Shenanigans .... and a Cunning Plan

More Gromits !

This one is a very endearing Dearest Gromit out by the UWE Bower Ashton campus. Friday saw me enjoying a day off work and hoping for less traffic than usual to head around some more of the outlying Gromits ... with an ulterior motive.

It's still pretty hot and dry too, as demonstrated by the condition of the fields overlooking the Bristol skyline. This was quite close to the last Gromit, just up the hill in fact.

Gromit number 13 was Wild At Heart with Ashton Court providing the venue for an iced tea lunch.

A quick hop over to Ashton Gate football stadium saw me finding Rockin' Robin. Traffic wasn't too bad up to this point, outside of the usual idiots on the roads. We have a lot of those ....

The motorway was clogged up by something unmentionable so I ventured into the backroads to get to the next Gromit over by Puxton Place. This one is the Merry Go Gromit, with the venue offering a charming farm shop and an activities park I'm curious about. Traffic was nasty though, was very happy that I had the air con, especially after emerging into a blast of heated air.

It wasn't quite so bad on the way to Weston Super Mare, which was where the ulterior motive was located ... I'm going to be buying another laptop very soon. It'll be an Asus (not-sponsored) and the PC World offering was the favourite, courtesy of another discount. But ....

Bristol - none available
Weston - wasn't honouring the discount.

If the shop isn't being cooperative, walk away. Don't be in a rush to spend more money than you need to ! (As it happens, the offering at Scan has got its discount back and is a superior laptop).

Oh I ended up parking at completely the wrong end of the sea front. I believed the signs ! They said "Grand Pier, park there". And there was a mile between car park and Grand Pier. They were asking for money at the Pier so I didn't check it out (most of the seafront prices were inflated) but waiting outside was :

I thought a slightly sad looking Giggles. Now up to Number 16 of 67 ! And starting to tick off some of the trails which are collections of Gromits.

The next set will happen on Friday, which is a possible Cunning Plan time. It's expected to get cooler as the week progresses, which means the conditions will be well suited to the 7.5 mile walk which is the Gromit circle in town.

But ... there is that possible Cunning Plan. It's also the Bristol Balloon Fiesta this next weekend and the timings could be convenient to do part of the circle and then head to Fiesta. Or even do the whole circle and head there. I'll have to see the timings and how things work out. (Nightglow is at 6pm so I would want to aim to be there around 5pm to sample what's at the Fiesta.)

Oh and then there's also laptop ordering ... And a week off coming very soon ! I've been at the counting down the days stage for a little while now. Definitely looking forward to it.

Last word for today - it looks like Microsoft have broken something again in an update. The antimalware service was taking up a whole cpu core's worth of processing. I.e. the cpu % load was continuously between 25 and 30%, even after letting it do its business overnight. That heats the room up and makes other stuff perform badly.

I've now disabled it and put Avast antivirus on. Things like this shouldn't happen. It's a shame we're locked into the slavery to Microsoft products, they really don't know what they're doing any more and just unleash bad software on us. I'd describe that antimalware service now as .... malware.