2 January 2025 (Thursday) - Chess, A Walk, Traitors

I slept well last night – for over nine hours. I was woken by a strange gurgling bubbling sound. The hose of my CPAP machine has been getting condensation forming in it over the last week. I expect that’s to do with it being cold at night.
I made toast and looked at the Internet as I do. This morning my Facebook feed was again heaving with the posts about chess which filled it yesterday. The adverts for dog training were still there, but loads of people were commenting that they had paid good money and had nothing back from these courses. I also saw quite a few posts featuring the navy’s aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales too. I wonder why.
I had two messages from Facebook as well. The two porn adverts that I reported yesterday have been removed. Actually applying their community standards might be their New Year’s resolution.
I munzed, got Wordle on the third attempt, then seeing sunshine got dressed and got ready for the off.
 
Once I’d scraped the ice from the car I took the dogs up to the woods. It was a foggy day, but we had a good walk. Once we were away from the car park we walked for nearly four miles and only saw one other group. Mind you we did see a huge buzzard flying through the trees.
We walked for four miles and didn’t get *that* grubby. Mind you the little ones were shivering when I loaded them into the car. We came home for a quick shower of paws and tummies and then I had a rather frustrating half-hour on the phone to the insurance people. “Stewart” was more helpful than the other two people had been at Sainsburys insurance, and after he’d taken all my details he put me through to the underwriter. The underwriter said that he needed an electrician’s report. I said that one had been done on Monday and had been emailed through… I got on to the people who sent the electrician on Monday and they said they’d email me a copy of the report.
I’m still waiting.
I’m left pondering though. I have an insurance policy with one company. However when I come to claim, it turns out that the actual insuring is being done by another company. All the first lot are doing seems to be acting as a middleman. Next year I will go with the actual insurer and (as Oliver Hardy once said) “cut out the middleman”.
 
Pausing only briefly to put back a fence panel that had blown out in yesterday’s winds I then cracked on with some CPD. For dull reasons that I explained over on that other blog I spent a few minutes Googling and I found an advert. You can see it here. It is offering blood film analysis (with a two-week turnaround time!) for three hundred and twenty-eight quid. Bearing in mind I can do fifty of those a day I think I’m missing a trick here…
Then finding myself underneath a pile of dogs I watched a couple of episodes of “Victoria”. They were rather good, but again finding myself woefully ignorant of nineteenth century history I turned to Wikipedia. And again found that what was being presented as a historical drama was actually factually incorrect. Chartists never stormed Buckingham Palace… and certainly not just as Princess Louisa was being born.
 
I had another look at Facebook; I found myself still being bombarded with adverts for chess-related pages. So I set myself up an account on chess.com. so far I’m kicking the ass of a both with difficulty rating “rather easy”.
 
“er indoors TM came home from babysitting littlun, and boiled up fish and chips which we scoffed whilst watching the first two episodes of the new series of The Traitors”. It’s a good show in which everyone turns on everyone with the least provocation and at the slightest excuse whilst the actual traitors pretend not to be at each other’s throats.

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