It's emerged over the last several days that my old phone (discontinued, and the manufacturer is too ashamed to have a page for it online) was beginning to fail -- by Thursday afternoon, it was turning itself off at random intervals and I was missing calls on it.
On Friday, I went into town, where I persuaded the nice mobile phone people to to supply me with a new handset, so I'll have a little bit of a learning curve before I'm fully at home with the changed user interface. It seems to be behaving thus far.
My real reason for visiting town was to pick up 450 copies of MH 101, which I managed to do successfully.
On Saturday, I collected
hddod and we drove up to adelheid's house, there to meet four more of the ZZ9 committee, to whit johncoxon, aeglefinus, the_major and archaro. Large numbers of magazines and allied bits of paper were put into large numbers of envelopes, and large numbers of address stickers and stamps were applied. We're getting steadily more efficient at this. stanrandom and beermat were also in attendance. When the stuffing was complete we held a ZZ9 committee meeting, and exotic substances (coffee, crisps, strawberries, cakes) were consumed.With all the ZZ9 business out of the way, and after dropping
hddod off at a railway station to make her way home, I took johncoxon down to the_major's house, where she and beermat were hosting an evening of foolishness in honour of their birthdays -- 21 and 42 respectively, six weeks or so earlier. Besides aeglefinus we had Kier (NOLJ), nerosmaster, nolley, lproven, mgspiller, Jane (NOLJ) and alexmc. I don't know if that's the order of our arrival, but that's the order of first appearance in my photos, which I'll be posting later. There were two particularly notable highlights. The first few arrivals phoned up to get a curry delivered, and when it turned up they'd thrown in a bottle of white wine and a couple of random side dishes for free. And, rather later in the evening, there were The following day,
johncoxon and I went off to Northfield Farm's open day, where we found a whole load of gorgeous animals, a substantial quantity of delicious meat, and a whole bunch of the Rutland crowd -- whotheheckami, sarah_mum, the_mendicant, A and E, morfessa, deborah_c, flannelcat and penguin_worship. A little later (but before the second burger), adelheid and stanrandom turned up too. Someone (but I can't remember who) said that it looked like an LJ meetup. Dropped John off at Oakham station, and then drove home cross-country via a number of small Chiltern towns because I didn't fancy the motorways.Home now. For a rest.
