Salma went in for a week’s worth of intensive therapy last night. I suffered from a little separation anxiety, but nothing that a nice piece of cake (of which more later) couldn’t fix. I should be composed enough tomorrow to tell Martyn why he’s right. And yet wrong.

…Too traumatized. My iMac is a victim of the leaking capacitor problem (now that’s what I call a memory leak) that is vexing Apple and Dell, among others, at the moment. She’s gamely hanging in there, but sleep or power downs cause her no end of trouble. Poor, dear Salma.

Two substantive posts in a row: it’s time for a day off. It started raining just as our boat pulled away from the dock this morning, and continued throughout the row and the ride to work. It struck me as a very British rain; typically here it seems that if it’s raining at all then it’s raining hard, whereas this was just a heavy drizzle that got everything wet but didn’t cause any real problems.

This reminded me of a little burst of homesickness I got yesterday while reading about the Shipping Forecast. Radio 4, one of the main radio stations in the UK, broadcasts a forecast specifically for shipping four times a day. It’s always done in a very concise, measured format that seems somehow very reassuring. Here’s a short made-up sample that sets the scene, though you can get the real thing here:

Viking North Utsire South Utsire Forties Southeast backing Northeast 4 or 5. Rain later. Good

Translated, that means in the sea areas North Utsire, South Utsire, Viking and Forties (roughly between the east coast of Scotland and Norway) there’s a 4 or 5 mile an hour wind blowing from the southeast, but moving counterclockwise to eventually blow from the northeast. It will rain later, but currently the weather is good (not, as you might guess, showing typical British pleasure in the fact that it will rain later).

Listen to the audio stream to get the full experience (and to relish a full-on British accent). You can also check Wikipedia for more details.

I know you’ve been worrying, so the good news is that the chipmunk is gone. I’m afraid I took the coward’s way out and let it die before disposing of it, while not leaving it long enough to get stiff or anything.

Somewhat disturbingly, while clearing out the pipe I found the body of another one that had clearly died a long time ago. I don’t know if it was from the fist batch we had (I took two out, but there could well have been a third, or yet another incident. We hadn’t noticed any smell, so it’s hard to say what happened.

Our dryer stopped working last night. Everything seemed OK, pressing the go button made the right whirring noise, but somehow the motor just didn’t seem to ‘catch’. I spent a little time turning the drum, trying to see if it was binding on something, when a scuttling noise from inside the machine told us what was wrong. As happened a couple of years ago, something of the family rodentia has fallen down the vent pipe (I guess the cover I installed to deal with this has fallen off).

So now the dilemma. Wait for it to die, and pick a festering chipmunk corpse out of the back, or set it free now and have it running round the basement? I’m currently contemplating leaving it to weaken for a day or two so that I can grab it and give it a fighting chance out in the wild. Assuming that in turning the drum I didn’t break its back or something. I lack the woodworking skills necessary to craft a small cart for its rear half if that has happened.