ultra HD. And not just that, but they will be housed in Steelbooks with original art. And for a bit more money, include a limited edition Steelbook library case. Which of course you know I would be interested in. But do I really need this? I've already got all the films on Blu ray. Is 4K necessary? And if the only other original thing about the release is the artwork and casing, then I'm not sure it's worth it. If they were to also include a bunch of new extras - both on the disc and in addition to the disc - then I would definitely be sold. But as it is, I'm just not sure. And for me to say that, then it might have to be a reluctant pass.
One of my least favo(u)rite noises is that of a chainsaw. And unfortunately I had to endure it most of the day today. My landlord decided to cut down some more branches from the trees alongside my driveway. Ostensibly I understand why he is doing it - to allow bigger vehicles to more easily be able to go up my driveway by increasing the clearance. Specifically, his justification is to ensure emergency vehicle access. Is there something he knows that I don't?! Either way, I don't like it. I don't like the loss of tree cover, both for me and for the local bird life. It reduces my privacy. Particularly to the neighbo(u)r's house that has been on the market for a while - and which I went online today to discover that it has been sold (for a million dollars!) pending inspection just within the last few weeks. Now the side of my driveway seems very open - and I don't know if it will ever fill out with other growth. I'm sure just taking down a few branches doesn't make a big difference to how much noise I receive - but it certainly has a psychological effect. Out of sight, out of mind. But now the newly sold house is in sight, in mind. Let's hope my new neighbo(u)rs aren't too noisy.