The drive belt on the washing machine broke on Saturday lunchtime, just after the shops shut for the weekend. This left me with a load of washing to rinse by hand, which was rather a pain.

Yesterday was nice.

The clocks went back on Saturday night, but I just slept later and missed an hour of day rather than an hour of sleep.

After a solid month of writing only non-fiction, I decided to treat myself. I absolutely didn't have time, but I wrote some fluff about a secret agent doing James Bond-type stuff, only he's a hamster. Deathless art it ain't, but it was fun to write. And I felt much better afterwards: something like having your first shower for three days. I need fiction to stay sane.

Or what approximately passes for sane.

But this morning the hour change really hit me. Lucky me, I could go back to bed. And now I'm catching up on little jobs, plus one not-so-little one. I really must write the promised review of "Interspex".

Improving

Well if you've seen the other blog, you'll have gathered that I've got video-editing sussed because the videos are up. The current problem is that I don't have an audio editing programme on the PC, just on the laptop. A download yet another download - should fix it.

I still feel blue and for some reason I'm tired all the time, even after a siesta.

But I made the effort to go and see the exhibition at the end of my son's robotics course. That was fun.

Frustrations

I've had a frustrating couple of days.

I got an email that Leeds university are seriously considering closing down their botanic gardens. Now this sounds dumb - I don't see how you can teach botany without plants, but then it's no dumber than trying to do astronomy without telescopes. That's their business. What upsets me is that those gardens were a large percentage of my father's life's work. The person who emailed me about it said he was "only pleased that Trevor did not live to see it happen."

Not the best choice of words; I'd much rather my father was still alive. But I know what he meant.

It's some consolation that someone's writing a history of the gardens, and wants details about my father.

Then we had a family funeral.

The two things together really brought back memories of the time just after my father died. Not good, obviously.

My friend F suggested that it would cheer me up to go into town and take photos of the living statues. It sounded worth a try, so I went.

The statues were great, and broke the circle of depressing thoughts. The still photos are on the other blog.

I got through the funeral OK.

And this morning I tried to edit the video. At that point I found out that the PC only had MovieMaker version 1 and I needed version 2. But I couldn't install it until I got Service Pack 2. And I couldn't do that until...

So I decided to do this video on the laptop, and sort out the PC later.

Using a new programme is frustrating at the best of times, but eventually I got it done and saved itto disk.

The save hung at 21%.

I went into town to get more photos, and was surprised to see a completely different set of statues.

I got home, tweaked the edits, andsaved the project again.

The save hung at 21%.

I tried a different format.

The save hung at 21%.

By this time the steam was rising from my ears. Luckily Theresa was around, and she eventually worked out that it was reading the video clips from the card reader, not the disk. As soon as the buffer ran out, of course it went at the speed of a moribund snail.

It took a while to persuade the programme to look in the right place, but eventually I got it saving to the web. It saved the whole thing (which took about 15 minutes) and then announced it didn't have the details for the web server. So now I'm saving it yet again as a local file.

Fingers crossed.

A Sweet Man

My husband gets up at the crack of dawn and goes jogging. When he comes back he makes himself coffee, so when I get up, the coffee's there ready and waiting. This is great, because I'm not a morning person.

This morning he had his annual health check, which meant that he had to go and have a blood test before he ate or drank anything. So he couldn't have any coffee.

He made coffee anyway, just for me.

See why I married him?

More Progress

Yay! I got Photoshop and basic anti-spyware installed.
I finally collected a parcel from the post office this morning that's been there since the morning I went into the Caldera. )I tried to collect it on Saturday, but they were shut. Grrr.)

I collected a whole lamb from the butchers (special offer - and they cut it up, thank goodness) and shared it out between us and some friends. The freezer is now very full.

I updated the blog about La Palma and filled in my Facebook account. They do say Web 2.0 is the route to success - we´ll see.

[Takes out megaphone] "Hey Everybody come and look at this great blog about La Palma!"