waking up to see the first snowfall of the winter

Trees in blossom, seen from my home office window. And being able to make use of the good weather to get the laundry dried outside on a workday.

Finding a home workaround for restless legs
I get restless legs. Lying awake in bed at 3.a.m., 4 a.m., 5 a.m. with a pair of legs that think they want to go for a half mile run while the rest of me just wants to go to sleep is like Chinese water torture . My known exercise workarounds are to tire 'em out by going for a long walk, or running up and down a flight of stairs 6-10 times or pedalling furiously on an exercise bike for a couple of miles. But I live in a flat and have no stairs (and no exercise bike), so the two quick and easy workarounds were not available to me at home. Very, very glad to have found a life hack that I can do at home that also works and doesn't take the couple of hours the walk takes.

[Simons] You're going to tell us what it is, aren't you...? Sorry to hear of your case, it must be horrible to face up to confinement. Very glad you have found a solution.

[Simons] Yeah, what is your fix for the problem? (I bought a treadmill on Friday. Half of it was delivered on Saturday, the other half came this morning. I have paid for it by not having to buy petrol to drive to work for the next 6 weeks. I am imagining walking and listening to half-hour episodes of the Goon Show or Poirot or Paul Temple)

Well it's a home hack; I realized my futon base is at a usable height for 'step training'. Really it's far too high for proper step training but as I need the equivalent of running up at least 6 flights of stairs two steps at a time it'll do.
Normally a divan-like bed would be too soft, but mine's got two tatami mats in it so it's firm enough to step on repeatedly.
For restless legs, the NHS suggestions include taking a hot bath in the evening, or applying a hot or cold compress to your leg muscles - only cold works for me. In fact I also discovered that my legs don't get twitchy as long as they remain cold, so I sleep with not just my feet but my legs outside the covers, and provided it's not too warm a night that also works. Unfortunately my exercise tolerance and cold tolerance are increasing with practice, so my legs and I are locked in an arms race.
And when it's too hot, tiring them out (by any expedient method) is my only fix.

[Simons] Tried lying on your back and pedalling furiously?

I haven't actually, but that probably wouldn't provide heavy enough resistance to work against.

Strap bricks on your feet?

[Pablo] No, that's cruel. Poor bricks.

The silence.
I also heard there was a petition out to switch the street lights off so we could all see the stars.

And no junk mail either, have you noticed?

Pathetech's jumping pillar box pp Stevie

Practising pedal notes on the trombone. It's taken me 25 years to get the hang of this, for some reason. A wonderful rich farty sound that shakes the very walls.

So,Rosie, it wasn't trumpets that brought down the wall of Jericho?

(Dujon) Nah, it was a load of King 3B's. Pricey, aren't they? Mine cost £595.

The day I realised that my musical skills would never lead me to buying a musical instrument, brass or otherwise. It was the brass involved that disillusioned me.

(Duj) Musical instruments, especially new ones, are a ludicrous price and there's a lot of pretentiousness involved. The keys of a bassoon, so I was told by a bassoon player, are made put of silver. Why silver? Brass would do, or chrome-plated mild steel or even cast iron or even nylon, which is strong stuff. It's all bollocks, I tell you. Everything is. I could go on.

I would postulate that when it comes to the quality of metal, we are talking about the difference between a responsive brass instrument and one that has as much life in it as a 3 day old dead ferret. Like my French horn - complete crap, but then so am I as a horn player so it doesn't matter. There are, however, cases where it matters very much. Like real brass players.

(Pablo) The quality of the metal probably reflects the overall quality of the design from an engineering point of view but should not affect the actual tone since all the sound comes out of the bell and the material of the instrument itself hardly vibrates at all. This obviously does not apply to an instrument with a sounding board such as a piano, violin or guitar but it certainly does to a brass instrument. You can make a "brass" instrument out of anything, even cardboard. A metal mouthpiece probably helps though.
The worst thing about a cheap 'n' nasty trombone, say, is a sticky slide or leaky water valve, engineering defects. If you open the water valve some notes just disappear; they just cannot be played whereas others are completely unaffected. Weird! All to do with nodes and antinodes.

Watching the little birdies scoffing their mealworms. It seems mealworms are the best thing ever, to a bird. I am less enthused over the featherless cat that also likes them.

[Rosie] Granted that brass instruments are at base, merely tubes (so the didgeridoo qualifies as a brass instrument(??)), I think you could find many top pro brass players who say the metal matters very much. Not just for reasons of weight and balance, but the sound that they can get on them.
Re the water valve, I once knew a trombonist who could play a scale on it. You had to be there.

(Pablo) They get a good sound because they feel comfortable with the instrument which is probably expensive, shiny, well put together, well balanced and has a nice easy slide. The material simply can't matter because it doesn't vibrate.
As for the didgeridoo, I'd say yes, it's fundamentally a "brass" instrument because the sound is formed by the player's lips, not by a reed. So, for the same reason, is the sodding vuvuzela. I've played one made out of rubber. It blows just below the Bb below middle C. Harmonics are difficult to get and ridiculously out of tune anyway.
BTW I'm not "top brass" let alone a top brass player. Big Band hack, more like.

[Rosie] technical qiestion: is a Kazoo a brass instrument or a reed instrument?

(pen) It's a reed instrument. The wonderfully vulgar sound comes from a vibrating membrane. Brass is basically blowing raspberries down a long tube, in my case 9-13 feet.

[Rosie] Us French hornets have a technique called bouchée or cuivré, whereby one partially stops the bell with the right hand while blowing like the proverbial. If the metal is good, the bell vibrates like crazy, which you can hear. If the metal is crap, nada.

Survival Just read back my entry directed to Stevie from early in the year, commiserating with his bronchitis. Christ, I must have had Covid! Pre-release version, OK, but it has been established that it has been around since November. Note to self - get antibody tested.

(Pablo) If the bell vibrates surely it can only do so at one frequency which may well not be the note you are blowing. My trombone does this and the bell resonates just above D a ninth above Middle C. I can only get this note on a good day (a D-day, I call it) but you can excite the resonance by playing the G below Middle C, just slightly sharp. But none of this affects the sound of the 'bone in its normal range.

BTW I hope the Covid hasn't done you any harm. I certainly don't want to get it myself, not at my age.

[Rosie]Without trying to labour the point, I think this shows the difference between quality of metals, as instruments respond very differently. Tried doing harmonics? Like playing a note and humming strongly the 5th, 10th or 12th above? Bones are particularly good for this. Horns OK, Weber even wrote them into his Horn Concerto.

Thanks for the Covid good wishes. As I am still here, and as good as ever, no, it didn't bloody well get me, despite my age. I'm sure it's the cabernet sauvignon that did it - excellent preservative.

(Pablo) Can't do those harmonics. However, I can do quite a good growl, something that goes down quite well in a trad band but would get you some funny looks if you tried it in a big swing band.

[Rosie] Eh? Since when was growl banned from big bands? I've written it into swing charts myself. Bubber Miley in Duke Ellington's band?

(Pablo) You certainly wouldn't put in a growl when playing ensemble but I agree it could easily be part of an ad lib solo. I've even tried it myself but not to any great effect.

[Rosie] No? Try the first 10 sec of this

[Pablo] I relate that music to not very good chocolate chip cookies (though, if given them, I won't refuse) because of this

(Pablo) Top trumpet players but that isn't a growl, it's the wa-wa mute and probably marked as such on the chart.

[Rosie] Actually it's marked as a plunger growl. (Wah-wahs wouldn't cut it - not gutsy enough)

A little rain.
A little rain is a little pleasure. A lotta rain, I agree, maybe not. But overall I like rain more than not, personally.

Lunchtime dogwalking wearing a coat Much cooler today, around 19C after last week's 32-33-34C, and I'm back at work (although still working from home) which means I do the lunchtime dog walk. I had to wear a waterproof coat and actually enjoyed the cooler temperatures that made me walk faster on the 1.6 miles to the potato warehouse and back. Thank goodness I've invested so much in boots and coats over the past few years. I have gear for every possible lunchtime meteorological condition from now until at least next April.

(pen) Well, don't hold your lightning conductor like that - it could be live.

The shipping forecast. Just been listening to a French person who said he liked listening to the French shipping forecast as he used to go sailing with his grandfather. Not just a Blighty thing, then.

I remember - 20 or so years ago - driving around somewhere near Aberdeen or Inverness for work and playing around with the Long Wave on the car radio and picking up what I presume was the Danih- or perhaps the Norwegian shipping forecast. It certainly wasn't German or French, but I could identify the names of the shipping areas.

Serendipitous discoveries Today my friend and I took a slightly different route on our walk round Wimbledon Village, and found Cannizaro Park, which neither of us knew was there.

[Simons] Hidden gem, isn't it? Make sure you go next June when the rhododenrons come out, it's amazing.

Corporate kindness Rare as it is, it generates a lot of goodwill when I see it. Especially when humor is also shown. See this recent example from Northern Rail.

"We are aware we have bees nesting at the end of platform 3.
Please do not disturb them.
Consider them as key workers and apply social distancing."

Oh hey, I'm accidentally switching to American spelling. Serves me right for getting in to a big document in US-English.

Tim Vine jokes. Merriment.

Cake.
It's raining and windy and grey and I just got soaked on a dog walk so any cake will do. I should have made one yesterday but was busy ironing. Banana bread tonight then.

Red wine, after a week on the wagon taking a no-booze antibiotic

The wobble on a good hot dog. This one hadn't occurred to me, but it is true, and this video link of the WobbleDog 9003i in action makes an incontrovertible case.

I shall now pause to observe a moment of silence for the few dogs injured during these experiments.

Still sunny at 16:00 on a Friday afternoon in January. Longer days in lockdown.

My car passed its MOT. First time for ages. That means I can still legally drive to Waitrose (one mile). The open-ended freedom this endows me with is positively scary.

More red wine. And more....

A dog sleeping on your lap and cherry coke with grenadine or pomegranate juice.

Waking up with a pulse and apparently Covid-free. Thanks to RFLT.

[Chalky] Radox-Filled Large Tub?

[chalky] Ralf Lemster Financial Translations?
Red Frogs Finishing Tuna?
Robots Liking Flambed Turkey?

Rapidly Fried Lark's Tongues?

S'obviously Roger Federer's Lunting Trousers.

Reeking Limburger For Tits?

[Stevie] I'm on a diet. As of now.

Playing "Take the first line of a novel" and then add "And then the dragons arrived." There are so many that work surprisingly well.

Of course, Harry Potter, LOTR, The Hobbit, and 1984 have all been popular ones.

These have been my contributions:

Not so long ago, a monster came to the small town of Castle Rock, Maine. And then the dragons arrived.

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf stream and he had gone 84 days now without taking a fish. And then the dragons arrived.

Alice was getting very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do. And then the dragons arrived.

Marmalade tea and individually wrapped slices of quail salami.

Seeing on and working on my art car. Also, having others add to it.

Getting quite pissed on brandy and visiting the Morniverse, which is full of my type of people. (KagomeShuko) Are you sure you'e in the right game?

Having (and eating) leftover cakes I made for the in-laws' visit yesterday.

Throwing away stuff that even I can't think of a use for. Not so much that it didn't spark joy, as that it did spark 'what in holy hell even is this thing?' I have still got a stash of bits and bobs that I don't know what they're for, but it's smaller now. I'm keeping some of the more intriguing artefacts, at least for this round, because if I chuck 'em I'll never find out what they were. Curiosity and hoarding tendencies have managed to outweigh tidiness once again.

One of the stranger objects I had stashed are some screw-like objects with a fat smooth cylinder in the middle of the screw. So they're not cylinder-head screws, because there's thread before and after the cylinder part, which is considerably thicker than the surrounding screw. So what the hell are those things for? What are they called? I guess they're some kind of screw-hinge device?

[SM] Sounds like anchor screws used for attaching curtain rail holders. One side screws into the wall, the other into the rail holder. If they are beefy then they might be used for attaching sinks and other similar items. If they are massive, then maybe for holding railway rails to the sleepers. All these types have different threads on each end.

Some sort of curtain fastening arrangement seems to be the best explanation. I think I'll call that a win.