Weather of the Day: Rain

We had 16.2mm of rain today; 14.1 in one hour. Too bad we had already watered the plants.
Admin1 is reading The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch. Admin2 is reading Earthly Remains by Donna Leon which is mostly about rowing so far. To be fair, the crimes in the two Donna Leon books are mainly environmental, and the detective who tries to solve them is a happily married family man who devotes his spare time to reading ancient Greek and Roman literature, which makes a change.

Critter of the Day: Dilophosaurus


Happy Birthday Lee.
Admin2 spotted this animatronic monstrosity outside a closed-down shop while searching for another shop that turned out to be inside yet another shop.
Admin2 is also reading Trace Elements by Donna Leon which is pretty boring so far, being mostly about the weather in Venice. You wouldn’t catch us banging on about the weather all the time…

Finding Jesus

Baby Jesus has been missing from our Nativity scene for years now but Admin2 found him in the cupboard while reading the gas meter. Admin2’s mother made the set from a kit of plaster of Paris moulds back in the olden days. Jesus looks like a self portrait.

Admin2 is reading Under the Wave at Waimea by Paul Theroux but abandoned it because surfing is boring. Admin1 is reading The 22 Murders of Madison May by Max Barry.
We scored 10 on the GWQ.

Egyptian (Virtual) Holiday

Admin1 has been playing Assassin’s Creed Origins, a vast open-world game set in Egypt, circa 57BC. Some effort has gone into making it accurate, with consultant historians and linguists, and it’s undeniably impressive.
Here’s an eagle’s-eye view of Alexandria at sunset, taking in the Hippodrome, the museum, the famous library, the theatre, docks and ending up at the Ancient Wonder Pharos lighthouse, rediscovered in 1968.

There are also pyramids and the Sphinx…
…and, of course, cats:

 
Meanwhile, Admin1 is reading The Chalk Circle Man by Fred Vargas and Admin2 is reading The Other Mother by Michel Bussi.

Critter of the Day: Starling

We put our fruit bowl outside to entice the fruit flies out of the kitchen and the tits went for the fruit instead. But here is a starling of sense eating the bird food.
Admin1 is reading The Three Evangelists by Fred Vargas. Admin2 is reading The Killing Kind by Jane Casey, a horrible book about horrible people.

Sunday Tea

A (mostly) cold meal this evening: salad, cold meats, pigs in blankets, jacket potatoes, tuna, boiled eggs, freshly baked rolls and fruit salad with strawberries, raspberries and blackberries from our garden. We scored 10 on the GWQ thanks to Dave and thanks also for his heroic gardening efforts.
July gifted us 126mm of rain but was otherwise a pretty average month all things considered.
Admin1 is reading The Waiter by Ajay Chowdhury. Admin2 is rereading One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson.

The Day That the Rain Came Down

It hasn’t rained for two weeks but it bucketed down today, accompanied by thunder. It has only rained for 10 days so far this month, but we’ve had over 100mm of precipitation. Interesting, huh?
Admin1 is reading The Eight by Katherine Neville, an enjoyably daft conspiracy thriller about a mystical chess set, set mostly in revolutionary 1790s France and 1970s US/Algeria. KN is amusingly determined to shoehorn in absolutely everyone you’ve ever heard of to this barmy tale: various Bachs, Euler, Casanova, Diderot, Boswell, Robespierre, Newton, David (the painter), Wordsworth, the Freemasons/Rosicrucians, Talleyrand, Napoleon, Gadaffi, Catherine the Great, William Blake, Voltaire, Cardinal Richelieu, Marat, Frederick the Great, Rousseau … and many more. Not to mention myths of Ancient Egypt, Crete, Algeria, the Moors, Syria, Turkey and so on. Published in 1988, it’s a sort of mix of The Da Vinci Code, Tomb Raider, Mary Gentle’s Ash and Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle (in order of (very!) sharply rising quality). I didn’t believe a word of it 🙂
Admin2 is reading The Waiter by Ajay Chowdhury, a spicy snack of a story about a disgraced detective turned waiter who carries on detecting.

Critter of the Day: Cabbage White

Pieris rapae feeding on our lavender.
Admin1 is reading Have Mercy on Us All by Fred Vargas. Admin2 has been reading The Honjin Murders by Seishi Yokomizo, which is like a fiendish logic problem, not helped by its old-fashioned style and Admin2’s ignorance of aristocratic Japanese culture in the 1930s.

Epic Street Chalk Day

Well that’s how it was billed, but nearly all the chalk was in one patch (exception for ELMO LOVES YOU next door to us) and Auds and Bobs preferred to draw all over our patio. Admin1 is reading Dark Memories by Liz Mistry, a confusingly overpopulated crime novel set in Bradford which belongs more in the misery-lit genre. Admin2 is reading The Golden Rule by Amanda Craig; a corny Cornish gothic romance overlaid with trendy topical talking points (and impossible to believe that a former advertising strategist dealing with a couple of public-facing characters would not have cleared everything up with an internet search). Yesterday was our warmest day this year: 30.7°C.
We scored 11.5 on the GWQ.