… much better day today.

A mere 3.5 mm of rainfall fell today, and given what we have had just recently that’s a positive drought.

This morning though I was on the computer and finally finished the spell-check on my notes from Canada.

You might be wondering why I was using a spell checker, but apart from the obvious reason, it also has a multiple-entry correction facility. And the speed at which I transcribe my notes from the dictaphone there are always the same faults and typing errors and the multiple-entry correction fixes all of those in one keystroke and that saves me ages.

Next thing was to go into my text editor program.

I use Note-tab instead of Notepad, and for a few good reasons too

• it has multiple-page facility, which Notepad does not have, so I can have a dozen pages open all at once
• it has a library facility. That means that you can build up your own library of common phrases or keystrokes and use just one click to insert the block of text instead of typing it out each time
• There’s an excellent find/replace facility too. If you want to change – say, an é letter into its alt-code for web purposes, or change a name from Mike to Michael in a huge block of text, tabbing through the find/replace facility does it far more quickly than you would do it by hand. How long would it have taken to change the … (gulp) … 745 cases of e-acute manually one-by-one?

After that I went off a-gardening.

I’ve had some bean, pea and sweetcorn seeds soaking since Saturday and they needed planting before they go rotten. And the pea seeds were already chitting too.

This meant “weeding” and to my delight this was much easier than I had anticipated. The ground was so waterloged and the raised beds were working so well that the roots of the weeds were not in very deep at all and came out quite easily.

I did the bean and pea beds in no time at all.

But this was where I discovered that I had been rather too quick off the mark. When I returned from Canada I had checked the beans and peas and noticed that next-to-nothing had come up – hence the soaking of another batch of seeds.

But after weeding, I reckoned that the peas must have been slow germinators as there are now about a dozen or so rearing up their ugly heads, not to mention all of the seeds that I had just been soaking.

Anyway, I planted everything all ready for the second phase of gardening, and I also found the old pea frame. I gave that a going-over and then installed it over the pea bed to give them something to cling to.

You can also see one of the bean beds in front of the pea bed, a potato bed to the left, a compost bin to the right with a blueberry bush in front.

It did rather remind me of the story of the Crewe and Nantiwh Borough Council workmen, and the foreman ringing up the clerk of works on one particular job that they were on –
“the men’s shovels haven’t arrived yet on this job. What are we going to do?”
The clerk of works replied “tell the men to lean on each other until they arrive!”

In other news, I’m having phone issues again. The phone that I bought from a brocante three years ago for 50 cents seems to have given up the ghost. I have another Belgian phone that I could use to replace it but I don’t have a French (or a generic) phone cable – the one for the broken phone is a special type made just for that phone and isn’t interchangeable.

After much searching, I decided to buy a new phone. And this wasn’t as easy as it sounds either. The cheapest ‘phone is €9:99 but there is a €6:50 postage fee from amazon.fr.

There were quite a few others to choose from but the one at €15:50 comes with many more facilities and is also on special offer – free delivery, and so that makes it cheaper than the cheapest. So that’s on its way now and hopefully my phone issues might be at an end.

I did once have a spare phone but I lent it to a girl who used to live around here but she has moved – twice as it happens – and so I won’t ever be seeing that again, will I?

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