Ah, Samothrace, you never knew me...

The Winged Victory of Samothrace is being restored,

It is totally not my fault that I have her in my head entirely the wrong way around: that to me she is and always will be the Winged Samothrace of Victory. The world needs more samothraces. This is not a monument to an extinct species, damn it, it is a promise to the future. They shall be restored! Victory is theirs!

Sometimes perspective is adjectival

This must be one of those shifts in perspective that you get growing up, only in this case it's about forty years delayed.

I am totally bewildered, I find, by the actuality of a Christmas tree that I can look down on.

Adjusting for emphasis

In other perspective-shifting news, I need to stop saying I've been here eighteen months; it's twenty-one months now. We will have been married twenty months tomorrow. Numbers: leave them alone, take your eye off them for a moment, and they start rounding out. And rounding up.

And further yet to the it's-longer-than-you-think, I took possession yesterday of my specially-ordered unusually-lengthy English garden fork. Which I am not going to call a spading fork, as seems to be the habit over here; I think that's silly. It's not for spading, it's for forking. It's made by Clarington Forge, and carried an attractive label: English garden tools, hand-crafted since 1780. That's the kind of longevity I like.

What I don't like so much is that I have had to come in for a breather after digging over six square feet of a flower-bed. I dunno: I didn't think I was sick any longer, and I can certainly walk limitless distances, but this shift of exercise is - well, yeah. Leaving me gasping. Oh my chest and lungs, you're supposed to do better than this... (Actually, this is what always happens when I get sick, it takes forever to get my oomph back; and I always forget, so.)

Oh, and another (but this one is a little odd)

In yet more something's-gone-wrong-with-the-scale-of-the-world news, something has happened to Windows 8.1 on my laptop. It's fine when I boot up first thing, but as soon as I let it go to sleep at all, when I wake it up again everything on the screen is half the size it was. A quarter the size, rather - half-size in each dimension. So far as I can tell (tho' that is not very far: I do not know my way around this software at all) the settings haven't changed, it's just decided to rescale everything. I can still read things at this scale, I can still work, it's not disabling at all: just a little disturbing. And irritating, that I can't figure out what's happening or how to fix it...

(I should add, this only happened after Barry decided to lie across the keyboard when the machine was on and open. If he's set some switch or key-combo, I don't know what it is. Nor why it should only cut in after a period of sleep.)