Falling Leaves and Litter

Our tree is now rapidly losing its leaves. Some of the other trees have already lost them all. They are forming piles in on the pavements and in our garden area, blown there by the wind.

There is a supermarket plastic bag caught in the upper branches of the tree that has been there since last year. There are also large lumps of light polystyrene plastic that have been blowing down the hill and cluttering the place up. Where they have come from I don't know. Probably some black waste bag that broke open.

Someone, presumably in one of our flats here, has left an old door-frame in the front garden. It has been there several weeks. It will probably be up to me to arrange for it to be taken away. More recently someone has also left some bits of wood from carpentry work lying about, still with nails sticking out of them. I'd have thought any competent carpenter would know to remove the nails and dsipose of the waste safely. I find such carelessness annoying, especially when it's left to others, i.e. me, to tidy up.

Tidying Up

Tidying up did cheer me up a bit. A bit more progress on sorting my knight's tour material might help. The problem is that I keep changing my mind about what is the optimal method of arrangement. The way it is going seems to be to place emphasis on the different types of symmetry rather than on the board shapes. Thus instead of having a section on rectangular boards it seems better to classify rectangular tours across several sections according to their symmetry, and whether closed or open.

I tried switching on one of my convection heaters last week but it produced too much smell of burning dust. So today I took it all to pieces and cleaned it internally. I'm sure it could be made to come apart more easily. So many screws to take out, and so many pieces, like the wheels, to remove before the actual bodywork could be opened to give access to the oil-filled radiator! Fortunately it all fitted back together again and it is now working OK without the smell. It was all a bit like playing with the Meccano that I used to enjoy as a boy.

There is a central heating system and radiators, which came with the flat, but I'm not at all certain how that works. I use it to provide hot water for washing, but hesitate to use it for the radiators, since I'm not sure how much gas it is likely to use. I expect a cold spell will be needed to stimulate me to try it out.

Autumnal Attitudes

With the putting back of the clocks I'm feeling rather depressed and autumnal. So I thought another photo of my favourite tree would be appropriate to mark the passing of the seasons. Its leaves are distinctly yellowing and thinning out, but at least the sun was shining which prompted me to take the photo.

I seem to be getting more and more buried in papers. My solution to depression is usually to tidy things up, but I seem to have been tidying things up for years without much result.

Since I installed the new version of P C Guard on my computer everything seems to have slowed down considerably. I suppose it is checking everything more thoroughly behind the scenes, but more probably its just dithering about. It also seems to decide to make virus scans always just as I'm about to switch off. I suppose everyone has got to change over to Windows 7 next.