Almost there!

It’s a beautiful day, hey hey… Good morning world! I am feeling positively chipper today despite the grey moody sky and have a list of things as long as my arm to crack on with.

(Incidentally, is it just me or do you also hate ending sentences with a preposition? In my eyes it makes a sentence look unfinished, weak, and a bit needy, like it wants a cuddle. What do you think?)

I also have to say that I’m struggling slightly as my internet connection is pants and my elderly computer is showing signs of early circuit dementia. I am frantically bailing memory hogging applications so I can continue the finishing touches to the novel, but it’s a bit touch and go. I fear this computer will soon have to be retired and start its new life as a dust covered ‘ornament’ adorning the spare room. Somewhere in the spare room (the Spare Room of Doom) is my old iMac computer which cannot even remember its own name. I am terrified of binning it in case identify theft bastards somehow pounce on it in the local dump and manage to chisel out my bank details. They surely would have to be Neo from The Matrix, but in this day and age it’s a legitimate (but paranoid) worry, isn’t it?

The local ‘dump’…I never thought about it before (probably because I thankfully don’t spend much time musing on the word ‘dump’) but it is slightly onomatopoeic, not that it is going to be added to my favourite word list any time soon. I wonder if our local dump has a real name - perhaps something like ‘Neighbourhood Household Refuse Too Big to Get Away with Concealing in a Black Bin Bag’. Although God knows folk around here like to chance their arm – I walked past what looked like half a tree sticking out of a pile of bin bags the other day.

Anyway where was I? Ah yes. Doddery computers. So currently my internet connection is on a drip.



What you can see there is masking tape holding my broadband in place. So if anything looks shonky around here (great word invented by the lovely Kit Courteney) then you know the reason why.

And now I really do have to prise myself away – got two days off real work in order to work my fingers off getting the novel ready. Almost there, folks! In fact, I rather think this weekend will be It. Eek!

And on that happy note – I shall leave you with Abigail and Ginger. I think you can guess which is which!

It’s the Internet, Jim, but not as I knew it

Since I might not be back at my mum’s for long, I decided I didn’t want to sign up for broadband, mainly because of the bother of installing and running cables everywhere that mum can eye suspiciously. So I have gone for a ‘3’ mobile pay-as-you-go internet dongle - and look! Here I am at home, online, and posting to my blog – surely all is well!

Except…

I’m not altogether sure me and my new little dongle buddy are going to get along. It says my connection is HSDPA, which stands for How Slow Does Piddly Attachment go, or something… although to be fair I have been insisting it downloaded the 600 or so emails I had stacked up in the ether waiting for my Inbox to become active again. I also expect it to be able to handle youtube, posting pictures, opening more than two web pages at once, and not choking if I have outlook and photoshop open at the same time. So far my expectations are very high, and the reality is everything is rather s-l-o-w. And since my standard response to slow websites is to click refresh repeatedly, I can see me and the dongle are shortly going to be having words.

But at least for now I can read your blogs, and catch up a little with the outside world without feeling furtive at work. So I’m back, but not at full throttle just yet. Still, its nice to be home!