8 March 2010 (Monday) - Stuff

I’m sure this year is colder than last – it’s March, and I’m still scraping ice off of the car in the mornings. Having got the windows so’s I could see out of them I set off to Asda to get some lunch, where I met with a minor hiccup. Asda don’t open till 8am on Monday mornings, so it had to be Tesco. For once, Tesco was relatively painless – I wasn’t made to feel totally unwelcome.

To work, where I got this month’s copy of “Laboratory News”. “Lavatory News” (as it is fondly known) rarely has anything of professional interest, but it has one major advantage – it is free. Something for nothing is never bad, and today’s edition made interesting reading. In the first three months of its existence, the UK Space Agency has decided to cancel the UK’s involvement with NASA’s Cassini mission.

How stupid is that? Cassini took seven years to get to Saturn, and cost millions. The thing is one of humanity’s most ambitious technological accomplishments, is in orbit around a planet which is (about) a billion kilometres away, and has a very limited lifespan,

To just abandon one’s involvement with the project less than half way through is idiotic in the extreme. Surely there are plenty of other projects one could put to one side and return to later if we are short of money? The large hadron collider is one example. It will still be there, under some fields in central Europe in a few years time. Cassini, half way across the solar system, will not.

(takes a deep breath)

I then settled down with the monthly accounts. In theory I should be reasonably well off this month, in that many of the annual direct debits don’t apply in February and March. In practice I’ve squandered any savings on my latest tattoo. I see that the direct debit for last November’s gas bill still hasn’t been taken, even though there’s been three debits to the gas people since. I might just pocket that as profit. Or squander it on a tattoo.

And there’s a minor disaster. The Kleeneze pikey has put a note through the door saying she’s coming back for the Kleeneze catalogue. And we can’t find the Kleeneze catalogue. My initial reaction would be one of utter indifference. If the Kleeneze pikey is so dumb as to tout her tat with me, she gets all she deserves.

However, things are never as simple as they might seem. The Kleeneze catalogue was not left by the Kleeneze pikey. It was left by a family friend who is “slumming it”, and if we don’t find that catalogue, I am “dead as ice cubes”. I don’t see why I take the blame, but I suppose it is my lot in life to do so. Everything else is my fault...