Weeknotes 2022.8: The £114 pizza
I accidentally paid £114 for a pizza on Friday. The cashier’s finger slipped when she was entering £14.93 on the terminal, I activated Apple Pay and paid before checking the amount on the screen, and that was that. It almost feels too easy. Thankfully the money was refunded pretty sharpish. And the pizza, for what it’s worth, was good.
I had an Instagram message this week from someone impersonating a friend. I sussed that something was wrong pretty quickly (they’d never messaged me on Insta before; the messages didn’t seem like they were written in their ‘voice’; the account they were using wasn’t followed by any mutuals) so checked with the person on a known channel—they said they don’t routinely use Instagram, so that solved that mystery. I blocked and reported them before I could find out what the scam was.
I’ve been trying to something meaningful into words about current world events in Ukraine, but haven’t been able to. There is nothing I can add to the conversation that shouldn’t be blazingly obvious—that war is a wicked and monstrous thing, that we got here through old men living out imperialist power fantasies, that declarations that nuclear war ‘must never be fought’ are all well and good but mean nothing while warheads still exist and can can be launched within minutes. Twitter, with its constant firehose of LinkedIn level clout-chasing, disinformation, tasteless shitposts, armchair OSINT, and questionable gallows humour, is not proving helpful to my sanity at the moment, so I’ve removed the app from my phone. I’ve also limited the amount of time I can have news sites open (although will need to get better at not simply tapping ‘Ignore for 15 minutes’.)
Bulb Watch: The crocuses have enjoyed the sunny weather, even if they’re starting to go over in greater numbers now. The muscari I got in the green are also on their way up—hopefully they’ll be flowering in the coming week or two.
Our local celebrity, a heron that hung around a local pond, disappeared a while ago but has shown up again as of yesterday. A Facebook post on a local group a few weeks ago seemed to suggest that they hurt their leg and couldn’t hunt for themselves. I’m struggling to think of a name for them—the best I’ve come up with so far are Eva Heron and Charlize Heron.
