Taking it easy

Feeling much better but somehow shell shocked from yesterday. One of the worst parts had been the awful side effects of the pain killer drops I had taken at 6:00am. OK they were a few years past their best date but I would have expected that to weaken the effect and I did only take the recommended minimum dosage. In retrospect I ought to be giving thanks to someone that I got home safely yesterday without causing an accident. Seemed to have operated on autopilot.

Obviously such medication is a blessing as a rule, as I well know but one to used with great caution and certainly not after the "best by" date! - Fool!

So with still very swollen hamster cheek but no pain, with a kidney stone doing it's morning appearance, I did not venture out much and Angie as always was left to pick up the bits including doing a late afternoon ride. The promised sun didn't manage to break through and it was very cool. I did manage a walk with Flash while she was out riding.

Otherwise spent ages trying to sort and date old photographs from the 70s and 80s as part of my determination to get as much documented in back blips but doing everything in my power to get the date correct. So lots of trolling through old paperwork to get hints - passport stamps for instance or postcards. Even before the wretched Maastricht nonsense, the lazy European customs and passport control people had stopped stamping our black and then red passports and the Greek postal workers were clearly more interested in not stamping the postcards properly in fear of the Ouzo spilling over the glass rim as the date stamp hit the card. And anyway what is the Greek shortened version used on date stamps for those two primary postcard months - June (Iúnios) and July (Iúlios)? Why can't they use Roman numerals and why hasn't the EU forced them to change as an austerity, ink saving, measure?

The whole Blip thing makes more and more sense to me although I continue to be such a bad Bliper of late. I do really appreciate and read the comments. However there are a number of non Blipers who also read the "Daily Rag" - well not that daily of late. One of these people who won't touch her morning coffee or pick up her Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung to get news on Donald, before she has read the daily Blip has been sending dis-respective messages of late complaining about the service. As it's her birthday today, my present is a promise to get my house in shape within a week or so. Happy Birthday Mrs.......XYZ.

Also this week and again today, phone calls from the children asking how things are. I suppose that is a case for closing down Blip but on the other hand a simple photo a day does tell a lot more than a confused 10 minute garbled explanation over the phone. And anyway it's fun for me to document and where possible embarrass them a little over their past by digging out the old stuff.

One of my research jobs recently got me to ask my uncle Jochen, who lives near Heidelberg, and features on several old photos a few questions including one concerning my mother (his step sister) which I had never had the guts of asking my parents. Actually it's the very conservative British up-bringing which prevented asking possibly tricky or embarrassing questions. I was 100% sure Jochen would know the answer, even though he was only 4 or 5 years old at the time. It perplexed him as much as it has me for at least the last nearly 40 years. I sent him the material I had and he had done some research at town halls in parts of Germany and I now have some interesting documents although they sadly don't ultimately give an answer to the question and we will now never find out.

The event I referred to happened long before I was born and thus has no place in Blip. It's totally harmless but just maybe if I find the time to do some more research and could with a multimillion chance to one find someone with knowledge of the event, I could then document it.

I would rather like to eventually "go" without my children having to late say "I wish we had asked him .........."

Blip could be a very useful help in achieving this. And it was rather nice to read the comment from BikerBear on an old Back Blip that she enjoyed reading some of the old nonsense I got up to. I am aware that Back Bliping does confuse matters when people look at my latest Blip icon on the Browse pages - sorry!