Yesterday as it is Friday we go on our normal trip down into town to visit 'The Lemon Tree' cafe which is now our favourite venue for a Friday morning. After the pouring rain of the last few days, it looks as though the bands of rain are sweeping their way northwards and, upon our return, the weather was rapidly brightening and yielded quite a pleasant day during the afternoon. We were delighted to meet up with our University of Birmingham friend who we often see at the weekend, either on a Friday or a Sunday. Then we rather had to dash up the hill to ensure that we get home in plenty of time for Meg's late morning visit from the carers. I recently had to repair (i.e.wood glue together) some of the legs from a little occasional table we have in our lounge - I suspect the legs had become loosened from when Meg in her falling about days had sent the table crashing. The wood glue seems to have worked its magic although I a treating it very gingerly these days.
I have managed to get the Bluetooth keyboard upon which I am currently typing communicating directly with my iPad whilst sitting in my favourite leather armchair. This means that I can now chat with Meg, watch the TV and also type notes to myself all at the same time which is true multi-tasking. We also treat ourselves to a bought haddock fish pie which we are going to have for our Friday lunch and today is no exception. We finish off our lunches these days with a small bowl of plain Greek yogurt but enhanced a little with some spoonfuls of coconut yogurt (sold in Aldi) which is delicious. Last night was a disturbed night for both of us. Although Meg had been put into the bed by the carers so that she was all tucked up by 7.30pm, in practice she did not fall fully sleep until about 11.00pm.This happens occasionally such as every third night and, on occasions like this, I try to keep Meg calm and unagitated but this is easier said than done Eventually, I got up and started to do the jobs that I reserve for the evenings when Meg is (hopefully) asleep. Consequently, last night I got very little sleep last night and consequently have felt like 'death warmed up' the whole of the following day. After Meg has had her 'tea time' call from the carers in the late afternoon, we always go to the main lounge and see what YouTube has to offer. Sometimes we are presented with some classic comedy and so, sometimes with some classical musical offerings, depending on what the YouTube algorithm has sorted out for us. Today, there was an examination of the lives of the three great tenors,Caruso, Gigli and Bjorling (the Swedish tenor), As a follow up, there was a biopic of the life of Mario Lanza who had a magnificent voice but, coupled with his good looks, lent itself to the TV and cinema era rather than the opera house. But Mario Lanza died at the age of 38 and although he had recorded the sound tracks to The Student Prince, the powers that be that in MGM substituted another actor who played (and lip-synced) the role pretty well by all accounts. We were happily watching our TV when suddenly we lost all TV signal in both of our lounges. Suspecting a transmitter fault, I got onto the appropriate website which informed me that there were no problems with the transmitters (but I am not convinced about this) After an urgent phone call to my son, he came over and we experimented with a little portable TV and various lengths of TV cable to try to work out if the problem was with our aerial.To cut a long story short, we got first the portable and then the big Toshiba TV working but only in the other end of the lounge and only receiving the terrestrial channels and not the internet channels. But from the important standpoint of keeping Meg engaged, we now have a TV that offers something, if not everything, and she can view this by locating the wheelchair into a different part of the lounge. After various experiments and trials with different combinations, my son and I think that we may have an explanation for what is going wrong. It could well be that the transmitter has some kind of fault and is transmitting at a lower power than is normal. This might be effecting the big TVs but not the portable. In addition, to put the TVs where they need to be proximate to our armchairs, I have deployed long lengths of cabling along the skirting boards of the Music Lounge and this will degrade the signal further. So we think that a reduced transmitter power coupled with our cable-induced signal degradation may account for the problem. We are going to wait until the morning to see if anything has been sorted out overnight and whether the TV in our Main Lounge is functioning as it should in the morning. But as things stand, they are now looking somewhat less bleak than they were an hour or so back when it looked as though we might have to call a TV or aerial specialist and be without TV for days on end. I am relieved that we have a solution that will just about work for now and we will have to see what the morning brings.
The foreign affairs news on the evening bulletins was disturbing in the extreme. Israel had attacked the Hezbollah HQ in Lebanon and the scale of the destruction left a huge red glow over the horizon that rather reminded me of the initial American attack on Iraq when they were promising 'shock and awe'. It looks as though some of the major Hezbollah leaders may have been successfully targeted but not their actual leader. Of course, there will be others who will step up into the role and I have always thought that the military doctrine of (almost literally) decapitating the enemy was a futile strategy. For example, if Churchill had been killed at the height of WW2, would the reaction of the rest of the population that now is the time to sue for peace? So a ceasefire seems to be a long way off and the Israelis are preparing for a ground invasion of Lebanon in the near future in any case. One has to despair what a solution might be in the face of these calamitous scenes.
© Mike Hart [2024]