Monday 4th April - Exercises and sewing and Windows 11

 This arrived in the post for me today;

My Medal! I started 'walking' the South Downs Way on Boxing Day last year, and completed the 100 miles last Saturday. Let's be honest here; it s a virtual walk, where you enter the distance in km, miles or steps and you can see the course of your travels plotted on a map. I've been aiming for a daily step count of 2000 by the end of each day - not much, but it has kept me active. If I do NOTHING but sit and red, sit and knit, sit and watch television, my step counter can be less than 500 by bedtime. So this has been a real incentive to walk those extra steps, usually 'on the spot' while watching television.

One side shows Beachy Head, and the other King Arthur's Round Table, which is at Winchester. The disc rotates, showing various landmarks along the route on the Beachy Head side, and the names of the Knights on the other.   

I'm going to try talking my ancient and reluctant relative (mentioning no names) through a short and simple set of chair exercises several times a week as part of my phone call - I phone most days. He used to go to a proper Chair Exercise class, but that stopped some time ago. He has become a bit wobbly, partly s a result of being unwell recently. I'm no trained fitness instructor, but I reckon this will do us both good; - everything to be done gently and easily without strain...

1. wriggle your toes, flex your ankles up and down a coupe of times, rotate them a couple of times clockwise and then anticlockwise.
2. raise your foot and lower legs up, and lower a coupe of times (do each let separately)
3. see if you can get your knees to touch the underside if your table in turn (I know he is sitting in a chair with arms at his desk)
4. hands and wrists; stretch your fingers, and loosely relax them into a fist, repeat. Wriggle your fingers as though you were drumming them on a table top, or playing a piano. Bend your wrist up, then down, up, then down. Rotate your wrists one way, then the other, and repeat.
5. shoulders; raise and lower each shoulder in turn, make them go forwards and back in turn, rotate one way and the other.
6. neck; slowly look to the left, and the to the right, and then left and right again.
7. You're done! 

"Really," he said in surprise.

"Yup. was that okay?"

"Well, yes. More trivial than I was expecting. Thought you were planning something much more strenuous".

I hope he will be happy to do this again - it only takes just over 5 minutes. I'm assuming he did try and do it all - I did point out that there was no way I could tell if he was joining in, so he could just pretend and that would keep me happy...

This was the next thing to arrive;

A small brown paper bag with a square of orange furnishing material, two other scraps of cotton, a square of wadding and a little clear bag of notions - buttons, a ribbon, embroidery floss. It's for a project that our local eco group is running (not the church one but the town one), to collect embroidered squares and sew them into a sort of cloak.

I didn't choose the colours, and am a bit non-plussed. The theme is nature; they are the colours of the desert burned dry by the sun. I knew that if I ferreted through the bags that a friend brought round I would get lost, so just picked the first one.

Can you see what it is yet? 

No? Well neither can I.

So far I have made a quilted background - not quite finished. I've added some of the pieces of brown and dark red lace that Ang sent me right at the beginning of the postcard project, and I think I will add the green sequins she included, to be seeds. Then what? Belum tahu, as they say in Indonesia, one of the few phrases I remember from over 50 years ago. It means 'don't know'.

My Cross Country Collaboration has arrived with Ang, so I can post the picture now;

 I'm tempted to leave it small - it's meant to be daffodils on the banks of Ullswater. Oh, let's go large!

Finally - Windows 11 - a 'heads up' - I haven't moved to windows 11 on this computer, although my husband has moved his. It's ok, but a bit different to Windows 10. The messages 'inviting' me to upgrade are coming thick and fast now, and need careful reading or you will find yourself upgraded willy-nilly. That might be fine for you - or it moght not. 

Tuesday 25th October - Sort of sorted

 Yesterday was a BEAST of a day - at least the morning was.

Arranging flu vaccinations - check the surgery website. It looked as though they were sharing vaccination clinics with one of the other practices nearby, so I rang them (20 minutes on hold) only to be advised that no, if it is just a flu vaccination, not flu and covid, then my own surgery was holding the clinic. Rang my own surgery (20 minutes on hold) and managed to book for both of us.

I would ask those in charge of choosing the 'hold musak' to sit and listen to it for 20-30 mins, and then reconsider their choice - both surgeries had the same music,determinedly upbeat, repetitive, with a vicious backbeat (emphasis on beats 2 and 4). Do they choose it to discourage one from staying on the line?

Never mind. On to order some flowers-by-post for a neighbour. At the point where you are just waiting for confirmation that the payment has gone through, the screen froze... had it worked? or had it failed? I'll know when my Barclaycard statement appears - due any moment - but I think it failed and I'll order them again.

No problem. Next task - renew a subscription which has lapsed. Ah. My login was no longer valid - fair enough - but I couldn't create an account in order to put the order through as there was already an account associated with the email address. I fired off an email to the help desk...

One last task - sort out a query to do with a pension that will become due; it is a bit complicated so I did need to speak to a real person. Hey ho. Three minutes of going through menus, and then - deep sigh - back on hold. The music this time was not as offensive, but after half an hour it was time for lunch.

Lunch was the bright spot of the morning!

I got through to the pensions company after half an hour, and managed to stay civil and polite with the hapless man on the end of the phone, and everything is sorted now. After thanking him for his help, I did suggest to him that he pass on my request that whoever chose the 'hold musak' should sit and listen to it for half an hour.... he was non-committal....

The afternoon continue to improve - weather wise and pottering in the garden wise, so at least I went to bed in a happier mood.

Today I had a reply from the help desk, and following the instructions managed to renew my subscription - hooray!

Just the flowers left - I'll leave that for a while longer as it is not time-critical.

And Breathe - All done....

(10minutes2relax - Simple Beach)

Friday 15th January - Mmmmmm

 That was the letter for today, Mmmmm.

We have discovered the pannetone left over from Christmas, hiding in a dark corner of the hall, and also a large bar of Toblerone that I was gong to use for home-made chocolate truffles, but never got round to.

We bought our first microwave in 1986. It transformed meal-making in a hurry for hungry impatient babies and toddlers; one child-rearing book I read had the simple mantra

microwave - freezer - microwave - baby

and it proved to be so true. The technology was so different that cook books were required, and I invested in a couple while I got my head round this miraculous machine.

One thing that caught my eye was this;

Chocolate fondue; (Sainsbury Microwave Cooking by Lorna Rhodes)

250g / 8oz Toblerone broken in pieces

142ml / 5 fl oz double cream

put these in a bowl and microwave on MEDIUM for 3 minutes, stirring while cooking, until melted

This does make a lovely rich fondue to serve with fruit and marshmallows.

I misread the recipe and heated it all on HIGH - it didn't matter then when microwaves were lower power, but would probably matter more now.

HOWEVER, if you also have a bar of dark chocolate to hand you can add this to the mix - how much? I'm not sure, probably all of a 100g bar, you get a much thicker mixture, which will set firm when chilled.

Then you can scoop out teaspoonfuls and roll them in cocoa power to make chocolate truffles to give to people, and to yourself, as presents. 

We have skipped the 'making truffles' stage and are just eating the Toblerone neat.

 In other news, Brexit has already hit this household in the most irritating fashion. Our printer reached the end of its useful life over Christmas, so we ordered a replacement, and were given a delivery date of 12th January. However, the printers are made in the Netherlands. 

We can track the progress of our printer from the factory to our house; the delivery date has moved a couple of times but that is not a great problem. There's not a lot of difference between the 12th and the 15th, after all. However the date has now disappeared to be replaced by a message stating that the hold up is at customs because of incomplete paperwork. I have a feeling that this is going to be a common problem in the next few months.

It has lead to complicated discussions on how we can use the tech we have in our house (quite a lot) to make it possible for me to read the music (which I am now unable to print copies of) on one screen, and still have two screens set up for the zoom. Two? Yes; after six months of having the screen side-on to show the keyboard, and me sitting in a contorted position as though I am squashed into one of those magician's boxes for sawing a lady in half, I have changed to having a screen on top of the piano I can talk to, and another at the side to show the keyboard. Goodbye neck ache, back ache! I should have done this ages ago.  I am getting more and more techy by the minute. 

I did get out for a walk; this time I loaded myself down with 2.5kg of books in my bag. Why? That's the weight of the light-weight oxygen concentrator that I have my eye on. I did 230 m in the first 6 min walk (without using oxygen) which is uphill, and later was surprised that I managed 280 m in a second test on the way home (downhill!). If 2.5 kg makes this difference, it makes it appear more worthwhile to try and shed a few pounds in how much I weight. I must give this some consideration once we have finished the pannetone and the toblerone bar.

   

Monday 27th November - It was a dark and stormy afternoon

By half past three, when I looked out of the little room where I had been teaching all day, it seemed like it was already dark. The sky was overcast, and it was raining, and all definitely dusk-like.

I've discovered how to crash my laptop. Put it in my back-pack in such a way that it manages to press down the volume and on-off control at the same time. Luckily, he has also discovered how to recover it from it's unhappy state. So that's all right then.

Here's today's music - I was amused to find it is 'Hymn to the Dawn' (bearing in mid how dark the evening was) from 'Choral Dreams from the Rig Veda' by Gustav Holst. Only three minutes long. Rather good.

Sunday 28th January - Bell, Book and Kindle

There are no bells in this post. But the title was too good to resist.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/hereford-cathedral-chained-library

I am reading a number of books at the moment;

On Paper -

• Secret Life of Cows (Rosamund Young)
• 
  
• The Graveyard Book (Neil Gaiman) - just finished a day or so ago
• 
  
• Country Bunch (An Anthology collected by "Miss Read")

On Kindle -

• A Far Cry From Kensington (Muriel Spark)
• 
  
• Letters To A Young Poet (Rainer Maria Rilke)
• 
  
• Selected Poems (U A Fanthorpe)
• 
  
• Three Men In A Boat (Jerome K Jerome)
• 
  
• Flame and Shadow (Poems by Sarah Teasdale)
• 
  
• The Diet Myth - The Real Science Behind What We Eat (Tim Spector)
• 
  
• The Artist's Way (Julia Cameron)
• 
  
• Fierce Imaginings - The Great War (Rachel Mann)

Reading books, the printed-on-paper sort, is relatively straightforward. You pick up the book, find the page, and start reading. Except for the occasion where you are in one part of the house, and the book is somewhere else, so you have to go upstairs or downstairs to fetch it. Or, even worse, you are out and about somewhere, and you have left the book at home.

Reading Kindle books has advantages. If you have your device with you, then you have all your books as well, and it remembers where you have got to. I've downloaded most of the books in the Kindle list above onto most of my Kindle-reading devices. Great. O, wait, not ALL of my current books are downloaded on ALL of these devices, which are a paper-white Kindle (in the bedroom), my phone (in my handbag), and my android Lenovo Yogabook (downstairs or wherever I am working). Hey, not really a problem, provided I have wi-fi and battery-life and patience.

I also came a bit unstuck last night, when I clicked on the paperwhite Kindle and started to read. It took me a few minutes to work out which book I was reading! The page displayed had a couple of descriptive paragraphs; was this an anecdote from "The Artist's Way"? or scene-setting for "A Far Cry From Kensington"? or the beginning of yet another comic moment from "Three Men In A Boat?" At least I had no trouble discounting poetry, diet myths or "Letters To A Young Poet" from the possibilities. Finally, near the bottom of the page, the name of one of the characters, Wanda, appeared, and I knew where I was again (in Kensington). 

The phone and yogabook are a leetle bit smarter than the Kindle; so when I open the Kindle app, it shows me the cover of the book I last read, like this;

(screenshot from my phone)  

It sort of irritated me to begin with, when this new opening screen appeared after one of the updates. Now I am learning to be very grateful. 

The photograph at the top is of the Chained Library in Hereford Cathedral. We saw it several years ago when spent a week in that neck of the woods. Makes me even more grateful for my Kindle.

Saturday 11 November - Couldn't have said it better myself

One of my favourite websites is

The Beaker Folk of Husborne Crawley; www.cyber-ceonobites.blogspot.co.uk

Today's post is extra brilliant, so I have copied it for you to enjoy - to see it for real, go to http://cyber-coenobites.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/funeral-for-dead-laptop.html

SATURDAY, 11 NOVEMBER 2017

Funeral for a Dead Laptop

Announced by Archdruid Eileen

A laptop hath but a short time to live, and is full of whirrings. It booteth up, and is powered down, its hard drive grindeth like a mill, then it never continueth one day when thou needest it most.

In the midst of operating life we are in risk of viruses: of whom may we seek for succour, but of AVG, who poppest up annoying ads and is most displeased with our browser histories?

But if we are wise and take aforethought we shall have made backups, and the My Documents folder will live once again. Or if we kept everything on OneDrive then we need not fear laptop death. As long as we remember our password.

Or else we may end up faffing around with cables and unusual interface connectors, and trying to get data off the device that caused all the trouble in the first place.

And we shall always feel guilty we didn't recycle it properly. But we would have worried then that someone was finding out our innermost secrets.

Forasmuch as it hath pleased us to find a replacement for the laptop here departed: we therefore commit its pieces to the landfill; rare earth to earth, Windows to darkness,  bus to dust; in sure and certain hope of the new one being quicker; whose grubby casing  shall be replaced with a shiny new model. or maybe just a tablet. After all, who needs an actual keyboard these days? You just want to be able to get on Facebook when you're sitting on the couch.

Thursday 12th November 2015 - A Technical Post

Actually I stay away from the innards of computers.

Ours has been getting more and flaky over the last couple of months, until yesterday it became totally unreasonable. Particularly about email.

Our resident technical expert set this going, and after about four hours the progress bar had got this far

The whatever it is was started around 6pm, and finished whatever is did at about 3pm the next afternoon. I think the message was to the effect that after five years of pretty intensive use, the disk was dead.

He's bought a new disk, and installed it. He says it should have finished the formatting process sometime in the wee small hours of this morning.

Then the data needs to be transferred, (if possible) from the old disk to the new one, which will fill most of Friday and maybe Saturday. If not, our most recent back-up was on Tuesday, and I happened to have copied the couple of Word documents I created after then to a memory stick for work, so that's fine.

Who knows, but the world might be back to normal by Monday?

At five years old, our PC is pretty much on borrowed time.

The next question will be what do to next. Rebuild? Replace? Buy a laptop?

Well. as far as I am concerned this has been an intensely technical post. I hope my more technically inclined readers are suitably impressed.

(I'm blogging on my laptop which is only a mere four years old. Plenty of life left in it).

Saturday 1st August - Another tidy-up job in progress

We were "early-adopters" of home computing, and once the children were born (a long time ago now) the computer lived in a corner of the sitting room.

The actual corner has varied from time to time, but at the moment, and for the last I dunnamany years it has stayed in the same place. I say "it" - the techy stuff has been rebuilt, upgraded, reconfigured and whatevered every couple of years.

And somehow, the arrangement of the corner has been a bit of a mish-mashy messy sort of area.

This is all changing!

I don't have the really, really "before" picture, but here is the first change, mainly to do with tidying. The roll of yellow paper was a piece of sticky-notes-on-a-roll which had just fallen off the wall, where it was marking out the position of the new shelves.

The heap of "to be filed" paperwork has gone (I suspect it may have been put "somewhere" as opposed to "filed", but that's a start), and the intricate arrangement (tangle) of near-identical (to my eyes, anyway) black cables with a variety of connectors is elsewhere. A couple of holes are all that remain of a single shelf that had been put up to hold software booklets and discs.

Aha! Three shelves will always look better than one! The single shelf had been annoying me for years! The plastic drawers under the bottom shelf were for storing cables etc... but 

 they really looked toooo cheap and flimsy for the job. So, the next day, they all got taken down (leaving ten holes in the wall) and we will have to look for something similar but more substantial, and more pleasing.

It doesn't take long for empty shelves to get filled.

 

 

Just this lot left to find homes for now.

 



It is so satisfying to be steadily chipping away at the bits and pieces around the house which have just been waiting (sometimes for decades) to get sorted out.

Thursday 6th November - A "Good" Lesson

I have quite a low boredom threshold. Is this a good thing for a teacher? I don't know - it makes for more work, because I'm not prepared to regurgitate the same-old, same-old lessons over and over again. That's not to say that I won't re-use games and activities that work well. It's just that I can't bring myself to teach the same thing in the same way at the same time of year every time.

Of course you've got to have some kind of objective, time kind of purpose in mind for the lesson. But for me, one of the main "Bottom Lines" is that I'VE had a good time.

That's why, contrary to most people's idea of maintaining sanity, I am really enjoying teaching country dancing to my class of 6- and 7-year-olds.

We've done "four steps forward, clap, four steps back, clap" and moved on to "circle to the right for eight steps and circle to the left for eight steps". I'm blessed by having several Teaching Assistants who seem happy to join in and guide the children around while I call instructions and watch from the sidelines.

Today's lesson involved the intricacies of "dos-y-dos". Many of the children have become quite competent at this manoeuvre but I have to say that the bewildered, but willing, look on some children's faces was absolutely priceless. I haven't given up -  six weeks of term left....

By the way, this activity dove-tails neatly with the new IT curriculum; learning to create and  follow instructions in order to reach a predetermined outcome is pretty much what computer programming is all about. I'm just using real children and music to do the same thing.

April 10th - Tewkesbury 7 - Belated Birthday Present

Someone in the family had a birthday a few days ago, and we weren't there. We had left presents behind, for opening, and we phoned, but it's not the same.

Here is a belated birthday present - someone's blog that I have just tripped across. It will appeal to his sense of humour.

How I found it is like this; while rambling around Tewkesbury this morning, we spotted this.

 

 

By the way, I have just learned how to crop photographs on my phone! Who's clever then!

 

We are avid plaque and sign readers, and I enjoyed this one. Once back at the ranch, I investigated to find out what might have happened, but didn't, on that day - Tewkesbury has a long and complicated history.

 

It's a mixture of disappointing, interesting, dull and amusing.

 

The plaque is "an amusing gift item", and can been seen on buildings in Bourton-on-the-Water and Rye and all sorts of places; http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cast-Iron-Sign-NOTHING-HAPPENED/dp/B00F4479M4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1397134332&sr=8-1&keywords=on+this+site+nothing+happened

 

(Hurry, only one left in stock, price £14.85)

 

I also discovered from this blog, which I am about to make you a present of, that it is the date of an indecisive Naval battle in the American War of Independence (I'm pleased to note that his blog is as full of typos as mine)

 

AND, if you accept the theory that the year should have been 1752, not 1782, the "nothing" really did happen, as the date lies in that period of 13 days that were "lost" when changing from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar.

 

So, here's the blog; www.uselessofblog.blogspot.com "Infrequently Asked Questions". It's also got quite a lot of techie stuff to amuse and entertain.

 

Happy Birthday 

Friday 14th February - Knitting

This wasn't the kind of knitting of the "Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care"  type. (Macbeth Act 2 Sc 2, for those of you who don't feel like googling).

More like the stuff of nightmares - I must have unravelled as much as I ravelled when making these squares.

I made them all over the last week and weekend, when I was off work with the kind of chest infection which doesn't make me feel ill, but means I am supposed to take it easy.

So, I took most of Wednesday, Thursday and Friday off, (did a bit of piano teaching in the evening,  because, compared to class teaching, that's not really "work"), and went out for lunch at Wagamama on Saturday (ginger chicken udon - yum yum) and a brief tour of Waitrose.

Then, because it would be really inconvenient if I were not able to work on Monday (I was going to be Observed, and also it's a been a bit tight squeezing in the contracted number of sessions this term), I tested my stamina by doing Sunday School - that went OK, so I decided that  was better.

Back to work on Monday then.

Meanwhile, through the long tedious hours of daytime TV and radio and so forth, I completed five squares of the patchwork blanket project, started nearly two years ago, and lying fallow for months.

 
I seem to have used up nearly all of the bright coloured yarn, and have mainly blue and khaki left. Time for a trip to the wool shop.

Oh. I forgot. I'm supposed to be resting. Again. Because, yesterday, Thursday, I started to load the car ready for samba and ukulele and recorder and class teaching, and suddenly my legs turned to jelly, and I realised that I was not going to be able to strut my stuff with my samba drum and my samba whistle, or whang out a tune on my uke. So I rang in sick, and went back to the Doctor.

She said I should REST. As in DO NOTHING. I whinged about piano teaching not being real work, but she was insistent that anything that requires CONCENTRATION is work. So that definitely rules out knitting. The sixth square will have to stay on the needles for another couple of days.

I've gone back to bed, with laptop, mobile phone, Kindle, tray for tea-making - everything I need to a low-concentration day. This has made the Uptairs Cat very, very happy.

Thursday 24th October - Cat - astrophe

I was greeted by two extremely vocal cats when I came home this afternoon. I was rather pleased to see them, as neither had come inside this morning for their breakfast. They came rushing up to me as I got out of the car - most unusual for them to greet me in this way.

"Miaouw-riaow-miaow-wiaouw-iaouw" they said, over and over (they use quite a limited vocabulary, either because they think I am thick, or because they are thick. Probably both, as they are too thick to know that they are thick.)

Just like the infants at school when all of them have something important - the same bit of news - to tell me and they all want to tell me at the same time, so that I can't understand a word.

I opened the front door, and they both hurtled

down the drive round to the back door, and then took turns peering in through the transparent cat flap but not coming in.

So, I opened the back door and let them in.

Turns out there has been a system fail with the electronics for the cat flap (our cats have to wear special tags on their collars which magically - or electronically - whateverally - make the cat flap open for them, and bolt it behind them. This is to thwart an unwelcome visitor cat that used to come in and frighten ours.

I'm grateful that the flap failed in such a way that it would let them go out, but not let them in. Not so pleasant for the cats, but much better for me. And it hasn't rained today.

New batteries and sophisticated pressing of buttons to reset everything. and possibly reprogramming the cats - I mean the collars, of course, - and everything will be back to normal. Soon.

Wednesday 28th August - Conversation between Mickey Mouse and the Technocrats

Occasionally my son posts something on his blog that is too techy for me. Well, here's a technical post for him.

It should be simple - seems very simple to me.

The Technocrats have lots of photographs on their super-dupes cameras which they, and I would like to post into my blogspot blog.

However, I am a simple soul, and have developed a very simple system which I can understand - I take the picture on my mobile phone, upload it to picasa, and then get it into the blog. Bob's your uncle and Charlie's your Aunt. So seeemple even a meerkat can do it.

The Technocrats are in consultation together on how to get their photographs into the blog; I understand the first step, which is I need to go through and choose which photos I want and copy and paste them into a folder. I can get my head round this thus far.

They are working on the least offensive (to their purist minds) method of proceeding.

They have totally and uncompromisingly rejected my solution;

Display the photograph I want on the screen of the laptop, take a photograph of the photograph with my mobile phone and upload that to picasa!

NOOO! they chorus as one.

I might try it anyway when they are not looking.


Oho oho

It CAN be done. But it ain't great.

And I got caught in the act. There is one very irritated technocrat on one side of me, and another one laughing on the other side of me. Perhaps they have a point!

Saturday 21st July - Reckless Haste - Thurs 26th July

I wonder what this post was going to have been about?

Something, or someone, must have interrupted me as I got started, and what seemed to be so important and worth sharing last Saturday has completely evaporated. All I have to go on is the heading.

I could just delete the post... but this has reminded me...

from wikipedia: An IBM 704 mainframe (1964).
I'm writing about 1987, but mainframes looked much the same as this!

Years, and years ago, in another life, I worked as an Installation Planner in the Computer Department of a large company. It was large enough that we had several engineers and account managers for the big international computer corporation that supplied the mainframes we had permanently on-site to deal with the never-ending stream of enquiries and general maintenance work required to keep three mainframe computers and several scores of terminals afloat.

I remember setting in train an urgent enquiries about availability of some bit of kit. maybe it was a disk drive (they were about the size of laundromat washing machines in those days). Then a few days later, the situation changed and I was now handed the task of stopping the train.

"No worries", said the account manager (or whatever was the current slang of the era). "I hadn't started looking into yet. I've always found it better to wait for a day so make sure that it is worth the effort of researching the query, as past experience shows that you (I hope he meant the company, and not me personally!) so often change your mind."

This response has stayed with me all these years, and prevented me from rushing off to get stuck into things without allowing some time - at least a couple of seconds, sometimes several years - for reflection first. I haven't mentioned the name of the computer company concerned, as I guess this "laissez-faire" attitude on the part of its employees would be severely frowned upon. But it was a valuable lesson, even if the management of the company concerned would have been appalled by this response!