This is Nelson the one-eyed alpaca. Without him, my IT crises would probably have tipped me over the edge.
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Reviewing the bank statement today, I realised we’re still paying contents insurance on a house we moved out of three months ago.
With no expectation of anything but a quick cancellation, I phone Barclays up.
They backdated my cancellation for me and I’m getting almost £200 back. Great customer service.
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£800 a year for contents insurance? 
…oh, hang on, you’re in Liverpool aren’t you. That’s cheap. 
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Being sent to the garage to get some potatoes, and (at the beginning of rush hour!) finding out that the garage had fuel, and there was a pump free!
Got the spuds, and £30 worth of fuel - in our car that took us to a full tank. No need to worry a bit fuel for another 3 weeks.
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Your house, next week.
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Mrs P_F put me on what she called a retraining programme.
I hurt everywhere, arms scratched to hell but penultimate Raspberry crop done and Chillies saved from the frost due this week.
That ain’t low cost labour, shit it was hard work.
Where’s my meds ffs
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Doing the usual Jay’s Online Pub Quiz and having family chat online with YoungAdult#2, but going to bed and leaving him and his Sis carrying on for the last hour (ongoing) talking cabbages and kings.
Did you see Jay’s quiz team take on the Eggheads? First game of the new Eggheads on Channel 5 this week.
Mrs C_S and YoungAdult#1 did. He didn’t do very well by all accounts
I would agree with that summary. Worse than average IMHO
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Tuesday was a good day for me.
At a loose end I thought I’d make a digital copy of a Victorian family portrait. It’s small glass plate, a collodion positive also known as an ambrotype, just 9 x 7cm. It has two cracks in the glass plate and I thought I’d clean the image in Photoshop. It worked well. The collodion wet plate process enjoyed a popularity with studio photographers, from its invention in 1851 until the early 1860s so dating the photograph gives us a likely ten-year period.
So, who is this grieving lady? The image is a widow dressed traditionally in “widow’s weeds” and as in most early long exposure photographs, smiling and blinking were not welcome.
Fortunately, a lot is known about my Victorian “Slowlane” antecedents, they had strong links with the literary world of the time, my G G Grandfather a publisher, my G G Grandmother links with authors. My G G Grandfather died in 1858 which puts the portrait within the “collodion era” so was this a picture of G G Granny Slowlane? The only other picture of G G Granny Slowlane was of her in her 80s so I wasn’t hopeful of making the link. However, after scrutiny of both pictures I was pretty well convinced it was she. I sent the picture to a literary friend, who has researched and written about Granny and he too was convinced. He was probably more excited about the portrait than I.
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It is just amazing you managed to find a selfie of your younger sister.
Bravo.
Superb effort.
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My younger sister is still around and she’s a feisty bitch…only the North Sea and The Baltic keeping you safe at the moment. 
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I have two questions. Don’t bother answering the second if the answer to the first is “no”.
- Are you some kind of Wolverine style mutant with a very specific healing power?
- Are these your newly chopped balls, borne of acts of violence from Mrs P_F and the rest of the village?
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They’re walnuts not @Polski_Filipnuts
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One presumes you have personal knowledge of the Polskinutsak?
Otherwise, how would you know? 
They are very sweet being so freshly dropped
There’s a joke about nuts dropping in there somewhere…
