Category: technology

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Alternative Offices

Everything seems to be conspiring against me writing this morning – well, maybe not everything, but certainly Microsoft, which resents my determination not to pay for Office 365, but continue to use the version of Office which I bought in good faith ten years ago, and which I have always found perfectly adequate for my needs. In revenge, it periodically tells me it has to reconfigure Office, and this morning I sat in front of the screen for ages getting more and more irritated, and rapidly losing the will to live, let alone write – so much so that I’ve come downstairs and am using the laptop instead.
This isn’t an ideal solution, partly because it requires me to sit on the armchair with the laptop on (surprise, surprise) my lap, which is not healthy in terms of either my posture or my eyesight – both of which cause me problems at this stage in my life. The other issue is that I don’t have any version of MS Office on my laptop any more, because the free trial version of 365 has now expired, and I can’t install my old version because it’s on a CD and there is no CD drive (besides which, no doubt I would get the same ‘configuration’ problems, though it might be quicker because at least the wifi in the front room is better than the study).
So I’m trying to get to grips with Open Office, which I’m sure I’ll get my head around eventually, but at the moment I find myself missing some of the features I’m used to with the MS version – though this is more of an issue with Excel/Calc than it is with Word. This morning I’ve found out how to insert the current date, but I’ve just noticed that I can’t see the wordcount without using the tool bar. That’s going to be annoying.
I was going to say more about the Madwoman in the Attic this morning, but I’ve been distracted by all these irritations and now may just fill in the rest of this post with moaning.
My poor cat joined me in the study just as I’d decided to give up on waiting for Office to configure and come downstairs. I explained to her what I was doing, but she hasn’t come down yet, even though I’ve been here for half an hour. Probably curled up asleep on her special chair. If she was here, of course, she would be trying to sit on my lap – which is currently occupied by… yes that’s correct. And, in another non-surprising surprise move, she has now just walked into the room – when I’m thinking of winding this up and going back upstairs, because that’s where the scanner is, and I’ve just remembered about a photograph I found among the stuff in the study, which I took on Cape Cod in June 1996, almost a quarter of a century ago. Does the message still apply?

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On Purpose

Am I, as was recently suggested, ‘looking for a purpose’?

First, let me freely acknowledge that I don’t feel I have ‘…a purpose…’ in any profound sense. But how much does that matter?  

This is a time of year when there can be a lot of pressure to set goals, make resolutions, plan new habits and behaviours, and generally beat yourself up and set yourself up for failure and disappointment. Well, that’s how I’ve always found it. I don’t want to detract from anyone else’s desire to do those things, but for me – hey, I’m retired, I live alone, and the joy of both those states is the peace not to feel obliged to follow anyone’s expectations but your own.

That said… my purpose last week was to complete and submit my tax return, which I did on Saturday. Now it’s to bring my accounts up to date, which I haven’t touched for the last two months, even though it’s a task I quite enjoy. Moving data between spreadsheets, checking totals and hunting for errors when things don’t tally – to me, it’s fun, it’s satisfying, there’s always a ‘right’ answer, and if it doesn’t work out, there’s always a reason which can be found – it’s like a puzzle, a more complicated version of killer su doku, but one which has a ‘purpose’ beyond just filling the time. Sometimes I think: I could have been happier as a book-keeper rather than as a failed book-writer, and maybe that’s a path I should have chosen years ago, but too late now, I don’t have the right qualifications – (and no, I have no intention of studying for the qualifications now – given my experiences of retraining in new skills during my fifties – creative writing, web design, graphic design, TEFL etc – and knowing where that got me).

Another potential ‘purpose’ would be to put together the book case which I bought from Argos in the Black Friday sales and which has now spent almost two months in two large cardboard boxes in my narrow hall. At one time I considered making it a post-Christmas project, but I decided to start knitting myself a jumper instead (which is coming along nicely, by the way). I’ve been walking past the boxes for long enough now, I don’t notice them any more, and a further disincentive from putting together the bookcase is that I might then feel obliged to put something on it, which might lead me to think about sorting out the stuff in the study, which could very well precipitate a complete emotional breakdown, so probably best not to go there.

So my plan for the day after I’ve posted this is: brush teeth; dry hair; get dressed; eat breakfast; mess around with my spreadsheets for a couple of hours (depending how much time is left after I’ve finished the aforementioned); spend the afternoon in my chair knitting and listening to the radio; get dinner; do bins (mustn’t forget); watch telly. ‘Purpose’ settled – job done.

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Blogging about Blogging

I do this every morning, supposedly first thing, but in fact I’ve usually already been awake for two or three hours, lain in bed thinking, listened to the radio, fed the cat, exercised, showered, prepared porridge, loaded the dishwasher…

This morning I answered a comment and made a comment on a friend’s post on our group blog, changed my profile picture, then noticed that the second comment wasn’t appearing, realised I hadn’t saved it anywhere else and didn’t want to have to retype it from scratch; thought maybe it was there but needed to be approved by an admin. Tried logging into the email account for the group blog; couldn’t get the password right; tried hunting for the bit of paper with the password on, which I was sure I’d seen in the last few days; decided to go downstairs and use the laptop because I was sure the email and password were saved on there; they weren’t, but the admin account was the saved login, so I managed to get into the group blog and confirm that the comment had never been saved; came back up here, typed it again (as best I could remember), posted the comment.

I could change the password for the group blog – no, it’s not the blog password I need but the gmail account – I can change the password for that, because I think I’m the only person who ever uses it, but it’s annoying me now and I don’t want to. That bit of paper must be around here somewhere.

I have a thing about not wanting to retype something I’ve already written – which is why I always do blog posts in Word first and save them, so I don’t have to do it again. Even a three sentence comment, I want to be sure I’m doing it the same way as I did the first time (or maybe even better, but I can’t know that if I don’t have a record of the original). It’s a foible of mine.

None of which is what I was intending to write about before I sat down at the computer (well, maybe the first paragraph was). My friend’s comment and his post had got me thinking about how and why I write this blog, because he said ‘Your words often make me wonder if you are searching for direction and whether or not I should be following a dream again.’ Then in his own post (referring to himself or a generic ‘you’, I presume, not me specifically) :

‘But really, the question means: what have you done with your life so far? And what are you going to do with what’s left of it?’

Well, what I write is just what comes into my head at the time, and some of that leads to thoughts of my life so far. As for what’s left of it – which is kind of what I thought I would write about, before I got distracted – I’ll start that tomorrow.

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Epiphany

I know today is Epiphany, but why is it called ‘Twelfth Night’? It’s the twelfth day AFTER Christmas Day – so, when did the drummers drum? Was that yesterday? Or how about the ‘First’ day of Christmas, when the partridge sat in the pear tree, was that really Boxing Day? Or does Twelfth Night literally refer to the twelfth night from Christmas Day, in which case, the Twelve Days ended at midnight last night, and did Twelfth Night end at midnight or at dawn this morning? So should I have already put my denuded (not that it was ever very well clothed) 20 centimetre fir tree in a pot out in the garden yesterday?

These questions bother me every year, yet no one else ever seems to notice. All I can say to that is: do the maths.

And why do I bother to ask, when there is now a source of answers for everything?

In most Western ecclesiastical traditions, Christmas Day is considered the “First Day of Christmas” and the Twelve Days are 25 December – 5 January, inclusive, making Twelfth Night on 5 January, which is Epiphany Eve. In older customs the Twelve Days of Christmas are counted from sundown on the evening of 25 December until the morning of 6 January, meaning that the Twelfth Night falls on the evening of 5 January and the Twelfth Day falls on 6 January. However, in some church traditions only full days are counted, so that 5 January is counted as the Eleventh Day, 6 January as the Twelfth Day, and the evening of 6 January is counted as the Twelfth Night. In these traditions, Twelfth Night is the same as Epiphany and is also known as the “Thirteenth Day”. However, some churches that fall in the latter category consider Twelfth Night to be the eve of the Twelfth Day (in the same way that Christmas Eve comes before Christmas), and thus consider Twelfth Night to be on 5 January.

Wikipedia

So why have I never bothered to check that before? I probably have, it’s just that I’d forgotten the answer.

I saw the waxing moon through the slats in the venetian blind when I was doing my morning exercises earlier. Which reminded me of another question which occurred to me during one of my beach walks a few weeks ago. The sea had clearly been high enough to throw bits of seaweed, pebbles, sand etc up to the sea wall and over onto the prom, which, due to the terracing of the beach, almost never happens. It must have been due to a storm, but it got me briefly thinking about the tides – in particular, that there must have been an exceptionally high tide – and then I remembered that the moon was in its dark phase, so how could it be high tide? Which also made me realise that the tides are not related to the phases of the moon at all, as I’d been assuming, because the moon is always there (when it’s on this side of the earth), it’s just that we can’t see the bit that is in earth’s shadow – and why would that make any difference to the gravitational pull between earth on the moon? So why do the tides change as the moon changes? This puzzled me mightily for a while, until it dawned on me that the tides must change with the distance of the moon from the earth, which I suppose interacts with the phases of the moon (in terms of how much we see) but isn’t directly linked.

I didn’t check that on Wikipedia (or anywhere else), but I was quite happy to have figured it out for myself. Welcome to the inside of my head.

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Cloudy

I decided this morning that if I ever publish another book, on the back cover, under the blurb, where real books have glowing reviews, I will place the following:

‘A tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.’ W. Shakespeare.

Do I have plans to publish another book, maybe this year? Well, I might – at some indeterminate date between now and my final gasp – but I don’t have plans. Anything’s possible.

I do plan on finishing this jumper I started knitting on Christmas Day – though I’m a bit concerned at the moment about the size. Did I separate off the sleeves from the body too soon? I was aiming for the same number of stitches as the Christmas one I did for my daughter (it’s the same yarn) but stopped when the sleeves hit sixty, when the front and back for some reason were only at 112, although on the other one it was 120. I can’t really tell by looking, because of it being on circular needles, and that also makes it a pain to try on – and I’ve lost my spare circular needle, which is what I used last time (front on one and back on the other). Bigger better than smaller, surely?  Should I undo what I did yesterday, to be safe? Yesterday I undid two squares’ worth of weather-blanket backing that I’d done the day before, because I wasn’t happy with the way it was working out.

I’m thinking now about Penelope, at the end of ‘The Odyssey’, weaving by day, and in the night unravelling what she’d done the day before, waiting for her husband, Odysseus, to return from the Trojan War (spoiler alert: it took ten years, on top of another ten years for the duration of the war). The process matters more than the outcome, the journey is more significant than the destination (evidently so in Odysseus’s case, I’m not aware of any stories about what happened after he and P were reunited). The process of unravelling is a bit frustrating, and as it’s knitting, picking up the stitches is a lot more of a pain than the crochet equivalent, but as long as there is no deadline, it’s surely preferable to a finished garment that’s too small? (Or maybe not, given that I’ll probably never wear it?)

Incidentally, that last sentence was just highlighted by Word, presumably because it thought it was a double negative – not so clever, eh?

This isn’t what I was going to write about. No resolutions, no plans, no expectations – not that I was intending to write about any of those – on the contrary.

Gazing out of the window, I watch the slow procession of clouds drifting across the gap between the end terraced house across the road and the pub on the corner. A woman in black leggings, a lime green top and head phones runs past my line of sight. Will I be like the running woman or like the clouds this year? What do you think?

Cloudy’, Simon and Garfunkel

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Rotting From the Roots

Sat down at the PC to start writing and remembered a) the mouse isn’t working and b) the top tool bar on word keeps appearing and disappearing and I can’t work out how to fix it. Weell… actually, after a few more minutes of trying the View tab and other things, I Googled it and found out that if I right click on the home tab it gives me a drop-down including ‘Minimize the ribbon’ which was ticked, so I unticked it and that worked. The first suggestion: press Ctrl F1, was stymied by the fact that I can’t see ‘F1’ on my keyboard. Don’t know how it got ticked in the first place, but I suspect it happened when I was thrashing around trying to get the mouse to work.

I suspect the mouse just needs a new battery, but spare batteries are downstairs and the mouse is upstairs, and by the time I got downstairs I’d forgotten I needed to get them. If I remember, I could take the mouse down when I go and do it then, but that would rely on me remembering to take it, remembering what I’d taken it for, then remembering to bring it back up again. For now, I’m getting more practised at using the touch pad.

Today, I feel the way this poinsettia looks. I used to buy a poinsettia every year, and this is how they always ended up looking. I think it’s down to over-watering – but you only have to do it once and there’s no getting back from the slippery slope. I’m always a bit erratic with my watering regime, I guess it’s to do with short term memory and lack of awareness. Some things die from lack of water, which is recoverable-from if you notice in time, but there’s no way back from over-watering.

I can tell you exactly how long I’ve had this one, because I bought it the day we went into Tier 3, the Thursday before Christmas. I know, because it was the day I took my cards to the post office and checked the local shops for a small turkey joint, then bought a little Christmas tree and this poinsettia on the way home. Then my family persuaded me to go to them for Christmas anyway, by promising to come and get me and bring me back, then two days later we went in Tier 4 and the plan changed again (but you already know that story).

In other words, this poor plant has been in my care for less than a fortnight, and this is what I’ve done to it.

However, that’s not why I’m feeling droopy, as though I’m rotting from my roots. It’s just that I woke up that way, as often happens. Maybe it’s because I’m always rotting from my roots, and I’m not sure whether there’s any way back from that. Well, nothing permanent, as far as I can tell, but at least I’m not actually dead yet.

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Monday Mouse Mayhem

‘This is the way the world turns…’

There was a line to go after that, it came into my head while I was making coffee, and went on for a little way, and I thought: this could be going somewhere, let’s follow it for a bit… But by the time I was sitting at the keyboard, I’d forgotten what I’d done with that second line, and so it’s gone, another aborted poem, and my head throws me a line: ‘…every song in my heart dies a bornin’.., not one of mine but from a song I knew fifty-odd years ago, and I have to sing it in my head till I get to the refrain and remember it’s ‘The Last Thing on my Mind’, by Tom somebody (not Lehrer) a sad little heart-brakey song which I always thought fitted will with Dylan’s ‘Don’t Think Twice, it’s Alright’, and if I was a singer I would sing them both at tonce, one after the other, two siodes of the same coin, but I never did because I’m not a singer.

Now something has happened to the mouse, it’s not working and it’s so long since I used the touch pad on this keyboard (even though I use the one on the laptop every time and don’t even know where the laptop mouse is), I just can’t seem to get it, and so everything since ‘…every…’ is now in italics and I can’t work out how to change it back.

Also did I mention that the top toolbar keeps disappearing, unless I move the cursor up there, which given what I just said about the mouse and not knowing how to use the touchpad, is tricky. But at least you can see that I’ve now rectified the italics, and also went back and corrected a lot of the typoes, but left just a few in to keep you on your toes, and also as a general illustration of my dyspraxia-fuelled nonsense, which I usually manage to cover up quite easily.

What an odd, yet oddly typical, start to the day. Also when I started the computer, my desktop was showing the image I was talking about a few weeks ago, the one of a harbour that I couldn’t place, but thought was either Italy or the south of France, and then couldn’t find and spent ages scrolling through the folder. This time I did identify it, checked the properties and found out it was taken on 10 March 2012, which I thought meant San Sebastian or Barcelona. Then I started looking for drafts of Single to Sirkeci  and couldn’t find where the files were, which is worrying. I found a very early version on the external hard drive, which I couldn’t open because it’s a different version of In Design, then I found a pdf of that draft, but that didn’t have the dates on each section, which I did in the later drafts…

Just realised I’ve written way over 500 words. Stopping now.

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Boxing Day

Definitely not the worst Christmas ever, in fact I’m not sure I’d even add it to the list of ‘bad’ Christmases. Yes it was sad not having the family all together, but the Skyping worked well (after some initial glitches – and for some reason I couldn’t connect the laptop to the telly as I’ve been doing for months for tai chi), opened presents in the morning with my son and daughter-in-law, then later we had dinner ‘together’ (a bit later than I would have liked, as they were late putting their turkey in the oven), and we even watched a film on Netflix ‘together’ after dinner (which I fell asleep in the middle of, even more typical). It was fun cooking my own Christmas dinner, and being in my own home with my little cat – which reminds me that the last time I did that – ten years ago, with a different cat – I went for a walk in the sunshine with snow in the park by the river in Bedford – which I wouldn’t have been doing yesterday, given the reports of flooding. I could have gone for a walk by the seafront, but didn’t have time, what with all the Skyping.

Ten years – I can’t quite believe it. Life goes through its cycles – lying in bed this morning, I was thinking about the bad times – years, not specifically Christmases – and how they seem to come at intervals of three years: I’d started by remembering 2014, then 2011, and 2008… all of them particularly challenging for different reasons. And going forward, what happened in 2017? Oh yes, cancer treatment. So that I guess puts this year on the same trajectory. All of them led, in the early part of the next year, to major turning points: 2009 splitting with my husband, 2012 going travelling and 2015 moving to the south coast – (although 2017 was the exception, because 2018 was also difficult – though that was the year when I started with my current therapist, and was diagnosed with dypraxia, so maybe that was a good turning point too).

Whatever, a new year is a new year, a turning point of sorts, and currently we’re between the astronomical new year (lengthening daylight) and the calendrical one. Usually I wouldn’t be here for the latter either, but life is as it is.

I used to find Boxing Day a massive disappointment – all that anticipation, and suddenly the excitement was over. Today I think I will just take it easy – not that I ever do anything but that these days, but you know what I mean.

I’m not thinking too much about the new year – whatever it brings will come anyway. I’m not sure whether I’ll carry on with blogging – I can’t seem to raise much enthusiasm for it at the moment, that might be a temporary thing, in fact it probably is, given past experience. I guess you could say I’ve lost my sense of agency (and urgency) – but then, it is Boxing Day.

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First World Frustration

Two things I have to do today: call Virgin Media to try and sort out my broadband issues; and try to find something for dinner on Christmas day. Neither of these is an exciting prospect, and both I’ve already spent too much time on yesterday.

Of the local shops, I’ve already tried the Co-op, the Romanian butcher and Sainsbury’s. I may head for Tesco shortly, but without much hope. On Sunday I saw a boneless turkey crown joint for six people in the Co-op. I didn’t buy it, because it was clearly way too big, but I did have regrets afterwards. I’ve got some pre-made pastry, because I was planning on having salmon en croute for New Year’s Day, but now thinking that I can get a steak and have steak en croute – or just steak. But I can’t find any decent steak either. First world problems. I can always get something out of the freezer, curry or casserole or something. Still got a couple of days to sort it out, but I don’t want to go to any of the big supermarkets and battle with the queues, or to walk twenty minutes through the rain to the butchers.

I may go and ring Virgin now. I got more worthwhile interaction from them in the morning yesterday – in other words, I got to speak to a human being. I didn’t when I tried again in the afternoon – because the guy had said ‘try this and if it doesn’t show any improvement in a couple of hours, call back’. Yeah, right. I tried calling back again around four, and got lost in that awful endless loop of listening to options and pressing buttons, then snagged on the request to enter characters from a password that presumably I was told five and a half years ago but have no recollection of now.

…

I abandoned writing, and went to call again. When it asked for the password, I sat and held the phone until it gave up waiting and transferred me to a young woman whose job presumably was to be shouted and sworn at by angry old women (or was this morning, at any rate). She said she’d send me an email with a link to change my password, and handed me over to a young Scottish man who asked for my password. I told him I was waiting for the password reset email, which he told me could take up to five days. I told him I didn’t have five days because if I wanted to cancel the new contract I’d have to do it this week. Then he asked me some security questions, looked at the new contract, compared it to my current usage, asked if I really wanted the features I’d never used, and managed to reduce it by £20, which made it less than my previous contract. He also said that I can get boosters online, but they are introducing new ones in January.

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Choices

For the second day running I have not gone to the beach for sunrise and then wished I had when it was too late. I was awake in plenty of time, then just lay there, and then read for a bit, and I had an idea for a poem, and when I got up I wrote it on the laptop (but don’t feel like I want to share it at the moment). I did it in Open Office, which reminded me that there are many features from Word which are missing from OO, but at least it works and I’ll be able to write in cafes or other places – come such time as I can do that again, which hopefully will return.

I should go out. I mean, I really should go out somewhere, the sun is shining today, I could walk to the beach and maybe get a take-away bacon butty somewhere. Yesterday I didn’t go out at all, or Sunday, only Saturday when I went to the shop. I know it’s not healthy to sit indoors all the time, and the weather is no excuse at the moment, but somehow… In normal times I would go out for breakfast just as motivation to get myself out of the door. In the summer I ate my breakfast in the garden most days, and stayed sitting out there with my crochet, which is better than never leaving the house.

I’ve been reading two books in parallel, one on the Kindle and one in print. After my conversation with the lady in the local bookshop just before lockdown, I felt quite ashamed of myself for continuing to support Amazon by having everything on Kindle, but it is so much more convenient. I’ve now compromised by deciding I will read from the Kindle in bed and proper books when I’m sitting. One of the big advantages of the Kindle is being able to adjust the size of the font. I have so many books that I’ve never read – mostly picked up second-hand – and I worry that my eyesight will go before I’ve read most of them. And of course I spend a lot of time listening to readings and dramas on the radio, so that I can knit or crochet at the same time.

The two books I’m currently reading both have subjects that sound quite dry – one about the history of the Hapsburg Empire (‘Danubia’ by Simon Winder – paperback) and one about DH Lawrence (‘Out of Sheer Rage’ by Geoff Dyer – Kindle) but they’re both written with such wit and humour that they’re great fun  – I think so, anyway. I’ve mentioned the Dyer one before, about how he keeps writing about how he can’t write this book. The bit I was reading this morning was about regret, and how he shares with Lawrence the knowledge that whatever choices he makes, he knows he will regret not doing the opposite. I don’t think I’m that bad.