stainem

I'm quite a fan of plants for many of their uses: algae oxygenate the atmosphere, potatoes can be used to create mashed potatoes, trees can be climbed and lettuce can be used to pad out carrot-pepper-and-chilli salad. Whilst some things also have an additonal ornamental dimension (trees again, grass and anything which inhabits mountainsides as part of its long-term soil-creation strategy) anything which exists or has been cultivated for purely ornamental applications occasionally annoys me. Flowery-plants are fine when they're in a meadow, hedge or field or somewhere else where they provide something for bees to eat and drink but when they're grown in a nursery to be cut and shipped to a florist for resale at a vastly-increased price after which they willl merely sit in a vase on a table in a flat or house somewhere doing absolutely nothing they have less merit, particularly when they start to be actively annoying by smelling slightly unpleasant and (in the case of this thing which I believe to be some form of lilyoid) staining anything which brushes past them with vivid orange tenacious pollen which fiercely resists both the brushing-off and dabbing-with-Sellotape methods of removal. Previous irritating inhabitants of the table underneath the window have included a small squad of cacti, some of which would leave spikes in anything which touched them and others which would not cause injury to others but which caused damage to themselves when they became attached to the curtains only to be ripped from their primitive root systems when the curtains were next whisked open.

It was far too hot outside today to make going for a massive walk a pleasant option. I did try but soon retreated to the shade to eat biscuits instead. I had a quick poke at the available software in preparation for doing my bit for the Uke Project just to check that there isn't a free way round the issue of extremely large built-in laptop sound card latencies and that I'll have to employ the imperfect solution of using both Nicky's laptop to play the source tracks and recording them on mine rather than attempting to re-align and fix the dropouts on a track recorded at the same time as the source track was played back, even when the sample rate is cut right back. Two soundcards sorted most of the problem on my old desktop but I expect I'll eventually get some sort of plug-in external device thingby when I can justify it, find one cheap on eBay or otherwise sneak it through.