I then attended to the clean up and washing and all the other things that must be done on a holiday weekend when some folks are enjoying a break and I am plodding around looking for Somerfields own brand washing powder. Well it is actually a kind of purple liquid but you know what I mean.
Smugly satisfied with myself I then turned to the main project of the day, attempting to complete the reinstalling of XP that I began yesterday. All day I spent downloading, installing, scratching my head, installing, querying, and installing till the candle was near the end of its life. Naturally my work had not been completed, I still had to connect to the web and reinstall OE. Today that was accomplished, and some hours later Outlook Express finally allowed me to use it. It is one of the wonders of this computer world that instructions for a wide variety of computer hard and software come incomplete! However I had wisely kept the secret hidden away and, once I remembered this, Success was achieved.
The word success does not include sound of course. No sound whatsoever can be obtained at the moment. 'No audio device' it claims, although I do get a buzz every so often - not like that - so something makes a noise. Oh yes, and the 'floppy' still wants a disk inserted in 'A.' So that is lost also.
However I managed to make an almost uneatable soup out off a wide variety of near penicillin veg that I had lying around. That I used tonight to take away the taste of the 'Flanders Curry' that I had for lunch, with oatcakes. The dole office have never suggested I take up cooking for a living, which is just as well. I once fed beautiful young lass who worked for the environment folk at the council. She closed down my kitchen! While doing this I listened to Sky Sports as the season begins to draw to an end. My ears were anxious to hear the good news of our mighty hammering of Falkirk at Tynecastle today - it never happened. It seems instead we had a dreary nil-nil draw which does not suit us at all. There will now be a moment for sympathy.
Thank you.
An unusual thing did occur tonight mind, I laughed at 'You've been Framed!' One of the sequences had me in tears of laughter and that has not happened for a long time, tears of woe and despair oh yes, but laughter - no! Mind you some folks blogs have come close to it in recent days. Usually deliberately!
But as I looked out of the window I realised just how much I love Spring. The birdies flit cheerily through the trees, singing happily while they begin the breeding season, maybe that's why? The chaffinches and robins, dunnocks and blackbirds pour out their song brightening the dawn. One advantage when I was a postman was to hear the dawn chorus beginning as I cycled to work, marvelous that was. High overhead a kestrel may circle or hover while seeking out the tiny speck that is a mouse or vole far below. Wood pigeons coo irritatingly loudly outside folks windows long before the alarm clock has threatened them into life. Massed ranks of rooks or crows,(who knows the difference?) caw loudly high in the trees, and somewhere a thrush takes time off from listening intently for the worm and instead sings beautifully while announcing that this is his patch so clear off. Among the trees covered in budding leaves are masses of bluebells showing through the darkening floor. Daffodils can be seen in many places, and snowdrops and little blue flowers begin to appear. Lovely, just lovely. The sight cheers the heart, a lightness within accompanies the lightening of the skies above, and the sun climbing higher each day, ensuring the sky is that little bit deeper blue, and the whole world appears a better place. No wonder folk in Norway and Finland who suffer six months darkness each year go bananas! That is enough to turn anyone into a Viking invader!
Admittedly, being Easter, the weather would turn a tad chilly. There is a slightly cold front moving from the north, starting at the north pole and passing through Iceland picking up snow and ice on its way. Kind hearted as it is the front is leaving Spring snow all across the highlands and down the east coast of England. Some of it has been plastering itself against my window all afternoon! To be honest it is bright and sunny at the moment but I can see in the distance another huge dark gray cloud heading towards us. From the light blue sky above small sleet like flakes are drifting by, doing their best to grow up into snowflakes. Now in my humble opinion, if the ice flows are melting, glaciers shrinking, and the Maldives and other places beginning to flood maybe it would be a better idea to keep all this white stuff up there in the north where it belongs? Could we not persuade the weather folk to do something about this?
Clouds have always fascinated me in some ways and I can see why Constable put them in his pictures so often. I doubt he realised just how large a cloud could be. In the far distant past I flew home to Edinburgh and the whole journey was above cloud. Later that night the weather forecast showed the size of the cloud. The picture revealed one single cloud that stretched for thousands of miles from the Arctic to the Mediterranean, and from the Atlantic to the centre of Asia. What a size! Add to this the variation in the clouds, what the meteorologist will understand from them, and what they comprise, it just leaves me wondering in the same way I do when confronted by other elements of creation such as the sea, or mountains. Fascinating. Wonderful stuff, but I would really rather get sunburned somewhere in the Mediterranean!
I am however suffering that guilt that turns up every so often. The guilt caused by talking to my mother! My Mum is a wonderful person and does so well for someone who is 93. However while I want to keep in contact I really find less and less to share with her. My conversation is limited at the best of times, and she is trapped indoors too much at this time of year, and after discussing the weather, the 9 year old, what she eats, and nothing else really there is nothing to say. Women need to converse in a way men don't, and all to often this is plain boring, and add to that my life being very different for the family up north, and indeed everyone else on the planet, it is a very trying time. Until my sister died things were OK, she would call and talk for hours about nothing, and she was just around the corner, not 400 miles away! It is so frustrating, and made worse by here deafness. I am not going to spend all night shouting down a phone!
So nearly every time I call I end up full of guilt, and angry! I want to do more, and I don't want to spend time talking about her dinner for an hour-again! Excuse me, I am just off to gas myself!
