“Days continue to lengthen from equinox to solstice and summer days progressively shorten after the solstice, so meteorological summer encompasses the build-up to the longest day and a diminishing thereafter, with summer having many more hours of daylight than spring.”

ianne’s birthday is 4 days away (ahead) and we plan to go travel to be merry. A week later it’s Bank Holiday, then it’s end of summer and end of our holiday based on the “meteorological summer” definition.

We won’t let inappropriate communications interfere with our holidays, we’re instead getting on with our lives while keeping productive.

T is “proper rainy” today (steady rainfall, not sporadic drizzles) and it feels good, for a change. We need lots and lots of rain. In fact, today we stay home, which means more output like fun (not strictly leisurely) blogging.

This past Sunday I cleaned the pavements here and it felt like I was doing a good job while listening to Discman. I didn’t know the cost of that task though; there was a lot of dust and even though I wore a musk a lot of the dust was still being inhaled and the dust gave me a runny nose for 3 days. That finally got resolved (fully) some time yesterday. So I will no longer work on the floor (I planned to do another round this coming weekend), I will do that again another season, maybe only on a wet/flooded floor where dust remains stuck to the ground. Oddly enough I did not have this sort of problem in past years. I am not sure why.

Housework and housekeeping aren’t worth compromising one’s health.

UST 10 days from now it’ll be the last day of August. It has been a very hot summer.

It’s the warmest season and it won’t be over next month, as some expect further dry spells.

By some standards, summer ends in 1.5 weeks from now:

We are now into the first week of meteorological summer, which began on June 1 and will last until August 31, with autumn beginning on September 1.

Meteorologists divide the seasons up according to weather rhythms and the Gregorian calendar, states the Royal Meteorologists Society (RMETS).

But there is also the astronomical calendar, which marks out summer as being from June 21 until September 21, with autumn beginning the next day and lasting until December 21.

Only the past:

T is only a few days away from start of the league and almost all the latest videos are about Pep (mesmerised by past achievements) and Rodri as if the new guy is already worth forgetting after a humiliating defeat.

If Enzo does not win this first game, a home match, it’ll be trouble for him.

think we’ve now identified 3 different flocks of birds we can feed regularly and every Sunday we can go feed on the other side of Town (depending on the weather). At home, our “favourites” are Sleepy, Bot, and Bot’s Friend. They’re all well behaved now, Sleepy is still trying hard to improve her ‘table manners’ (I help her, I’m being patient) and it gives me great joy to see them flying away with a “full tummy”. If every person did the same, we’d have a lot more wildlife.

One day in the future people will miss wildlife. Let’s not take any of it for granted.

‘ve just noticed that Puppy Breaker thinks merely taking a photograph of an animal can disprove his lack of empathy towards animals (he used to kill them to do his degree).

Years ago I asked him directly why he didn’t devote any money to animals’ charity. He had no compelling response to it. To him, animals are probably just a nuisance.

In his daytime job he creates climate change. It’s a company that makes the world’s most polluting computers to keep going (or running) a pyramid scheme (first fake-coins, now plagiarism-as-a-service).

Greedy people tend not to understand other living things. They lack sympathy and cannot relate to other human beings either (they want to put other humans inside cages).

his morning I wrote about “voluntary” (NOT!) layoffs at Microsoft.

I said: “They can’t catch a break, can they?”

I was using wordplay because it is summer’s break.

A friend asked, “why should shoddy, subpar, proprietary software be given any preferential treatment by groups which don’t have access to the backdoors / bugdoors built into the product(s)?”

He said that “can’t catch a break” looks too much like sympathising with Microsoft.

“It’s good news that the world is giving Microsoft,” the friend said, as well as “its products, and services the
heave ho. What remains, especially in Europe, is how to deal with the leftover microsofters which have displaced as good as all IT departments.”

“Even the idea of a team to support workers to use ICT to their advantage has become foreign due to the persistent pervasiveness of microsoftianism over the IT departments it has displaced.”

Another friend said “it will take a lot of time and effort to get rid of them and to properly train IT people on real technologies again you could talk about a lost generation or two. I’m just glad I started using GNU/Linux in 1997 and abandoned Microsoft in 2002, long before the current move towards GNU/Linux and free software…”