By The Numbers

Apparently today, 9/11/13, is the last time till 2105 that the date will figure three consecutive odd numbers.

Yes.

Who keeps track of these things?

Of course, in the US, where you do dates backwards, this phenomenon happened back in September, on the 12th anniversary of the Attacks, so I guess people had better things to be thinking about.

In Britain we also refer to this date in the US way as 9/11. But would the US do us this courtesy with the London attacks? I suppose we should be glad they can't be turned back-to-front, as they were, of course, on 7/7.

Oh, and the last time the dates will be three consecutive even numbers is next year, on 10/12/14. That's December for us and October for the US.

Divided by a common language.

Crackle, crackle

For several weeks now my phone has been crackling badly. My broadband, which arrives via the phone line, has become more and more unreliable.

The company, BT (short for British Telecom, which used to be a publicly-owned monopoly) installed my first telephone line 40 years ago. My current line was installed in this house in the mid/late 1960s. It was my school friend Lesley's number. I later bought the house from her parents. The line enters the house from a telephone pole across the road. To me it is obvious that the line outside is really vulnerable, but when the line started to fail I couldn't persuade BT of that. They wanted me to commit £129 before they would book an appointment. Someone on the other side of the world, who had no idea what was outside my house, insisted it might be a problem inside the house.

So after 40 years, I left BT and let Sky take over responsibility for my phone line. Gradually the problem got worse, so the other day I booked an appointment to have the repair done. If the fault was found to be with my equipment, I would be billed £99 after the fact. Knowing what I knew, it was a deal I was happy to go for.

Yesterday my next door neighbour had an engineer at her house for hours. A couple of weeks ago the people next door to her had an outside repair done. While my chap was working today, an engineer came to look at another line two doors away. Gosh, I wonder if maybe these ancient lines ALL need replacing?

The wear on the piece of line he removed was appalling. It's a surprise it worked at all. In fact, just before he arrived, I had lost the dialling tone, my line was dead.

But now everything appears to be fixed! Cross all fingers.

A promise is a promise

I 've been trying to get my friend Julie to the zoo for ages, but her work schedule is very difficult.

We were in two minds about the date we set when we heard about the tiger cub, but Julie hadn't seen the new adult tigers, so we decided to go along on Halloween so she could see them.

I must say that their stewardship of the animals continues to worry and astonish me. Both were in the half of the enclosure where the pool is where the cub died. There seemed to me to be no reason why they shouldn't have free access to both halves. What's more, they usually only keep them together with keepers looking on in case of aggression. None were in sight.

Jae Jae had of course hogged the covered area where there is a heater. Melati was out in the cold and wet grasses.

Later, she took a chance and was warily lying near Jae Jae in the heated area. She didn't look very relaxed, and when she decided to try and move closer to the overhead heater she did so very cautiously.

Graansha

As usual, I had forgotten that the pictures for this album accidentally got uploaded somewhere else, and I can't remember where.

Since my internet connection is being rather temperamental thanks to a very old line and that unusual autumn weather condition, wind and rain, not to mention the impossibility of updating the payment card for my mobile iPad SIM, I may be difficult to get hold of at times till I find time to sort things out.

Meanwhile, here's some GGG to cheer you up.