Square eyes

Jewish memorial, Dachau, December 2018

Many, many movies have been watched. On the weekend before Christmas Lola II and Mr M have a screening of a Christmas-themed movie, and this year it was Love Actually and I went all that way to see it. Then mostly on my wonderful huge TV screen at home: Leave No Trace, Bros: When the Screaming Stops, Swimming With Men, Phantom Thread, Bohemian Rhapsody (at the cinema), A Quiet Place, Hell or High Water and 20 Feet from Stardom. And some David Attenborough nature documentaries, both current and from long ago.

I've also worked out how to stream video from my mobile phone to the TV, so I watched the first episode of the American series Breaking Bad which Landrover Man loaded onto my phone, but when I tried to watch the second episode I couldn't take the unpleasantness of the content so I'm back looking for a quality episodic drama. All this screen time means I haven't done very much reading lately.

Something that has kept me hooked up to the computer is that I decided it was time to change all my passwords. While a specific app that encrypts and saves passwords would be the ideal solution, it's unlikely that I'd be able to use it at work, so I decided to do the job manually and it turns out that a) I have an awful lot of passwords, and b) it takes quite a lot of time to change them all. And it turns out that, annoyingly, some sites require you to have certain characters in your password, and some specifically forbid those characters. One site wouldn't even let me have a sequence of two numbers or two letters the same (e.g. 'gg' or '22'). I think I've very nearly finished them all, but this is a job that has to be 100% finished or I won't remember which ones I've changed and which I haven't.

Christmas and New Year came and went. I worked most of the time but also went to London because my cousin from Seattle was visiting with her son and other friends. I've been moving furniture around upstairs, but also in the Auditorium because of the carpet fitting. The carpet estimator came and was very helpful, so I have that to look forward to.

Actually there's quite a lot to look forward to - January and February are chock full of assignments, meetings, trips, visits as well as the usual badminton club nights and matches. The Buddhist group is running a four-week introductory course, and while they do that in the usual venue it was proposed that the regular members might meet somewhere else - so I offered my house. We've done this twice, and it has been rather lovely. I have also volunteered to join the committee that runs the group. I want to generate more social activity within this group, and hopefully promote its growth.

And a man came to service the boiler. The only reason I mention this is that he offered to check and bleed the radiators, and we discovered that the bedroom radiator essentially contained air rather than water, which neatly explains why it has been so cold in there. Very timely for the arrival of visitors this weekend, but reminds me how very obvious the solution to some problems are.