resolved

I may never know what made me go through the Meadows to work today when I usually walk along either Lauriston Place or the Grassmarket (depending on how late it is and how full of irritating posh gits dropping their irritating posh git children three feet outside the gate of the posh school Lauriston Place is likely to be). Perhaps it was because that was the way Nicky was walking in order to go to where she'd parked her car. Perhaps it was because my brain secretly knew that the corner of the West Port/Lady Lawson Street junction would not be a sensible thing to attempt to walk over in my currently-gripless footwear seeing as I've lost grip and slipped there in the wet or ice twice in the past eight years already. Perhaps I had even thought that because it was sunny but suddenly cold that the Meadows might be nice and full of pretty mist, much as they generally tend to be in those sort of conditions.

That was probably it, in fact.

One thing I notice as I take more pictures is that I'm noticing things I previously wouldn't necessarily have noticed, or that I'm noticing them sooner or after taking less pictures, often early enough to be able to re-take a picture in a slightly different way. Unfortunately the few people walking down this bit of path weren't all behaving so I wasn't able to get a picture where the three people were balancing each other in the frame and in which there was also a nice line of increasingly-faded trees on the left-hand-side. The version with two people at the same distance didn't quite work as well. One thing this will hopefully do is encourage me to start leaving earlier to be able to spend a little bit more time if I hit somewhere at the right time, as the other thing I notice the more pictures I take is that I'm finally able to spend less time dithering over crops and different edits even though I can potentially end up with more usable things more frequently to have to sort through. As I often feel I sometimes also end up with more clearly unusable shots I have taken this to indicate some improvement in judgement, at least at the processing stage if not when taking the picture. Something else I'd probably not have caught myself doing until fairly recently would have been upping the colour to the point of unpleasantness, whereas some of the other edits look a bit overdone even when they're not even as saturated as the real thing. Hmmm.

Even though I was not expecting much of a reply from the web-based customer services of a popular outdoor-clothing chain regarding the need to return the squeaking trainer they sold me on Thursday despite it not being visibly damaged, the problem potentially not being audible at speeds of less than 7km/h and the soles of the trainers being visibly affected by their brief spell outside, I was mildly surprised to have received a response by lunchtime today. This surprise was cancelled-out by the response being clearly automated and merely advising me to go back to the shop to see what the real people with decision-making abilities would say. I was re-surprised upon getting to the shop to find that they had zero problem accepting back the slightly-worn trainers and even supplied a potential technical explanation for the issue. They had a suitable replacement model in the correct size and even though they were mildly more expensive and aren't quite as grippy and have occasionally had to be returned and exchanged at one month old for developing unseemly rips they seem to be slightly less inclined to develop squeaks, even when worn gripless. If anything it's another six months' breathing-space to try and find something else which fits and which doesn't squeak.