…and other quests. This is just a quick update for the week.

If you’re a Haruki Murakami fan, you’ll appreciate the title. Our wild cat chase was fruitless as the name suggests, but we haven’t given up.

The weather has been beautiful. No, that’s not a mistake. It is March in Plymouth, and we’ve had one week of glorious sunshine and another of slightly overcast but pleasant conditions. I’ve been out in the garden doing bits and pieces and started a number of seedlings in the conservatory including courgette, squash, pumpkins, tomatoes and peppers.

We spent the weekend travelling around Cornwall and Somerset. The first leg was centred on a feline individual. Sarah’s cat, Pippin, has been roaming the countryside near Truro and we had a cat hunt and picnic on her grandparent’s farm. One cat was found early in proceedings, but unfortunately cats are not interchangeable and this random one didn’t fit the bill. Pip is scheduled for transportation to the New World (Monkton Heathfield, near Taunton) as we don’t think he’ll get along with our Plymouth cat, Annie, although we have to find him first.

Whiteboard Relay

A big whiteboard has been on my “to buy” list for quite some time now. I’ve always found scoring off to-do lists satisfying, and use Google Keep most of the time for that purpose. Shopping lists. Films to watch. Jobs to do. Keep is good at what it does, but it can be easy to ignore older lists and gradually they become lower and lower in priority until they are all but forgotten. Having a physical representation of the items will hopefully motivate me to get more of it done, and stop putting off simple tasks like painting that bit of polyfilla by the nursery door that has remained in the same state for about a year.

Amazon has become my benchmark for prices, and big whiteboards don’t come cheap. I suspect a large part of this is related to how unwieldy and expensive to ship they are. I have gradually weaned myself off Amazon in order to support smaller retailers because it was becoming my only online shopping choice. It’s no longer easy to tease out the quality of items with shill reviews and other suspect practices ongoing, so going with a smaller retailer often gets you a better deal in one regard or another. I am also a massive proponent of buying used – there’s so much crap out there already, why not find it for a lot less money and save something from going to landfill unnecessarily. Facebook Marketplace has overtaken Gumtree as the main classified platform, much to my chagrin.

Facebook Marketplace is bad. Objectively bad. Communication with sellers is through Messenger, and that line of chat includes a picture of the item for sale but no link back to it. It’s bad, but everyone uses it and I’m slowly coming to terms with that sad fact. A quick search showed an office clearance in Plymouth with multiple whiteboards for sale at ridiculously cheap prices. Not an opportunity to pass up for a budding whiteboard enthusiast, although it did require some manoeuvering. I had cycled to work that morning (push bike, not e-bike because I’m a glutton for punishment) which meant I had to first cycle home to grab the car and drive into Cattedown. I quickly picked up the whiteboards and made my way back to work all in the space of about 45 minutes. Now for the rest of the work.

Games

We’ve been rediscovering Spyro 3 and utterly exhausted the playability. For us, that’s collecting all the gems and eggs on everything apart from the flying levels which are always awful. Some mechanics have aged particularly poorly, although I don’t recall enjoying those levels on the original PlayStation game. Normal gaming is on hold until May unfortunately until the exam is over, and at that point we’ll be returning to Resident Evil 5 and continuing our marathon playthrough of all the games.

That’s it for now, but stay tuned for more projects, food and games. Maybe even a nutty crust loaf or two…