Author Archives: essiep

Summer spirit

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23°C bright sun & winds. CR:33 miles.

What are these things I pass on my ride so often? The girders seem to be aligned north-south and are on a pivoting support. Will solar panels be fitted sometime soon? There are just the two structures pictured here, both connected to a trough dig into the grass. 

It’s Sunday, the first after we broke up for the summer holiday. I feel the spirit of the holiday already which normally I don’t count until we get to Monday. We don’t work Sundays any time of the year but today is different. There is none of the pre-work nerves that so often blight this day of rest. So, let’s count today.

The Tour De France– Haven’t watched this for years, but the prospect of a possible British win drew me in. Bradley Wiggins & Mark Cavedish took 1, 2 this afternoon in Paris. An unbelievable result. I raise an imaginary toast.Can’t say I give a damn about the Olympics yet though.

Life in pot

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15°C, rain

Three months of rain would suggest that summer is as good as cancelled this year. All that water has driven the garden wild, it’s a jungle out there. I have some work to do this weekend with the nearest thing I have to a machete.

It’s no normal summer when a little 5″ pot can stay wet without once drying out. Such conditions seem to suit the curious little guys who live in there.

After work each day, I visit their pot to see how they are doing. This picture shows today, they are taking form. Last week they were barely more than the little bits left over when you have rubbed out a pencil mistake. If you waggle your finger in the water they scurry back down to the silty layer that has collected at the bottom.

Starting from the day we break up for summer, the sun has promised it will put in a sustained appearance. I must make sure their little world remains habitable for the charming little dudes. Presumably, they must be larvae for some flying insect. Let’s see this through.

Jetstream

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16°C, rain

Three months of rain. The met-office say it’s the Jetstream running unusually far south this summer. Normally it flows north west of Scotland and sends to occasional storm down the northern approaches. This year it’s overhead. For those who don’t know, I ought to explain what this Jetstream is- think of a giant hosepipe in the stratosphere that is gushing water over our little island archipelago.
An image worthy of an animated visualisation don’t you think.

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Waiting for them

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15°C, rain

In biggin Dale yesterday. I was on station to wait for the DofEers who might make a wrong turn and walk off the map. Two groups were supposed to come by and I would sure see them while reading my book (Murakami 1Q84). Sometimes I snoozed, sometimes I sneezed and sometimes got up for a walkabout.

They never came. Was I generous to give them five hours before moving? It certainly qualifies as a a blissful day- becoming buried in a book that grew in my mind. Would that I could write so well.

Poison

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20°C, light summer clouds. CK:30 miles

I am poisoned. I think it was triggered by contact with Ivy. It causes a reaction that takes a few days to reach full rage. I have furious itching on my hands, especially on the webbing between fingers. On advice from the NHS, tried an anti-histamine. The cure was worse than the illness. Saturday I spent the day with the feeling you get in the days after a cold- detached, listless and fuzzy headed. Hydro-cortisone seemed to reduce the irritation, but it still took nearly a week.

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Peleliu layered

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19°C, showers later.

Peleliu looks much better in FSX. The island, like most in the Pacific is built on a seamount (a volcano), with some jungle and edged with coral reefs. Waves actually break offshore over the reefs and not so much on the beaches which is the tricky bit in FSX. 

This screenshot shows it from the top, there should be shallow white water with coral to the right (East side). After all these years I have learnt new stuff about the way the sim handles water. The sea surface is generic but tiles placed underneath give the water its colour. FSX documentation is uneven on this, but it claims to cover everything from muddy river deltas to oceanic depths with or without plankton. There are, it’s said, sixty textures to choose from.

Urgent tottering

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15°C, sun

The olympic torch procession thing passed through town today, I think. there was a nucleus of noise and crowds which is calming down now. I was out with the dog and could hear music, horns, pea-whistles and amplified voices from a point that audibly moved along at a steady pace. There were small groups of people hurrying towards the nub. They almost broke into a trot, not quite but handbags swung with some urgency. Other people walked quite quickly too, that’s a remarkable thing for a nation that likes to walk veerryy sloowly. Maybe you had to be there to appreciate the point of it all, but the noise was not a attractor for me.

NHS direct

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13°C, wind & broken sunshine

Amid furious itching, I used the NHSdirect website to decide whether I have excema or a dermatitis brought on by exposure to some trigger. the webbing bit between my fingers on one hand are ablaze. So, I filled in the questions on the webpages and within 20 mins, they phoned. It may be a reaction to weeding in the garden. Probably the day I pulled ivy off the window-frame here.

Not normally the kind of detail I’d go into here, bit I am rather impressed with nhsdirect.

Peleliu

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18°C, wind & sunny bits

Ill and off work but after a monster sleep, you find me feeling better.

Making Scenery for FSX like old times. The default land texture for Peleliu in the Pacific is a joke. It should be all tropical jungle, but MS have put dry farmland on the little coral & volcanic island.

What is should be like is closer to this:
 The island’s shape is still wrong, but I’m not sure how much more I want to do on this one. There is plenty of detail that could be added, there are coral reefs, beaches with black sands and channels in shallow waters (The German Channel) and of course, other small islands slightly to the north. Visually, the result could be rather appealing. All this tropical island paradise conceals a grim human history- The Battle for Peleliu during WW2. The US Marines invaded and forced the Japanese occupying forces out with a huge loss of life to both sides. The jungles now conceal tank wrecks, demolished bunkers and crashed planes. There are, of course, memorials on important sites there.
I’ve been watching a series called Pacific on blu-ray which tells the story from the USA side.

So there is an ugly story hidden under the canopy of palm trees on this beautiful tropical island paradise.

What the end of the world looks like…

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18°C, torrential rain followed by nice sun

10am the sky darkened, so dark it looked like 5pm on a late November evening. The difference was, there were no streetlights to cast a dull orange glow onto the undersides of clouds. Traffic lights pierced the gloom with such vivid colour, it was quite hypnotic. Kids at school felt a sense of foreboding, maybe this is the way Armageddon might start.

I’d like to see our cities with streetlights switched off again. Would it be so bad if lights went off every night from, say 01.00 to about 04.30? Some people have said they’d feel less safe (from traffic or muggers?), but society would adjust. We’d adjust to carrying a torch and paying lower local taxes (council tax pays for lighting I believe).