I am online again.
This post has been brought to you by the kindly donations of Numbers One, Two and Three Daughters, who have stepped into the breach and rescued me from the consequences of my general lack of organisation and available funds. I am so guiltily grateful for this I can hardly think about it.
My thrilling new iPad arrived this afternoon, and I cannot begin to say how magnificent it is. The colours seem to be brighter, somehow. Everything is sharper and clearer, and the screen is so glossily smooth to the touch I can hardly bear to type on it in case I spoil it. It is just like the old one, except that it is not accidentally bent into an odd shape, and the broken corner is not there.
I spent a very contented half an hour this afternoon, loading all of my things into it. I am not very good at computers, and so I had to look a lot of things up on the mighty Internet, starting with how to switch it on. My old one was never switched off, and I had forgotten what you were supposed to do. It turns out that there is a handy switch on the side, just in case anybody else was wondering.
In consequence of this ignorance I had an interesting interlude spent watching clever young men with American accents explaining things on YouTube. I learned so much that I have done lots of useful things with the new computer that I could not do with the old one. All the little pictures on the front can be wiggled about and moved to somewhere more convenient.
I played with this for ages, it is a bit like a Rubik cube. When you move one they all move, and you have got to plan quite carefully to get things to where you want them to be. I have got a picture of the camper van on the lock screen, and a picture of the lake on the wiggly picture screen, and I am feeling very much at home.
I am sorry that you were sold short yesterday. You missed all sorts of exciting events, like the frantic attempt to get the camper can through the MOT, which saw us flapping around Windermere at half past one in the morning after work, trying to dry the headlights out with a hairdryer. You missed the bottle of hand cream exploding in the microwave. This is too long a story to be included here, but I would like to offer another in my occasional series of Housewifely Tips.
Do not put hand cream in the microwave. It explodes.
I can no longer use the microwave for ordinary things like warming up bread. Despite an intensive and sweary cleaning up attempt, the microwave still smells of patchouli and bergamot, and this is not a good thing with which to flavour toast.
Mark laughed a great deal when I told him about it and thinks that some of the hand cream has probably gone down the vent inside the microwave. He says that he will take it apart and clean it for me when he gets some time, but that might not be for a little while because of rural broadband and driving taxis. Until then, if I want to microwave anything it has got to have a lid on it.
I will conclude by telling you about some changes that are coming to these pages.
At least I think they are coming to these pages, this is entirely dependent on my having correctly followed the instructions. The instructions took some following, I can tell you, they said things like: Paste the HTML code in the <body after the URL of your website.
It might as well have said: flobber the jingly shenanigans with your left ankle, it would have made just as much sense. It took me ages. In the end I discovered a page called: How To Edit Your Webpage If You Are A Complete Idiot, and although I am no nearer understanding, I think I might have got it right.
It occurred to me that there is no point in putting a massive effort into these pages and then having to be bailed out by my children when something goes wrong. This seems to me to be evidence of a massively rubbish business strategy.
My diary is not a business, but perhaps it can go some way towards meeting its own costs.
I am going to put some adverts on the pages.
I never wanted to do this because I always felt that it gave advertisers some kind of say over the things that I wrote, but these are Google advertisements. Before they put adverts on them, Google wishes to examine these pages and consider the wisdom contained therein. They have issued warnings that the content Must Not Be Wicked, but apart from that they don’t seem to mind.
I don’t think it is especially wicked anyway. It would be more interesting if it was.
They will be at the side of the page. Every time somebody likes the look of one, and clicks on it, I will get some money. Probably not very much money, but every little helps. Please click on them a lot, especially coming up to Christmas.
In fact I am quite excited about it, it will be rather splendid to see this as a business project.
Watch this space.
The picture is some letters that arrived this morning, which was a small happiness. There is a letter from Ritalin Boy and a postcard from Number Two Daughter. I need not tell you that I was very pleased to get both.
Communication is a marvellous thing.
