Skyness

On my way to do one of my visit-the-sick things I spotted a strange-looking sky with a fascinating whirl of cloud included. The traffic lights stayed red long enough for me to grab the camera and take a quick shot through the windscreen -- and that was just about the only blip I blipped all day. I spent a couple of hours chatting with Tony, the elder statesman of our Music Group, who's been unwell for two months now, suffering mainly from vertigo. Our chat seemed to veer all to often towards illness and death, but despite this I think he was glad of the company, and I promised to call in to see him again next week. He was in reasonably good form, certainly much perkier than when I last saw him just over a week ago.

My pal Michael came over from Budapest last night. He got a call on Monday to say that his mother had fallen down the stairs here at home and was in a bad way in hospital. He asked me to drop in a box of chocolates or suchlike to reassure her that he was thinking of her while he arranged a flight over. I spoke to the ward sister, who told me Michael's mother had 'an episode' during the night and that the doctor had tried unsuccessfully to contact the family. She took a note of my number as a temporary measure, told me not to bother coming in with chocolates, and said that flowers weren't permitted in the high-dependency ward Michael's mother was in. I phoned Michael to tell him the news, he gave me phone numbers for his brothers which I passed on to the hospital, and we spoke again a couple of times again yesterday. He was in a bad way when I spoke to him this morning, and I promised to meet him when I left Tony's place, but by the time I contacted him to make arrangements he'd already found another shoulder to cry on. We'll meet tomorrow instead.

Back home, I rested and fed myself and then played around with my sky blip, trying out the new image-editing kid on the Mac block in the process. It's pretty good for a version 1 app, and I look forward to playing with it some more.