Friday was another full day. Up at 7:29 am to find Cora Lee asleep on the sofa in The Lounge, having deserted the marriage bed at 4:30 am, not being able to sleep on account of her guilt over insisting we purchase the Summerliving flimsoids! Once showered, caffeinated and breakfasted, off to Knightor Winery & Restaurant, (where we had reservations for luncheon), near the Eden Project, another stop along the day's way, after collecting Penelope and Michaelovitch, friends from London, staying in Luxury, Sheer Luxury, at the Alverton Hotel in Truro!
Few minutes later we were back at Knightor and tasting three wines: the 2011 Madeleine Angevine was first and I found it quite, quite tart, a full dollop of mouth-puckeriing gooseberry, light and refreshing. The 2011 Pinot Gris, my favourite, showed restrained fruit with pleasant notes of grapefruit, making for good acidity, and possessing a subtle, flinty finish.
After tasting we had a very tasty, light lunch, (tender roast-beef, with extra horseradish, baguette sandwich for me), in the restaurant right off the tasting room. Gang shared a bottle of the Pinot Gris but I contented myself with water, and a slice of lemon, in a wine glass, designated driver being, Ayn a Coke. After a cappuccino, for me, and shared desserts, delicioso, cheese-cake and crème brûlée, for tothers, we headed homewards. As we would be passing through St Austell I suggested we might stop at the brewery, of same name there. With a bit more backing and forthing we eventually found our way to the brewery's parking lot.
- Ayn P You too Carol Riera xo23 August at 23:10 · Like · 1
Carol Riera Looks like so much fun, Ayn. Too bad we weren't in England at the same time. xoxo23 August at 23:10 · Like · 1
Wayne Sutherland How did you get your dad off his bike.
Patrick James Dunn The Sisterhood threatened to take away both it and my malt!Patrick James Dunn Paltry collection that it is!Nancy Mennel So glad Pat & Corinne have an official photographer. Great pics Ayn!
Glad that we did as Ayn and I scored some great finds in the shop. She bought some T-shirts for Los Horridos and I found a terrific rugby shirt and a number of packs of playing cards. Disappointed, however, that Proper Job, (one of my favourite bitters), fridge magnets were not to be had. Settled for The Rattler Cloudy Cornish Cider but wasn't very happy, Dear Reader!
Mood improved when we repaired upstairs to the comfy bar/restaurant/tasting room where Penny/Mike treated us to cider and beer, (forced myself to have a half pint of Trelawny as it is only 3.8%), and after we had refreshed ourselves made our to till to pay for our purchases. My mood improved when I noticed the Walter Hicks Navy Rum, 125º proof, 71.4%! Felt even better when Madcap Mike told cashier that it was his birthday, (He has a birthday every day!), and convinced the teller to give me a discount, £33 instead of £37! Not a bad deal for $53.9396! Chuffed as a Cornish Chough we climbed back into the car, escorted by one of the cashiers, holding a large St Austell golf umbrella. It had started to rain quite heavily and The Sisterhood didn't want to have their mascara run. We motored back to Truro as the skies cleared and the sun shone on the freshly washed fields and trees that we sped past.
Dropped the London Toffs at their posh hotel, making arrangements to pick them up on the morrow, time yet to be determined, and waved goodbye. Quick stop at Sainsbury's for rest of groceries we needed for Saturday's meal and then back to Sydney House. Once home i helped Coriandre prepare the spudolas for her Feta/potatoe dish and Ayn put the Secret Chef more than a Beef & Veg Rub on the steaks. Once these preparations were finished I fried up some gluten-free sausages and made up a mixed green salad while Goils iPadded and TV'd. Heated ups some of the overleft risotto in the oven and when everything was ready we settled in to glue ourselves to the last three episodes of Game of Thrones. Nearly 12:30am by the time the last credit rolled and we hied ourselves to bed as it was going to be a busy full day on the morrow.
At the Sainsbury's' parkade with a soft eski!
Hello,
Capitan Barnacle uses MotionX-GPS on the iPhone and is sharing with you the following track:
Name: SMH - Bean - 2704 Date: 2013-08-22 12:50 pm Map:
(valid until Feb 19, 2014)View on Map Distance: 47.1 kilometers Elapsed Time: 2:28:22 Avg Speed: 19.1 km/h Max Speed: 49.0 km/h Avg Pace: 3' 08" per km Min Altitude: 0 m Max Altitude: 112 m Start Time: 2013-08-22T19:50:29Z Start Location: Latitude: 49� 16' 03" N Longitude: 123� 07' 39" W End Location: Latitude: 49� 15' 40" N Longitude: 123� 09' 59" W
MotionX-GPS Commonly Asked Questions- What is MotionX-GPS?
MotionX-GPS is the essential GPS application for outdoor enthusiasts. It puts an easy-to-use, state-of-the-art handheld GPS on your iPhone.
- Can I use MotionX-GPS?
Sure! MotionX-GPS can be downloaded from the iTunes App Store.
- How can I display tracks in Google Earth?
Follow the directions on the Google Earth web site to download and install the Google Earth program. Save the attached "SMH Bean 2704.kmz" file to your computer. Launch Google Earth, select File, Open, and open the saved "SMH Bean 2704.kmz" file.
- This email was forwarded to me. Where are the attachments?
Some e-mail programs do not include the original attachments by default when forwarding an e-mail. In this case, the sender must reattach the original files for them to be included.
Sunday Morning Sex
Upon hearing that her elderly grandfather had just passed away, Katie went straight to her grandparent's house to visit her 95 year-old grandmother and comfort her. When she asked how her grandfather had died, her grandmother replied, "He had a heart attack while we were making love on Sunday morning." Horrified, Katie told her grandmother that 2 people nearly 100 years old having sex would surely be asking for trouble. "Oh no, my dear," replied granny. "Many years ago, realizing our advanced age, we figured out the best time to do it was when the church bells would start to ring. It was just the right rhythm. Nice and slow and even. Nothing too strenuous, simply in on the Ding and out on the Dong." She paused to wipe away a tear, and continued, "He'd still be alive if the ice cream truck hadn't come along."
- Patrick James Dunn St Corinne's new convent in St Mawes. She decided to leave Sydney House after she read Sarge's Morning Sex joke with its church bells. No ice cream trucks on this side of the Fal River!
In the mid-1800s, a mass migration of Germans spurred by hard times and a crackdown by repressive German governments brought their beer-drinking ways to whiskey-drinking America. Entire families, children intact, could be seen sipping beer together at newly minted "beer gardens." This resulted in large populations of Germans especially in Chicago, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis. Prohibition, which was in part an ethnic and class-based movement, was in some respects a reaction to this immigration. (And though the German migration was one of the larger migrations to America, many German-Americans anglicized their names and masked their culture after they began to face attacks, hostility and discrimination from other Americans -- especially during World War I):
"[In St. Louis in the late 1870s, people flocked to beer gardens to] enjoy sprightly polkas and popular tunes, played by a small band, before heading home after dusk on the horse-drawn streetcars. ... It was 'one of the peculiarities of German customs' that parents readily brought their young ones to such drinking places, noted the 1878 book A Tour of St. Louis. 'It is often the case that a family consisting of husband and wife and half a dozen children may be observed seated at a table, sipping fresh, foaming beer, and eating pretzels.'
"Germans had poured into the Midwest from the 1830s through the 1880s as part of a mass exodus from their homeland. They were fleeing hard times, bad harvests, bullying bureaucrats, and the brutality of war for a better, freer life. The crackdown that followed the revolutions of 1848, in particular, drove many German liberals to America, where some became distinguished leaders in the antislavery and workers' rights movements. By 1880, some 54,901 of the 350,518 people in St. Louis -- more than 15 percent -- were German-born. They had nourished their dreams on books of advice like The Germans in America (1851), by a Boston pastor named F. W. Bogen. 'A great blessing meets the German emigrant the moment he steps upon these shores,' Bogen promised. 'He comes into a free country; free from the oppression of despotism, free from privileged orders and monopolies, free from the pressure of intolerable taxes and imposts, free from constraint in matters of belief and conscience.' Many Germans were drawn to the idea of a young, dynamic country where their talent and strenuous work mattered more than the whims of government bureaucrats or the accident of birth.
"The Germans brought with them something called gemutlichkeit -- a compound of 'conviviality, camaraderie and good fellowship, love of celebrations, card-playing, praise of [the] German way of life, and all these washed over by flowing kegs of good lager beer.' Lippincott's Magazine explained to its readers in April 1883: 'Beer and wine the German looks upon as gifts of God, to be enjoyed in moderation for lightening the cares of life and adding to its pleasures; and Sunday afternoon is devoted, by all who do not belong to the stricter Protestant sects, to recreation.'
"Many native-born Americans frowned on such ideas. The New York Times, the voice of the eastern Protestant establishment, with its affection for blue laws and prohibition, hoped these aliens would soon outgrow their Old World habits: 'In the old countries, where freedom is smothered, drinking may be necessary to drown the depressing influences of despotism; but here, where freedom woos the mind to culture, no such beastly compensation is called for, and we believe we have said sufficient to prove that our German fellow-citizens are born for higher and nobler uses than for schnapps and lager-bier.' The Cincinnati Enquirer, in contrast, insisted that German beer actually helped to civilize America. 'Formerly Americans drank scarcely anything else than whisky, frequently very bad whisky, and the consequence was quarreling, strife and fights. Now Americans drink almost as much beer as the Germans do, and whereas Americans used to pour everything down their throats standing, they now sit down good naturedly and chat over a good glass of beer, without flying into one another's hair.'
"It wasn't long before the number of beer gardens operating on Sundays in St. Louis became something of a national scandal, as easterners complained of a steady assault on the sanctity of the Lord's Day. Though St. Louis was predominantly Christian, 'it cannot be claimed that its inhabitants are pious, in the sense of the word as understood in Boston,' admitted the authors of A Tour of St. Louis. St. Louis residents -- some descended from French Catholics, who shared the German attitude toward Sundays -- burst from their homes on the Lord's Day, filling the streets with laughter and chatter as they made their way to such 'umbrageous enclosures' as beer gardens. 'Music, dancing, ball games, and other amusements are indulged in with a zest which shows the intensity of pleasure realized from them by the participants.' For them, such pleasures were 'soul-feasts.' " Edward Achorn, The Summer of Beer and Whiskey, Public Affairs, 2013.
Corinne Durston has sent you an e-card
Thank you very much for the ecard Corinne! I can't open it up here at work.. but I am sure it was lovely! Thanks for the thought anyway! Cheers! Joan
For you to respond to her.
You can't do two things that require concentration at once -- or at least you can't do them very well. And doing too much, even if not all at once, has a debilitating effect:
"The idea that conscious processes need to be done one at a time has been studied in hundreds of experiments since the 1980s. For example, the scientist Harold Pashler showed that when people do two cognitive tasks at once, their cognitive capacity can drop from that of a Harvard MBA to that of an eight-year-old. It's a phenomenon called dual-task interference. In one experiment, Pashler had volunteers press one of two keys on a pad in response to whether a light flashed on the left or right side of a window. One group only did this task over and over.
Another group had to define the color of an object at the same time, choosing from among three colors. These are simple variables: left or right, and only three colors. Yet doing two tasks took twice as long, leading to no time saving. This finding held up whether the experiment involved sight or sound, and no matter how much participants practiced. If it didn't matter whether they got the answers right, they could go faster. The lesson is clear: if accuracy is important, don't divide your attention.
"Another experiment had volunteers rapidly pressing one of two foot pedals to represent when a high or low tone sounded. This exercise took a lot of attention. When researchers added one more physical task, such as putting a washer on a screw, people could still do it, sort of, with around a 20 percent decrease in performance. Yet when they added a simple mental task to the foot-pedal exercise, such as adding up just two single-digit numbers, (a simple 5 + 3 = ), performance fell 50 percent. This experiment revealed that the problem isn't doing two things at once so much as doing two conscious mental tasks at once, unless you are okay with a significant drop in performance. ...
"Despite thirty years of consistent findings about dual-task interference, many people still try to do several things at once. Workers of the world have been told to multitask for years. Linda Stone, a former VP at Microsoft, coined the term continuous partial attention in 1998. It's what happens when people's focus is split, continuously. The effect is constant and intense mental exhaustion. As Stone explains it, 'To pay continuous partial attention is to keep a top-level item in focus, and constantly scan the periphery in case something more important emerges.'
"A study done at the University of London found that constant emailing and text-messaging reduces mental capability by an average of ten points on an IQ test. It was five points for women, and fifteen points for men. This effect is similar to missing a night's sleep. For men, it's around three times more than the effect of smoking cannabis. While this fact might make an interesting dinner party topic, it's really not that amusing that one of the most common 'productivity tools' can make one as dumb as a stoner. (Apologies to technology manufacturers: there are good ways to use this technology, specifically being able to 'switch off' for hours at a time.) 'Always on' may not be the most productive way to work. One of the reasons for this will become clearer in the chapter on staying cool under pressure; however, in summary, the brain is being forced to be on 'alert' far too much.
This increases what is known as your allostatic load, which is a reading of stress hormones and other factors relating to a sense of threat. The wear and tear from this has an impact. As Stone says, 'This always on, anywhere, anytime, anyplace era has created an artificial sense of constant crisis. What happens to mammals in a state of constant crisis is the adrenalized fight-or-flight mechanism kicks in. It's great when tigers are chasing us. How many of those five hundred emails a day is a tiger?' "
David Rock, Your Brain at Work, Harper Business, 2009
Dear Patrick,
Thank you for your swift response. I am delighted you are enjoying yourselves in Cornwall. The weather has been extremely good this summer throughout the northern hemisphere so you have seen it at its best. I believe you will soon be leaving the UK and moving onto France and Italy - am I correct? We will expect you in time for dinner on Saturday 12th October and you are welcome to stay for a second night, on the Sunday, as well. Then on Monday morning Andre and our gardener can start closing down the garden and pool and me the house in preparation for our leaving later that week. Enjoy the next couple of months touring Europe and look forward to seeing you both for two nights on October 12th. Have fun.
Much love, Rosemary XXX
- What is MotionX-GPS?
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