four mouses frozen
three keyboard crashes
two total failures
and a partridge in a pear tree.
You can tell that not only am I in the festive spirit for a change, but I’ve been working on the old desktop computer.
While I was poking around in there this morning after breakfast, I found yet another wad of interesting files in another partition. There must be tons of stuff on here that I have forgotten.
Certainly, there are all kinds of programs and utilities that I can’t remember what they do, and the only reason that I know that they are there is because there is a relentless stream of error messages telling me that they have failed to load.
But seriously, who remembers the Myspace Instant Messenger? Or Pigdin? Or the Crystal Media Player? Stacks of programs, all of which have long-since gone to that great Windows Exploder in the Cloud.
It seems that I built this computer in the winter of 2001 and I worked with it, screens of death and all, for five long years until I went to live in the Auvergne. And every time that I came back to Belgium for something too, until I finally sold Expo.
So far, I’ve extracted about 40GB of files from it today, and there are still plenty more to go at. I’ve no idea how many because it’s quite clear that my filing system back in those days was lamentable. However did I cope?
If you ever hear me complain about any new laptop or something, please have the courtesy to whisper “Windows 98 SE” in my lughole, just to remind me how lucky I am these days.
After the awful voyage of Saturday night, last night’s little voyage was much more pleasant. And I’d tell you all about it too except that by the time I came to type it out, it had gone completely. I must finish the unpacking from Canada and rescue the dictaphone again.
Having completed breakfast, next task was to book my rail journey to Brussels for Christmas. And as you might expect, there are no cheap fares or discounts for the days on which I would like to travel and I am having to pay full price. I don’t much like that idea at all.
And then to work. I attacked the big computer and we were doing just fine until the external drive was full. I’d tried another one beforehand but the computer didn’t recognise it, and I was wondering whether to use the huge dashcam drive or even to use one of the big external IDE drives. And I should have done that first, because it was in changing over the drives that I started to have problems.
There was an interruption from the church – they wanted to invite me to a carol service and they wouldn’t take “no” for an answer, even when I told them that I wouldn’t be here.
I don’t do too well with churches. The first time that I went to church someone stuck my head in a bucket of water. The second time, someone gave me this strange woman to share my house. So I’ve finished with churches. If anyone wants to drag me to a church in future it will be over my dead body.
We also had a little … errr … repose.
What with one thing and another I forgot to defrost some hummus. I had to attack the jar of red pepper spread instead. But that’s no problem. I like these jars. They make handy spice jars when they are washed and cleaned.
Later on I had my afternoon walk, out in the hurricane that was blowing.
And Neptune is back in town too.
I said the other day, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, that it looked as if we were going to have a gravel boat in very soon, and here she is.
There was a pile of mushrooms left over from the weekend, so I decided to make a curry. I had some dodgy potatoes, some peppers, a leek or two, a tin of lentils so I went into the kitchen and fried it all up. It wasn’t until I finished eating it that I remembered that I hadn’t added the mushrooms.
It’s not my day, is it?
Out again this evening for my usual evening walk around the walls.
By now the wind had dropped dramatically. Neptune was still at the quayside, still loading, and Minette was sitting on her windowsill waiting for her evening stroke. She was the only living creature that I saw.
So now that the big computer is up and running again (for now) from its latesT crash, I’ll carry on downloading the data. I’m not sure how long it will take but it’s not going to be finished this week.
However did I manage with that computer for all that time?
storm baie de mont st michel granville manche normandy france
storm baie de mont st michel granville manche normandy france
storm baie de mont st michel granville manche normandy france
storm baie de mont st michel granville manche normandy france
night port de granville harbour manche normandy france
