little stocking fillers

The other day Nicky asked if there were any little extra bits I was wanting that she could get me so that I had something to unwrap on winter festive period gift-unwrapping day. I couldn't think of anything at the time but if I'd realised that Superdrug had a BOGO½P on their foam earplugs I'd have stuck them on the list. After several weeks struggling to fit Boots's inferior round-tipped springier-foam plugs into my ear canals when surrounding noise levels require attenuation (though the plugs work quite well when they be persuaded to be inserted properly they're difficult to roll thin enough to stay compressed long enough to insert) I had another poke round the alternative sources of such things and found these nice highly-compressible and slower-to-re-expand pointy-tipped things, which I'd previously only found sold singly in Sound Control for 99p per pair. I'm not sure what to do with the ineffective plugs; there's a bag somewhere containing a load of knackered old earplugs but it must be fairly well-hidden as I didn't chance upon it the other week when going through one of our three roomsworths of stored crap in my failed attempt to find the power supply for my scanner.

I still have enough things to do to feel that there's a lot to be done (but not too much to do in the time available) so didn't feel I got a great deal done this evening, though a few things were wrapped and the remaining unwrapped things stuffed in one of the boxes of things to be transported southwards next week. I've started mentally compiling a list of all the things I need to take but shall try and ignore most of them as there would probably be no need to have them; things like adaptors and wires to enable me to connect my laptop to televisions and monitors and so on can probably be safely assumed to potentially superfluous whereas wires to connect my Walkman to my laptop to enable me to finally digitise and burn some old tapes my mum fished out a couple of years ago would not only get this task off the list but would enable me to leave the tapes in my parents' loft, where they would be relatively safe from damage by inadvertent exposure to high magnetic flux, always a risk in this flat in which only half the occupants are sufficiently paranoid about things like that to always try to find some reason to re-rearrange piles of boxes following re-arrangements conducted in their absence to ensure that the rules about things which must be kept separate are followed. The only problem with this would be getting the tapes home whilst ensuring that they're kept sufficiently out of reach of the treacherous magnetic field generated by the speaker in my amp. Keeping things apart in a smallish flat is relatively easy compared to achieving similarly safe separation in a small car.