Days 3110 - 3116

Aka Monday 29th May - Sunday 4th June 2023

Still v behind, so this will be a quick one. I sent a large part of this week dogsitting for my sister and her boyfriend. Which is pretty easy, even though I’m not really a dog person, but when my sister and her fella aren’t around she:

...gets very mopey and spends most of her time on the bad waiting for them to get back. V labour un-intensive. While dogsitting I got some more Disney 100th Anniversary Lego Minifigures, mostly doubles, but I did get my fav figure, the “Day of the Dead” guitarist:

…and I get this month’s Lego Star Wars Magazine, with a sweet Y-Wing:

…I picked up these New Comic Book Day gems:

…and I got ‘Cocaine Bear’ on DVD:

…I really enjoyed this in the cinema, funny and gory, and with the alternative ending, gag reel and deleted scenes I couldn’t really say no! The postman delivered my deluxe copy of Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds ‘Council Skies’ album (which came with some lyric sheets):

…which is…okay…Oasis, especially that run of their first three albums, were a big part of my youth, so many classic songs, but both Gallaghers solo projects have been disappointing, never reaching the Oasis heights. In a nutshell the songs just aren’t memorable enough. And this album is a good example of this. There’s nothing bad about it, I didn’t feel disappointed or that I’d wasted time in listening to it, but I find it v hard to recall any of the songs. It just doesn’t soar like the nest of Noel’s previous songs/albums…and I got a little Lotto win:

…and on Sunday I got a bit of exercise in, some free weights and a Morning Walk:

…which covered 4.50km in 54 minutes and 53 seconds, burning 424 calories and taking 5,955 steps…

…and I did this week’s G2 Crosswords:

…and the little grey cells, well rested over the weekend, stormed through the clues, scattering answers willy-nilly. We only had to cheat on 4.76% of the clues (aka one out of 21). We only got stuck on ‘brief evocative description or episode’ and, even with the intersecting letters, we couldn’t get ‘vignette’, but this is a damn solid start to the crossword week…

…and Tuesday’s crossword goes terribly terrible! We had to cheat on 26.09% of the clues (a record breaking six out of 23)! A truly terrible performance! We just couldn’t get to grip with the grid and couldn’t make that leap from the clue to the answer, like we should have gotten ‘periwinkle’ from ‘poisonous plant – edible marine snail’, I mean how many edible marine snails are there that have ten letters in their name. But we did learn that ‘Lesotho’ is a ‘country completely surrounded by South Africa’, that the ‘Trefoil’ is a ‘plant of the pea family with clover-like leaves’ and that ‘mulct’ means to ‘extract money by deceit’. Hopeful this is just a glitch and we’ll be back on track tomorrow…

…and Wednesday’s crossword went a tad better than yesterday’s disaster, but only a tad better. We had to cheat on 17.39% of the clues (four out of 23), not a good performance. But of those four clues we didn’t know the answer to three, and had no way of guessing, even through we had the intersecting letters – that Burl Ives is an American actor, musician and folk singer, who died in 1995, that the ‘Vulgate’ is the ‘Latin translation of the Bible, since 1592 the Roman Catholic church’s official text’ and that the ‘Tuareg’ are ‘semi-nomadic Berber people of west and south Sahara’. Although I’m ticked off that I didn’t get ‘Vodka’ from ‘unaged colourless drink’! The unaged bit did throw me, and I went down a rabbit-hole of wines and the such…  

…and Thursday’s crossword gets us back on track, as we only had to cheat on 8.00% of the clues (two out of 25). The little grey cells are back online and firing at the normal levels! Phew! And we learnt that ‘Nineveh’ was an ‘ancient Assyrian city’ and that ‘cogent’ means ‘convincing’. Hopefully this isn’t a blip and we’re back on track…

…and Friday’s crossword went even better…we only had to cheat on 4.76% of the clues (aka one out of 21). So close to a clean sweep! But we did learn that ‘largo’ means ‘music to be performed in a slow and dignified manner’, which is nice. Slowly we are building up a reservoir of Italian (?) musical terms😊…

…and we dip down a tad with the week’s last crossword, as we had to cheat on 12.5% of the clues (three out of 24). I think we were just a little bit too weary/half-asleep when we did the grid and the little grey cells hadn’t woken up. Afterwards I’m sure that we would have gotten ‘skewer’ from ‘transfix’ and ‘Papacy’ from ‘government of the Roman Catholic Church’, but we probably wouldn’t have got ‘cliquey’ from ‘socially exclusive’, pretty sure we wouldn’t have made that leap even if the little grey cells were on top form…