I Had, of Course,

....never heard of Ingrid Michaelson, until I clicked on a link on Metafilter. 

Metafilter is a source of hours of diversion for me, and allows me to pretend to myself that I'm learning new stuff, so it's not really procrastinating. I feel guilty about it, but otherwise how would I learn stuff like "A genome-wide association study has linked a dislike of cilantro with a variant of a single nucleotide in a cluster of olfactory receptor genes. The palatability of cilantro has previously been a divisive subject on the blue."?

And how, otherwise, might I have heard this? Well, I'll bet there is a whole heap of other procrastinators who justify their vice by imagining that blogging is not really just a pernicious propensity toward temporal profligacy. Dammit, that's a nice sentence, "Pompously bombastic claptrap!", shouts my greatest critic,  throwing sharp-edged peanuts at me. 

 Oh look.....  there's a link to a study on whether spiders abhor conkers..... wait a while, I'll be back, I promise, but I've just got to head over there and read it.

Listen to Ingrid Michaelson singing R.E.M.'s 'Nightswimming', with an a-capella choir of her own voice multilayered on looping tapes. I love it. There's someone in the live show audience I want to bash over the head with a frying pan though. Why do audience members think the song will be greatly improved by their random squeals and whoops?

Oh. Still there, are you? Well the Royal Society of Chemistry's foray into the world of arachnids versus the fruits of the horse-chestnut tree remain inconclusive.  Conker season is almost here, so I might try an experiment or two myself.

At my friend's house, a few days ago, something huge with eight legs scuttled up the wall. Before the humans could trap it, with a view to release outside where it might eat pigeons, or some other flying nuisances, there was a snap, the dog swallowed with a gulp, and lolloped back to her bed. 

Here, have a quick toccata and fugue. What? No, it's free. no charge, no, I'm not trying to make you do something nasty.

Good night.

Biff! Pow! Whack!

An update, don't-cha know.

 

Scaffolding arrived. 

(Bloke is a random passing stranger, this blog does NOT pay extras)

Got to miss all the phone lines. Why doesn't someone invent a wire-less telephone?

Isn't this the future? Don't we all have flying cars and pocket communicators now?

Beam me up, Spotty.

I bet they've seen a lot of bottoms in their day.

Bash thump.

 

And, new timber purlin, steel brace, bolts, and glue. 

Yes, glue.

Single-skin brick, I bet it was cold in there in winter. You wouldn't loiter, oh no, straight back to those nice warm machines!

Can has bukkit?

 So far, no unscheduled plummeting, neither of bricks nor of humans.

The mortar on the roof's from the ridge tiles, another job on the never-diminishing list of things to get around to, someday.

Oh. and I spent some time tracking pipes, for another job. 

 The pipes are colour-coded. But sometimes the painter makes it up as he goes along.

Yellow denotes gas. 

And there's a specific code for the EXACT shade of yellow.... Or you can just use whatever you've got in the van, can't you?

And I was crawling in a dim space where water's coming out of the wall. It's a spring, it comes and goes with the weather. Have to invent a cure for it. 

Or plug it. Or dig a drain. Or install a sump-pump. Or dark-adapted penguins. Whatever.