Progress?

We were musing just now about the stuff we hang on to even though it has little or no current value.  When I was doing a (minimal) tidying-up of the kitchen just now, I found the ticket to the textile museum in St Gallen, which comes printed on a little scrap of fabric: it's so cute that I can't quite bring myself to part with it, but since most of what I read these days comes in one electronic format or another, I have few vacancies for bookmarks.  We were taking stock of cameras.  Martyn has a Canon Sureshot that he bought decades ago in Toronto, a couple of digital cameras and a camcorder.  I still have at least one film SLR camera, a digital SLR and no fewer than three other digital cameras.  And which of  them do we use most?  None of them: we use our iPhones.  We have a code for this kind of thing.  When my great aunt was worrying, back in the 1970s, about how to pay her care home fees, she said 'there's a good gramophone I could sell': by that point any gramophone, good or otherwise, had become at best a museum piece, and at worst mere ballast.  Our code for obsolete stuff that we ought to ditch, but hesitate to in view of what it cost, is therefore 'Aunty's good gramophone'.

The very hot weather seems to have left us for the time being.  We've had a lot of rain over the last few days, and I'm back into the spring and autumn pattern of watching for a decent day to get the washing done and dried outside.  Today being fine, you won't need three guesses as to what adorns the back yard.  The grass got a cut on Wednesday, when there were enough tufts of green here and there to make it look scruffy.  Just three days later it is greening up well, so I guess I'll be chasing the mower round again in a few days' time.

My on-line purchasing skills are distinctly curate's egg these days.  The sheets for the back bedroom beds seem OK, and are now out on the line.  Next, I ordered a new watch strap from the manufacturer, since my current one now has a sharp bit of wire sticking out from the mesh.  I measured carefully, and ordered a 22mm strap.  When I released the old strap from the watch, it became clear that the 22mm refers not to the strap, but to the 'ole it 'as to go in.  Vile language ensued, since it wasn't inexpensive: it goes back to the supplier on Monday.  Rather than buy again from the manufacturer, I have ordered a replacement from a UK firm whose web site, unlike the manufacturer's, lists a wide range of straps, specifying the model numbers of the watches they will fit.  One lives and learns, usually too late.  Watch (sorry!) this space.