Coronacut

I wanted to catch this before it was gone (i.e. grown out). I had a radical haircut on Thursday - especially the fringe which is shorter than it's been possibly for ever. So thanks, Mr A, for the photo.

Lovely weather - so we took a walk up to the weir and back in the morning (it wasn't particularly busy or that quiet - just normal so plenty of space for everyone), and then Mr A got on with some baking. Well, we've got to make a dent in that flour. He also made another cake. We will be the size of houses at the end of this. But we certainly won't starve or go short of good things to eat. I managed a bit more of the Spain photo editing, but I'm not loving it. The trouble with editing sunny photographs from the winter is dealing with the problem of excessive contrast. I'll be happy when it's done.

I also popped Mr A's bicycle onto Freecycle, and got rid of it literally within an hour. It's a perfectly serviceable bike, if not rideable at the moment for various minor reasons, but the reality is that he will not ride it again and it's just cluttering up my study (and I need to make space for the spinning bike to come in). I gave it to a young Romanian guy who said he was looking for work (I didn't ask whether he had just lost his job, but I guess that's the implication), and isn't keen on using the buses.

Later in the afternoon, when my eyes got tired, I read my book (Circe) for a while, and then after dinner we watched a production of Dr Faustus at Shakespeare's Globe via youtube. We tried to watch it yesterday as well, but after a while the youtube stream stopped, so we turned to iplayer. This happened again today - got about five minutes in and then stopped. So we started streaming soemthing on iplayer and that too ground to a halt. So we turned to the other method of streaming, which is via the laptop, linked to the TV with an HDMI cable, and that worked fine. Presumably the problem is with the excessive demands being placed on websites at peak hours of the day, and I assume that streaming via the laptop is less hungry for bandwidth. I doubt the problem is at our end as we are not on BT but on Hyperoptic and we have fibre optic cable right into the flat.

Watching (or listening to) something quite diverting and relatively demanding in the evening works well, especially if I don't blip in the evening - i.e. I don't open my laptop again after turning the TV off. I managed to transition from watching TV into bed and reading my book without stirring up my anxieties again, and as a result fell asleep pretty quickly and slept deeply. I woke early, but that matters much less than not being able to get to sleep in a timely manner. So I think that in future I will not be blipping in the evening - but will either blip earlier in the late afternoon or, more likely, the following morning, as I am doing this time.

Strategies, strategies, eh.