Arrivederci

Touch wood, off to NZ this afternoon

I managed to snag a residence visa last week so, provided I don't get caught committing any acts of genocide before teatime, I should be good to go

There'll be few, if any posts, on this blog probably for at least a couple of months

Thanks again to all who've contributed and engaged in some of the chats we've had. Hopefully we'll meet again - if not here then somewhere else; here or maybe here for instance

Peace

Stef

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And now for some chart music...

Available now from Amazon...

The Playmobil Security Check Point

An old favourite but there have been some interesting new customer reviews since my last visit. This one's still the best though...

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Best Windows joke ever?

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Here

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Some things going up, some things going down

Remember - if it's cold it's only weather, if it's warm it's Man Made Climate Change

Large swathes of the UK are currently draped in an ever thickening blanket of snow

Apparently, the country has virtually ground to a standstill

Daily Express readers will no doubt blame the fact that lots of people can't get to work on eleven years of 'ZanuLabour' misrule.

The alternative point of view is that quite a few people are secretly just a tiny wee bit pleased that they don't have to go in to work today and didn't try that hard

Including, I fear, the people behind this website...

http://www.dynamicdemand.co.uk/grid.htm

...which attempts to monitor how well our national electricity grid is holding up at any given point in time

Here's what things were looking like last night at about 10pm...


There was me watching the needle gradually drop lower and lower ...when the bogging site goes off line

Boo

Spoilsports

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When not sitting around waiting for the lights to go out, I'm also staring morbidly at the price of stuff going up, especially photographic equipment

I've been keeping an eye on the prices of a couple of lenses I was planning to pick up before heading off to the other side of the world and I've noticed a couple of things over the last few months...

- Suppliers, even the solvent ones, have been running out of stock because normal scheduled deliveries haven't been turning up. I'm guessing that's at least partly due to the much discussed collapse of the global shipping trade (I've had a dozen boxes sitting in a warehouse waiting to hitch a ride to the Antipodes for a month and a half)

- Thanks to the £ tanking, photographic manufacturers have started jacking up their prices; in Canon's case twice in a month, in Sigma's case only once, but by 40%

Camera gear is hardly one of Life's essentials but this doesn't bode well for the future pricing and availability of the slightly more essential

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