April 11th: Compost, lost footballs and birthdays

My wife did our shopping this morning. And.... she also managed to grab me three bags of multi-purpose compost from Tescos whilst she was doing her shop. Compost is clearly not 'essential' in itself, but as she was doing the weekly shop and there was a pile waiting to be bought....... it's the one thing I was short of in my garden - at least now I'll be able to pot on my seedling tomatoes, cucumbers, courgettes, beans etc and be salad self sufficient later in the year!

I still feeling incredibly guilty that she's doing all, or most of the shopping as well as doing her couple of shifts at the hospital and looking after her mum 2-3 days a week when she's not working. There are good reasons for me not contributing as much as I'd want to here, but it still feels wrong. She's going to need an enormous bunch of flowers.....💕.

On our (almost) daily exercise walk today stopped to admire some cherry blossom. It's staggeringly easy to take for granted, or just not see some of the beauty that's right in front of our eyes. Only a few weeks ago it was raining, incessantly, cold and dark and now we see sights like this. Nature is truly a wondrous thing.

Blossom on a tree near our house

Also out on our walk I spotted a misplaced football. In fact, if you open your eyes when you're out and about, you will probably see loads of lost footballs. A few years ago I was introduced by fellow blogger, friend and former cricket team-mate Andrew Pearce to a Twitter feed (now also available on Instagram), called @Lostfootballs (lostfootballs on Insta). Their bio says;

"The saddest sight in the world - lost or discarded footballs. Honour them, send in photos. No rugby balls allowed".

Now whenever I'm out and about and see a "lost" football, I make an effort to post it to their Twitter feed.

A lot football spotted on today's exercise walk

And talking of Twitter. Today apparently marks twelve years since I joined this at the time, rather fledgling social media channel. Specifically it was Friday April 11th 2008 at 10.13 and 47 seconds (no, seriously). I've been a fairly avid user ever since, and at the time of writing this afternoon, I'm posted 29,521 times. That's almost 2.5k times a year or just under 7 times a day on average. I suspect much of what I tweet has been either

1. Football (and mostly Cardiff City) related
2. Replies to someone else (frequently about Cardiff City)  - seeing a trend here?
3. Photos of holiday places, or other things that have taken my eye
4. A load of rubbish
5. A combination of any of the above

I'm a Twitter Twelve!

If you hadn't already guessed I like Twitter. I like it's concise nature, although the move to a 280 character limit from 140 felt like a cataclysmic shift at the time (interestingly, despite this shift to 240 characters it appears from some quick back of the fag packet research that many tweets remain in the 30-40 character range. I haven't got the inclination to source this beyond a few quick Google searches). However, the channel also has faults. People are inclined to believe what they read without fact checking. People use it to troll/abuse/blame very quickly. There are the usual percentage of absolute idiots that use it - although you can level that at any communication channel. I also find that it can be good for customer service issues. Being a very public channel, (some) companies have realised that if they don't act quickly on complaints they'll get a bad rap pretty instantly, and have subsequently invested time and money in their Twitter customer service (CS). In some cases is rarely more than a "we're really sorry about this" (looking you train companies), but others provide excellent CS via this channel. It tends to be my first port of call these days. Anyway, I didn't mean to ramble on about Twitter that much. Sorry.

I'm right out of cat news.

Until tomorrow....

#isolationlife
#stayhomesavelives