Look, Squirrel !

I’ve not posted anything because my internet and telephone connection has been intermittant or totally absent these last 4 days.

The BT engineer came round, and she sat under my desk for 30 minutes checking the line out, replacing the socket and generally trying to find the fault. The connection came back yesterday (but slow), disappeared in the evening (no telephone dial tone) and is back again today.

Sitting at the computer doing some spreadsheets, I spotted a squirrel race across my front lawn, and hurl itself at the window of my study and bounce off. Then it did it again. As it was a hot day, it had a third attempt, and used the open window section, which is no more than four foot from where I was sitting.

As you can see it didn’t quite make this audacious attempt to break in, and it woke BlackJack up (bottom lefthand side at the bottom of the curtain), who proceeded to chase the squirrel off into the garden.

BlackJack also distracted me last night, when after a community meeting, he brought home another rabbit. This time he got smart, and growled at me when I tried to remove the said new friend from him. Eventually we compromised, and he went outside to eat it.

Now, the Look Squirrel argument, is one often used by climate change deniers to distract normal people with a totally spurious argument, an irrelevant article, or a set of cherry picked data that disagree with the mainstream science. To an extent, this posting is along those lines as I have not posted anything for several days.

Quite by coincidence, I had also pulled out my TV/DVD/Video set up to paint behind it ! So I couldn’t watch anything on TV either. (Couldn’t put the TV back as the gloss paint was still not dry)

That said, my loss of connectivity to the internet, and more importantly to the telephone network was real and disturbing.

We take our connectivity for granted these days in a way that 10-20 years ago would have been unhread of. I felt quite at a loss of what to do. Fortunately, my pets and local wildlife filled the gap in my life. I ended up going to bed earlier, reading a book before turning the light out and doing the sort of stuff we all normally did 20 years ago. Yet that was the norm back then.

What it has meant is that I am painting figures again. There’s no point staring at a slow internet connection, might as well go and do a layer of paint on a squad/HMG unit.

Now the connection and phone are working again, I promptly went out to Richard’s, to collect a lot of stuff he has been pining for me for the BoB game on the 31st. Some eye candy to follow.