Well???????

is it working yet?
Good Lord! Finally after about six weeks it sems to be working again.
Sorry Blogger, due to almost total failure to get any kind of help with the no publishing problem and the enormous difficulty of navigating round the impressively unhelpful help topics, I've left you.
New blog on wordpress here.

Wordpress is pretty good. I like it.

We can work it out

I was absently and hopefully singing this while scrambling up and down a hedge in search of a particular view. (Not sure how I got there from this but it seemed to work.)
Later, having received a text which said they had worked it out, I found myself singing
this and wondering if it was appropriate. (To be honest, it often has been with youngest - she's the kind of open, affectionate young woman who attracts jealous guys. Then blow me if they don't get jealous when more guys are attracted to her. And when previous guys are still attracted!).
(irrelevant photo of brambles)
All the wedding stuff seems to be going to plan. This weekend saw the stag do as well as the hen thing - Eldest appeared briefly here, three times, once with a lot of washing and later with some paintballed clothing and a trophy for being the best at quad-biking and um, not go-carting but something like it and then a third time to collect all his bits and pieces and hurry off back to Lancaster. And we got to see his pics of mountain biking in France. These actually seemed to be mostly about mountaineering and abseiling which made me feel a bit vertiginous. I'm glad I don't have to watch him doing this sort of stuff any more!
Meanwhile, we went to a sort of tiny, private music festival in Reading and listened to some very enjoyable local musicians and barbecued sausages* and generally had a good time. And I did find a few minutes to wander off and discovered a bonfire - it was a wonderfully sunny evening :)Now it transpires that I have to entertain GB probably from about 8 am tomorrow morning. I'd better go to bed or she'll have to wake me up before I can do the entertaining!
*No we didn't listen to the sausages, we barbecued them. But you could hear them sizzling if you really wanted to listen to them.

Oh look! Lots of chickens

Me and my girls (I would have included the boy but he wasn't invited to the hen night)


And the rest - a lovely crowd :)


:)

Got a family crisis

Sorry I may be absent for a while. No details, it's not my crisis to tell stories about.
It's ok though , nothing to do with the wedding :)

xxx

PS, the hen night was fun :) Pics when I have time.

I'm supposed to be finishing the booklet

and making a final selection of pics for the holiday crowd to see TOMORROW!!!!
This will teach me to take too many photos. Won't it?
Well, the other day, Frangelita and I had to get together to collect some stuff and we had lunch - Carbonara, very very good and huge!
I showed her my new lens and she said Oh is it one of those ones where you can do close-up eyes and stuff like that and I said Oh yes I hadn't thought about eyes. So naturally we did eyes across our carbonara.
My Eye (with rather nice clear reflection of Frangelita's hand taking the photo)Eye take a photo (of Frangelita's eye - less clear but still with the photographer's fingers reflected in there somewhere :)
Then we went home feeling absolutely stuffed to the gunn'ls (or gills, depending on whether you feel boatish or fishy, either way pretty bloated which is itself a bit fishy and quite appropriate since I am invited to Fran's grown up Hen Night* and we're having a fish restaurant dinner)


Moving right along to Wednesday, I can't do anything about photos or any of that right now because the computer is downloading yesterday's sunshine, very slowly. (which is bad of me because I ought to finish the other stuff first). But I'm quite excited - last night I nearly finished the booklet and there are only 3 more pairs of pages to go. And would you believe, they actually did meet in the middle. (They couldn't have done anything else really since I was working inwards from both ends of the booklet anyway but I could imagine that somehow I might have cocked up the process and ended up with ten pages of lovingly printed photos which didn't work out after all). There really is something quite satisfying about printing instead of just viewing.

So while I'm waiting for the photos I've tidied the kitchen (it's been getting harder and harder to find anywhere to put anything the last few days) and walked the dog across the road. We tried an extended version of our usual amble which involved going round the edge of the big field and climbing out into the road. The good thing about this is that after a gentle slightly downhill amble there is a stiff uphill walk back to our gate. A very short stiff uphill walk but definitely uphill. (This is good because it's exercise for us both. It's also bad because it's hard work).
We both found this quite challenging and I was hoping that when we got back the photos would be finished so I could get my breath back and sit down for a while. No such luck so now I must hoover. Ugh!

And finally, Thursday arrives and I've finished the booklet and sorted out all the pictures and now I'm copying them to CD. There are still 552 to look at and I can't imagine they'll want to see them all at one sitting so they can take home a CD. Then I shall become a whirlwind** of dust and untidiness and finally, settle down into a tidy dining room and kitchen and clean bathroom and bogs.
Meanwhile, from my sunny evening (it lasted all of half an hour) here's a hare started up by the harvesting (which seems to be going on for a very long time this year - I think the weather is giving the farmers a lot of trouble)
Bounding away into the sunset
And a cool, windy, sunny afternoon at Winterbourne.
Do you know, they did want to see all 552 pictures and then we looked at all Linda's pictures too and Steve brought the most enormous monitor I've ever seen so we all sat round the dinner table and behaved exactly like my parents used to with their friends, showing each other's holiday slides on projector screens. And it was fun!
But I forgot to show them the booklet!!!!!
Gaah!

Got to go to sleep now. It seems to have been a long day. I hope you all had a good day too. And I hope you all sleep well.
Goodnight :)

*The youthful and exuberant Hen Night is to be at the Bestival Festival on the Isle of Wight and they are all going as brides. I am excused thank heavens!
**Slight exaggeration, more like a lazy breeze with the odd eddy.

The met office says at 7pm there will be one of these
outside. That's in 13 minutes.
So I put my trust in them and organised my whole day around a plan to go out at around 7pm and take some photos. To be fair, it's been all day so I wouldn't have gone running out with my camera anyway. Still, there's no sign of any sunshine yet. Meanwhile, I've cooked the dinner, hours in advance, made little quiches for barney's lunches for the rest of the week, kicked the dog out several times because he was looking at me with too many big, brown, hopeful eyes, kicked the cat out because she was throwing up, let them both in again because I felt sorry for them, kicked them both out again because they wre driving me scatty and let them both in again to feed them (was this a good idea I wonder), not quite hung the washing up to dry because that felt like being too, too boring, printed several more pages of little booklets of canal holiday pics and turned my brain inside out in the process and now it's time for the weather to look like changing.
Er.......
Well?......
Sunshine?..............


Hmm.


Oh Ooops! it's 18.57 and the faintest little patch of sunlight is struggling through the clouds. Oh my goodness! I have to lock up and run away.
Back later - tomorrow maybe :)

*

A good match then. The weather and today's icon from the met office. (Except their weather seems to be going in the opposite direction from mine)


Barney tells me that one of the other members of the stamp club is a birdwatcher who has told him that there is a Peregrine falcon to be seen occasionally on top of one of the town's least pretty and tallest buildings.
Also that there was a French market in town today.

So I spent the morning looking at a selection of rather sad, dried sausages and limp, warm cheeses and perambulating obsessively round the building in question.
The sun shone brightly, no peregrines were to be seen and I came home with no sausages and a stiff neck.**

Now I am cooking English, undried sausages in a casserole with Chorizo and tomatoes and basil. And we're having it with a warm salad of puy lentils. Thus it is not sausage casserole as such (ie a warming, winter dish for wet windy nights) but a light savoury sausage dish to be eaten with salad on chilly summer evenings.
The difference as far as I recall is that instead of adding the lentils to the sausagey, winey, tomatoey, herby gloop and heating it all together I dribble the gloop over the warm lentils and perch the sausages on top and scatter some leaves and herbs over the top of that.
See. A summery sausage dish :)
(Shall I add cucumber? No, I don't think that will work.)
No, he wasn't in the least bit taken in by all this nonsense but accepted the inevitable when I offered him the opportunity to cook something himself instead. I like a man who bows to the inevitable. (Though I love a man who occasionally rises to the bait and cooks for us himself :)

And now, being completely dried up of inspiration I shall er.... well.... say goodnight. For now.
Goodnight :)

*I stole the icon from the met office website. d'you think they'll mind? I had a lot of fun trying to find various ways to steal it like copying and pasting into word and also into the blog post but in the end I realised I could just save it to disc as a gif. I've now stolen all their weather icons :) It seems to take up a whole line of er - space - which is a little excessive for something so small.
**Actually I went out with the stiff neck and indeed got up with it this morning but it fitted in better, obviously, after the perambulations round a tall building.

In which my left and right brains are severely challenged and rearranged

Oops. I've just filled the kitchen with smoke.
Brrr, now I've made the whole house cold.
However, all is well.
Yesterday, we got the immersion heater fixed. One more leaky thing down and two to go - it turned out the immersion heater was another leaky thing not just a watery one. It took all day and wasn't keen to fit in the allotted space so there was a sigh of relief all round when it finally filled up and the water got hot again - just in time for Barney's shower when he got home. And well in time for me to have one this morning. Isn't it funny how these things always go wrong just after you've said, Oh I really haven't got time for a shower today - I'll do it in the morning!

Finally, I've been through all the holiday pics. The other holiday people can come and see them any time. Only I have this feeling that they may not want to see 800 photos in one evening. So there's still a bit of sorting to do, of the sorted ones. But for me, it's like reliving the holiday. I can watch a slideshow and see the water gliding past and remember each picture as it was taken and what I was hoping to produce and what I actually saw. Every so often I think, "what on earth did I take that for?" and occasionally - quite often - "Oh I knew that wouldn't come out" and sometimes "what were you thinking when you took that!!!!". And now and then"Oh wow! That came out!!" Oh and quite often "Gaah! Idiot! Missed it!".
I've deleted over 4000 pictures.

Then, feeling a bit smug, I thought, wouldn't it be nice to print a few out. Perhaps as a little booklet. The idea took hold and suddenly I found myself fiddling around with the picture package thingie which I use to arrange pictures on a page so that they come out the way I want them - not!
See, the obvious thing to do is print each sheet of A4 so that you have two A5 pages with two pictures on each, er, a front page and a back page. Umm, and then on the other side a back page and a front page.
Right. And oops! you don't want the pictures on the back pages to follow the pictures on the front pages, they need to be taken from the end of the holiday - in reverse order- so that as you lok through the booklet you follow the pictures in the order they were taken. And then of course when you arrange the pages, the pictures at the top of each page need to end up opposite the ones they are following in the final booklet not following the ones at the other end of the final booklet.
With me so far?
Yes, I thought not.

Well and then when it comes to printing, you do have to make sure that the pictures come out on each side of the page facing the same way up! And it was at this stage that I nearly fell apart altogether since the printer produces the pictures the opposite way up from the way they are displayed on the screen. And back to front.
Which is to say that when you put the sheet with the first lot of pictures already printed on it, back into the printer to do the next lot on the back you have to make sure that they're going to emerge upside down and back to front - and face down of course. But you knew that didn't you?
Hahahaha!
Oh didn't you? Neither did I. Wasn't it a good thing I decided to print one pair of pages before doing the whole lot!

Well now I have pages 1-4 from the front and sort of x- minus 4x from the back (because I'm not sure how many pictures I'm going to do yet. So I'm doing the whole booklet from two directions at once - the back pages from the end of the holiday, backwards, and the front pages from the beginning , forwards). And they're all the same way up and they seem to be in the right chronological order. So far. It'll be interesting to see if they meet in the middle :)

Amazingly, the black ink didn't run out until I'd got to the end of the first stage of the marathon.
I am always slightly amused by the way it says,

"the black ink has run out

change

the ink cartridge"

And then it says

"the printer cover is open

Close

the cover"

Oh look, A wish arrive on the carpet:)

And I got to walk in the woods in the sun :)
Got to go an unravel my brain now.
Sleep well :)