*Today referring to the day I thought about writing this post; not the day I wrote or posted it - or, indeed the day on which you are reading it.

It's a set of man-made lakes (former quarries) that have been turned into a very scenic and tranquil nature reserve. It's wonderful. And free admission, so caters to the tight-fisted side of my nature. There are numerous hides where you can watch the wildlife, and a few open spaces where you can sit and eat your sandwiches (if you'd brought any - we hadn't). There is also a decent pub within a short walk, so that's all right.

We were possibly the only people there who knew next-to-nothing about birds. Each hide had at least one twitcher, equipped with fancy long-lens camera. I felt quite inadequate with my small digital camera with a bit of a zoom lens (but I think my pictures came out all right). I was also reluctant to point out any birds for fear that my ignorance would be greeted with howls of derision. "A cormorant? Of course it's not a cormorant. It's a mallard".

From one hide I saw what was obviously a heron standing on the bank. It wasn't until it took off and landed on the lake (and subsequently dived under the water) that I realised it wasn't a heron at all - it was a grebe. An easy mistake to make.

Annoyance when I got home was that I'd left the hot bath tap dribbling all day, so had wasted several gallons of water - and an entire tank of hot water. In fact it took a couple of days for the hot water to recover, as the short time the heater is on overnight wasn't enough to fully heat the tank from cold.

This isn't the first time I've been caught out by a dribbling tap (though this is for the longest period). I have a theory (that I must put to the test at some point) that when water is being drawn elsewhere, the pressure at the hot tap is low enough for the flow to stop before the tap is fully turned off.

I'm sure it must be possible for someone to invent a gizmo that would detect such leakages and turn the water off. But maybe the cost of installing such a device would far outweigh the few pounds that the dribbling tap cost me.

Just as I noticed this flagrant waste of water I realised that just about every light in my flat was on - though this only since I had got home, not all day.

On my way home I stopped at Tesco. It took a while to do my shopping, probably because I was buying things that I don't often get so spent a long time searching, and I spent about £2 per minute.

I think that bucolic and brackish are odd words. When I hear them I have to think twice what they mean, because they don't sound like their meaning. Bucolic sounds like a disease - a cross between bubonic and colic. Brackish sound like bracken and the ck gives it a harsh sound.

New word of the day is "gore" (noun). Amongst other things, it is the name for the small patch of ground in between a "Y" shaped road junction.

And when did the usual word for something tasting good change from "yum yum" to "nom nom"

My voting paper for next week's local election has arrived. Puts me in a bit of a quandary. On the one hand, I think it is important to vote (people have died to give us the right; if you don't vote, you can't complain; blah blah blah). But on the other hand I know nothing about the candidates*, so cannot make an informed decision.

Apart from one leaflet that came though my door today; it was so full of grammatical and punctuation errors there is no way I could vote for him, even if he didn't represent the Idiots Party a political party whose views I do not share.

We had a social evening at SJA, with a beetle drive. Set me wondering about the statistics involved - the most likely number of throws to complete a beetle, etc. I tried to work something out, but soon realised I didn't have a clue where to begin; too many options, and conditions. And when I calculated that there are over 78 billion combinations with 14 throws (the minimum required for a complete beetle), I realised that I wasn't going to work it out empirically either.