08:00 Halloween today, but it started a good 8 hours ago in Western Australia, where our daughter Sarah lives, with Francis and their 8-year-old twins, Lily and Jessie.
I wake up and already Sarah has texted me with pictures of what the twins made for their own special Halloween breakfasts: scrambled egg with monster faces - yikes, scary!!!!
They'll be all out trick-or-treating in an hour or two, and our other 3 grandchildren in Hampshire, England will be out doing the same thing this evening.
But it's going to be a quiet Halloween for Lois and me, that's for sure. We don't normally get any trick-or-treaters calling, because we live on a busy main road, where the houses are a bit set apart, so it's hard graft for little legs to "shlep" round them all.
All we have is our memories - these pictures are from Halloween 1981, when Alison was 6 and Sarah was 4. And the summer after that (1982) we moved to the US for 3 years, where they really know how to do Halloween. Happy days!!!!
flashback to Halloween 1981 - 40 years ago now,
when Alison was 6 and Sarah was 4: how cute they look!
10:30 Apart from that, it's a usual kind of a Sunday. Lois takes part in her sect's 2 worship services on zoom, but she tells me later that the sessions were plagued with technical difficulties, which was a pity. Sect members who turned up to take part in person at the Village Hall were okay, but those watching online had a lot of trouble - picture freezing, metallic sound quality and drop-outs etc. This doesn't usually happen, I have to say.
flashback to August: Lois showcases the Village Hall
where the sect holds its Sunday services
Unfortunately, although the day's visiting preacher was present at the village hall where there were no problems, the president for the two sessions was trying to preside over proceedings remotely, and sometimes didn't know when it was his cue to say a few words etc.
That's modern technology for you!!!
Eventually Lois says that the people in the hall changed the mobile phone that they were using to connect to the internet, and the quality was much better after that. But it was a bit too late as far as most of the sect members were concerned, and many had already logged off.
Well, what do you know!!!! But why is Port Arthur, Ontario, described as a "former Canadian city"? Has it been annexed by the United States???
What madness !!!!!!
13:30 I go up to bed for a nap, and Lois joins me at 2 pm, when the second service is over. It's a terrible day weather-wise - wet and windy from the southwest, with a few bursts of sunshine in-between-times. But how nice it is to be in bed when it's raining and blowing outside.
I think we're both feeling a bit below par - last night the UK put its clocks back one hour, and it always puts Lois and me a bit out of whack when this happens and we go over to Greenwich Mean Time for the winter - what a madness it is!
When I was younger, I was more organised, and before going to bed on Saturday night I would go round altering all the clocks in the house, so that we used to wake up on Sunday morning with everything in order. Now, I just change my watch on Saturday night, and then do the clocks round the house gradually as we go through the week. How lazy I've become !!!!
Another annoying thing is that we have to remember that there's now an 8-hour time difference with Western Australia, instead of the 7-hour difference that there is in summer. Western Australia doesn't change its clocks at all, which makes a lot of sense to me, that's for sure!
But what a crazy planet we live on !!!!!
I ask Lois if she knows who thought of the idea first, and this is what she digs up from the Internet: it seems that the original ideas were proposed out of pure selfishness - somebody who wanted more time to study his beloved insects, and somebody else who wanted to play more golf in the evenings - my god!
Willliam Willett, grandfather of singer Chris Martin,
proposed changing the clocks by two hours,
so that he'd have more time to play golf in the evenings
After all several quora forum users who "think outside the box" are often asking "Why doesn't the US just take over Canada?". So perhaps somebody read all that and started to implement the idea, perhaps?
I don't know, but I think we should be told !!!!
20:00 We wind down by looking at some TV, the last edition of this year's "Autumnwatch", which keeps track of autumn wildlife in the UK with the help of a team of presenters and a network of hidden cameras.
the programme's night-time cameras catch a beaver
felling a tree near Wild Ken Hill, Norfolk
And who knew that when beavers are doing their gnawing work, they stop every 5 minutes to grind their bottom incisors, which do the bulk of the work, against their top incisors, to sharpen them up?
Presenters Chris Packham and Michaela Strachan showcase
a piece of log that some beavers have been gnawing
Fascinating stuff !!!
Presenter Chris Packham famously has an aversion to using the word "cute" when talking about wildlife. But as it's Halloween, even Chris relaxes the "c-word" ban a little bit, on seeing one of the programme's legendary "cute photos", sent in by a viewer: this one showcasing a vole looking out at the world from the inside of a pumpkin.
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzzzz!!!!!
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