Not The Pod Files - Time Off Part One

I think that I had better split this into two posts, because having five days off is a lot for one post?

Tuesday November 22nd, 2022 -

On Tuesday morning I got in from the Monday night shift some time before nine o’clock I think. 

It was all about being prepared for going out that night, so I went to sleep relatively quickly, and I’ve forgotten what time I woke up. I think I got a not too shabby sleep though. 

In the evening I drove us both to the Palace Theatre in Newark to see the Crown Ballet perform Swan Lake.  It was great, but not the best performance of the piece that we have seen.  That’s not putting it down, because this ballet troupe from Moldova did incredibly well. They were fantastic, but I think that when you have seen a specific ballet a great deal of times, there will be standouts.

Out of interest, our favourite might be one of the performances by the Mariinsky Ballet dancers. Mind your Ballet Theatre U.K. did a great performance as well. 

Wednesday November 23rd,  2022 - 

Things from Wednesday will no doubt be out of sequence. 

We watched episodes 6 and 7 from the second season of the constantly fabulous Stanley Tucci Searching For Italy, where they went to Sardinia and Puglia respectively. There was a tribute to the late Chloe Avery, who was a producer and director of the series, as well as a producer for the Great British Bake-Off. She passed away in August of this, after being told in December 2021 that she had weeks to live after a cancer diagnosis. I’m guessing that she was part of the filming for season two before passing away at the age of 41. 

We watched the third episode of the Disney+ series The Santa Clauses. It’s okay I suppose, but not even a patch on the second film, never mind the far superior first film.  We’re in it for the duration now though. I hope it gets better!

I went through to the office to record an episode of Pods Like Us, only to find that my guest was unable to make it. I can understand why, and I won’t say, as it’s private. It’s been postponed to a later date.

We watched the Brandon Routh starring film The Nine Lives Of Christmas, which Louise had on DVD from when it had been on Channel Five a previous year. I actually had to leave Louise on her own to finish the film, as I had go and take part in recording a brand new show.

I went through to the office to take part in recording the brand new show Toppermost Of The Poppermost with Ed Chen of When They Was Fab and Kit O’Toole of Talk More Talk as my much more prepared co-hosts of this intriguing new Beatles related podcast, only to find that my laptop had lost absolutely everything!

I lost all of my files and virtually all of my software.

Somehow I was able to log in and take part, but it wasn’t easy.

Thursday November 24th, 2022 - 

Thursday was spent trying to do stuff about the laptop, while also trying to edit the forthcoming Pods Like Us episode - Pods Like Us meets Christmas Alphabet. That too wasn’t easy, because when it saved, I would shut down to take breaks, only to switch it back on and find everything had disappeared again.  Eventually I was able to stop signing in through the “temporary sign in” option, but in the process that actually did mean losing everything, including the temporary back up files that were there during the temporary sign in crap.

Once again we the watched what we call a classic episode of Columbo -  season 2 episode 6: A Stitch In Crime, starring Leonard Nimoy. I’ve probably said this before, but I used to purposely miss the first five to ten minutes of episodes so that I didn’t know how the crime had taken place. 

On Netflix we watched the superb nature documentary Secrets Of The Squirrel, which was a German made show with British voiceover.