Harvest Home

We went to the allotment yesterday, for the first time after a week away in Purbeck, and found that the summer harvest season is now in full swing. Pictured is the head gardener, Cde J Hanna, with yesterday's haul: a bag of red orache, a bag of parsley, a bag of lavender, three tubs of strawberries, two tubs of raspberries, and two of blackcurrants. And a vase of red roses to keep them company.

Last photos for today

Murder Mystery Party II - Gangster Theme !

One more..

Playing in the sand at little beach

And wait... there's more

Grandma in the workshop
Connor doing clean
and Dan drawing

(not necessarily in that order)

More photos

More photos from Albany - this time from the rodeo themed Murder Mystery dinner!

Photos

Well - finally got around to downloading the photos on my camera.
Here are a few for you..

First photos are of the kids at the Albany rodeo in January - it's official dirt makes your eyes sparkle!!
The last is of Mum and Bindi in the Albany house.

Purbeck Again

We're off to Purbeck again on Saturday, for another week of country walking and/or reading in the caravan at Swanage while waiting for the weather to clear. We have a number of walks already planned, to fill in (some of) the gaps left over from last summer: across the heath at Studland (with possibly a quick peek at the naturist beach because, *coff coff*, one just can't resist the lure of naked flesh -- or, more likely, naked flabby bodies); from Kingston around the Kimmeridge Levels and back via the viewpoint at Swyre Head; along the Wareham Forest Way to Sturminster Marshall (or, more likely, back from Sturminster Marshall; there's a bus service, but since the service runs via Poole it will clearly be preferable to start from there rather than finish there); and a visit to the town museum at Wareham, which caught us out last time by closing at 4.00pm, just as we'd finished our walk around the walls of the Saxon settlement and had an hour to wait for the bus back to Swanage. Plus the walks we really want to do: on the Purbeck Hills west of Corfe Castle, or as close as one can get to the military ranges; and to Corfe Castle from Swanage, across the downs in the morning sunshine. And if that last works out correctly, when we reach the brow of Challow Hill, with the castle below us, we'll sit ourselves down with our lunchtime sandwiches, and Judith will sketch and paint while I read, and we'll both watch the hares in the fields below and the kestrels in the sky above, and we'll know that no matter how many times we return we will never have "done" Purbeck.

That Didn't Last Long....

I wrote only a few days ago how I had upgraded to a spiffy new HP laptop running Windows 7 with all kinds of media facilities. It's a lovely little machine, but had one problem: I couldn't get e-mail to work on it. Not my legacy Eudora running in compatibility mode, not the beta test version of Eudora for Windows 7, not Mozilla Thunderbird, not even the Windows Live Mail that had been pre-installed on the machine. All failed, in one way or another, to connect to my ISP -- they could neither download e-mail ("connection timed out" -- "connection refused" -- "connection closed by foreign host") nor send it ("550 relay not permitted" -- "application refused (10061)" -- "RCTP rejected"). (Although, interestingly, I could connect to the web using Mozilla Firefox, using exactly the same settings as on my old desktop machine -- as I was attempting to use the settings from the dekstop PC for e-mail.) On the advice of the vendors, I downloaded a utility (Norton Removal Tool) to remove a pre-installed antivirus program which might have been gumming up the works; but this was of no avail. I couldn't even use Windows' system restore facility to return the machine to an earlier state (before I tried to install any e-mail application and might have buggered the underlying settings): that repeatedly closed without completing because "an application such as anti-virus might be running -- please disable the anti-virus and try again". That a basic Windows utility such as that didn't work suggested fairly strongly that the chief source of the problems was the machine itself.

So I finally gave up. I removed from the laptop everything I'd put on it -- music, photographs, desktop images, spreadsheets, other documents, the web-editing and other applications -- and returned it for a refund. That took a little bit of argument, since of course any vendor is reluctant to cancel a sale, but the fact that the thing couldn't be brought up to full functionality and was therefore No Damn Use was in the end fairly unanswerable.

So now I'm back to my old, slow desktop PC running Windows XP on a five or six-year-old processor and less than a Gb of RAM, with no fancy media facilities. On the other hand, it does have a TFT screen and wireless broadband, and it does everything for which I actually use a computer -- especially the sending and receiving of e-mail. Given the struggles I had getting the laptop to do something as apparently simple as that, I think it will be many more years before I again contemplate replacing my PC.

Upgraderate! Upgraderate!

My desktop PC was bought in 2005 -- or was it 2004? Anyway, it's obviously an antique in computer terms: although it still runs all my most-used applications, the Service Pack and other bloatware upgrades to which Windows XP has been subject over the means that for at least the past year it has been loading and running with what seems glacial slowness. I can of course use the jolly old Ctrl-Alt-Delete shortcut to access the list of stuff that loads on start-up and terminate all manner of rubbish lurking around waiting to access the internet when I don't want it to, but the Windows system itself is obviously creaking under the strain -- the processor isn't fast enough, there is insufficient RAM available for the swap files the applications need, there are periods when the hard drive churns continuously away without actually doing anything (if you leave the PC alone for any reasonable length of time it takes ages to awake from hibernation), et bloody cetera. Yet I didn't want to upgrade, because buying anything new would mean getting something bundled with Windows 7, which -- like any other new Microsoft product -- is still being tested on the customer and has yet to have its Service Pack 1 released to fix the bugs and patch the security holes.

You can guess what's coming next, can't you?

Last Friday, after several days of e-mail outage -- which I thought might be because my years-old installation of Eudora had finally reached the end of its operating life, but subsequently proved to be the result of server problems with my ISP -- I went to PC World in Tottenham Hale on the way home from werk and had a browse of their available laptops. Quite an expensive browse, as it turned out: I spent £639 on an Hewlett-Packard Pavilion dv6-2113sa Notebook running Windows 7, a model I chose because of its 500 Gb hard drive, 15.6-inch display, 4 Gb of RAM, fast graphics card, and lotsanlots of peripheral ports for Other Stuff like printers, bigger monitors, mice, external keyboards, back-up drives, etc. etc.. (Christ, don't I sound like a geek.)

And because Windows 7 is a new operating system, all of the organising features of Windows XP that I had come to regard as intuitive parts of my computer use have been junked, requiring users to learn how to use the machine all over again. *!$%£&!* Microsoft!

I squandered huge chunks of the weekend hacking through what felt like a counter-intuitive user interface and getting the thing partially set up for my use, chiefly downloading and installing the non-Microsoft applications that I prefer, and inevitably finding that (since Windows 7 is a 64-bit operating system and all previous Windows are 32-bit) some of them didn't work, even when I'd found the backwards compatibility option lurking in the depths of what used to be called the Control Panel (and is now called -- yeuch -- the Action Center). So I have my web-building program; but not the FTP application to actually upload pages to websites. I have my MP3 music library; but not the player used to rip CDs to MP3 format. Other issues were that although I could install the Microsoft Works Suite that I'd had on the desktop PC, it wouldn't import the spreadsheets I'd created thereon under Lotus 1-2-3 (probably my own fault for sticking with that superseded application because I'd got used to it instead of making the leap to Works' Excel-lite version, but still a bugger to have to copy-type them from the PC's screen).

On the other hand, I do have this spiffy, fast new laptop which doesn't weigh a ton, has a clean, attractive TFT display, an inbuilt webcam and (gasp!) Skype which appears to have either set itself up or which I appear to have set up without realising it, which means that I can now talk to real people over the internet and see how ghastly they are for myself instead of having to guess. And of course I can now do really wanky look-at-me-I'm-a-poser things like web the surf while sitting in pavement cafes or watch DVDs on long train journeys. Bloody hell, I may even take the thing on holiday to Purbeck with me in a couple of weeks, so that I can download and organise my photographs each day instead of waiting until we return. Heigh-ho!

Bank Holiday Weekend (part 2)

As prefigured in my previous post, I now have photographs of Exmouth to show you.

The town was a working port for much of its life -- full details of its history can be found in its Wikipedia entry; it also has its own website -- but changed direction to become more of a resort with the coming of the railway, which linked the villages along both banks of the Exe Estuary with Exeter and in due course changed them all into part of Exeter's commuter belt. A train journey down the east bank of the estuary is both v picturesque and an opportunity for close-up views of some serious money (apart from Lympstone Commando training centre, which is surrounded by razor wire fencing and the platform for which sports large unfriendly signs warning that one should only disembark from the train if one has business at the camp).

We went to Exmouth because we wanted to visit the bird reserves -- i.e., the sand banks which bar the mouth of the estuary and the mud flats which become visible when the tide goes out -- but because it was late spring there weren't a great many birds to see: the best time to visit is probably the winter, when many species will have moved down from the Arctic for the duration, or in early spring and late autumn, when many migratory species will be passing through. So instead we had to content ourselves with a walk along the front to the obelisk on the cliff at Orcombe Point east of the town which marks the western end of the Jurassic Coast world heritage area, and then a walk back, stopping off at the model railway (claimed to be the largest in the world) and a car boot sale at which The Wugster hoovered up some cheap jewellery (and would probably have bought Even More Stuff if I hadn't intervened).

A walk along Exmouth's sea front indicates that, like Caesar's Gaul, it is divided into three parts. The eastern section -- the largest section -- is the grocklerama, with stalls (thankfully not many) vending chips and fish to pasty, pudgy people from oop north and their horrible snot-streaked children playing on the sand with their buckets and spades and throwing frisbees for their dogs, with an admixture of size 00 teenage gels with dyed blonde straightened hair and the peculiarly vacant expressions so typical of those who appear to have been surgically welded to their iPods, not to mention their horrible gangly concave-chested shaven-headed boyfriends in scruffy vomit-coloured "shorts" hanging low off their bottoms displaying their manky underwear what a repellent sight it is such dressage would never have been tolerated in my day a few years in the Army would do them a power of good or better yet gas the lot of them and pulp the bodies for use as fertiliser 3 vols surplus rant omitted at this point. The middle section -- the smallest section -- is the refined but slightly decayed Victorian/Edwardian bit: a terrace of three- and four-storey private hotels, with occasional private houses of a similar mien and a hostelry of an obviously reserved kind, set back from the street in its own private garden, with a noticeboard listing forthcoming musical evenings of a type clearly designed to turn away the riff-raff who infest the eastern section. The third section -- the western and most modern section -- is set around what was once the harbour and is now the marina: rank upon rank of nautical-themed po-mo blocks with occasional banners shouting APARTMENTS FOR SALE in letters of an urgency which suggests that the blocks were constructed or came onto the market (were "released", in estate agents' jargon) at around the time the financial crisis of 2008 engulfed the world economy, meaning that the people who bought apartments around then must now be sitting on or in something that's worth half or less than the gigantic mortgage they took out (ho ho ho) and/or that the companies which built the things are now struggling to stave off administration or even insolvency and the consequent fire sale of the po-mo blocks for two-fifths of next to nothing (ho ho ho).

Some pictures follow -- The Wugster leaning against the obelisk which marks the western end of the Jurassic Coast; part of the 250 million-year-old Triassic red sandstone formation at Orcombe Point, the oldest part of the Jurassic Coast; donkeys on the grocklerama part of the beach; one of the many blue plaques scattered through the town drawing attention to its historic links and features (there's a blue plaque walking trail, but we didn't have time to follow it); and a panorama of the Exe Estuary at low tide (it was on the turn as we were leaving).

Bank Holiday Weekend (Part 1)

This weekend just past was the late spring public holiday weekend -- meaning that offices closed on the Monday (as well as for the weekend) but everyone else had to work, especially if they're self-employed, or toil in tourism and retail). Judith and I, being civil servants, also had the Tuesday off as a "privilege day", meaning that that we send loyal greetings to Brenda for being a spiffing monarch (etc. etc.) and she graciously gives us an extra day's paid holiday in thanks. (Go on -- complain to your MP.)

It being a bank holiday weekend, the weather of course turned nasty -- cold and wet on the Saturday, a modicum of sunshine on the Sunday and Monday, cold and wet again the Tuesday. We spent most of the weekend with my parents in Lyme Regis, either toiling on "the world's smallest jigsaw puzzle" when it was too wet to go out, or -- when it was much more clement -- engaging in a leisurely stroll through the countryside around Uplyme and then down into town along the River Lim for tea and buns at the new restaurant at the restored Town Mill.

Below are some photographs. The first two are of "the world's smallest jigsaw puzzle", or as much of it as we managed to do before we had to pack up and come home on Tuesday morning (each piece is one-quarter of the size of a normal jigsaw piece, and there are one thousand of them; the completed puzzle would be about the same size as a normal-sized 500-piece puzzle); the second two are of Judith sketching during a break in our walk through the Uplyme countryside and an image of the Woodland Trust wood above the village that she was sketching (the light reflections off the paper mean that the drawing unfortunately wasn't visible to the camera); and, finally, of our afternoon tea at the Town Mill. I had a barmbrack cake with a Dorset cheese; and Judith had a meringue with cream that was at least half the size of her head. (Duuude!)

On Monday, we went to Exmouth for the day, to visit the western end of the Jurassic Coast world heritage site and to see the birds in the estuary. But I'll post photographs of that tomorrow.

Sunny Afternoon

As Ms Wuggle has indicated in her post of a few hours previously, we are not now intending to visit Australia this September. We had intended to come over for the World SF Convention in Melbourne -- only the fourth time the Worldcon has been held in Australia -- over the first weekend of the month, which would have provided an opportunity to meet up with lots of people we haven't seen for some years before going on to family-related stuff in the rest of the month; but, as Judith has related, the family-related stuff has fallen through one item after the other, leaving only the Worldcon. Which unfortunately isn't enough of a draw on its own.

Not visiting Australia in September, but deferring a visit until April next year, removes quite a lot of pressure in a number of areas. For one thing, it means that I won't be using my entire annual leave allowance in this calendar year, and will be able to carry an unused portion forward into the next. For another, inevitable slippages in the timetables for the various pieces of legislation that I'm shepherding through -- coupled with uncertainty about how the new government wants to see things done -- means that my absence in September could have been a bit awkward. For a third, we won't be absent during the first part of the harvest season in the garden and on the allotment, so can both rethink our planting plans and not have to worry about tasking someone else to look after the weeding and watering duties.

But, speaking of gardening: today was bright and warm; utterly cloudless (until early evening, when a thin skein blew in from the west -- and carried straight on; the night sky is a clear dark blue) and with temperatures several degrees above those normal for this time of year. A bit oppressive for Ms Wuggle (she says -- even though she grew up in the tropics) but just dandy from my perspective (I strip down to next to nothing and stretch out to "toast my buns", as we say here).

I also took a few photographs, which are below.

Change of plans

Things just weren't working out for popping down to see y'all around the SF Worldcon in Sep '10 -- so we have decided to save up our long holiday allowance and pennies to come over next April for kellie's matrimonial do -- when Leith and Jule's new baby should be available to say hello to and they should be settled down in one spot; when Z&P should be at home in Sydney for us to visit their new extended house (well, new to us); when Ros is clear of her final teacher training demands, and when Maureen isn't having to settle a new maternity leave person into her team at work. Not to mention volcanic ash randomly grounding flights and predictions of another eruption next door. Fingers crossed everything will work out better for a visit then!And we might be able to do a bit more catching up with Z,P and co while they're up this part of the world.

So -- us hanging about not getting around to actually booking flight tickets or Melbourne hotel all turns out to have been the most sensible strategy in the end.

Meanwhile, in these parts -- fine hot sunny weekend. Lots of gardening for me and DIY for JN. I've just planted 5 tomato plants out in the back garden (Gardeners Delight (2, red cherry toms), Tigerella (stripy yellow/red), Black Plum, Big Rainbow, and planted basil around their feet. I'm re-working the next door front garden I look after. It had climbers around the walls and fence (jasmine, virginia creeper henryana) but they'd got out of hand -- so have been all ripped out (though no doubt bits will have escaped to re-sprout). I've put in a deep velvety red William Shakespeare rose which is supposed to have a very strong real old-fashioned rose scent, and a stripy red-and-white Rosa Mundia against the front fence, with various pretty flowers going in below them.

Lots of flowers doing their stuff: end of forget-me-not season, foxgloves and roses just coming out, columbines, mourning widow, sweet cicely in full swing. Swifts arrived back from Africa last week -- just in time for the 'aerial plankton' of aphids that they feed on. And 'Springwatch' programmes start up for the next couple of weeks on TV, with cameras watching baby birds hatching. We just had the first fluffy baby great tit of the year -- sitting on the fence quivering its wings to be fed by its mum/dad. Aaahhh!

Hi - there

Just a quick post before zipping off to Uni.
Everything here is ticking along as normal. Kids zooming to and from school and then to sporting or social engagements. Mark is back home - not sure for how long - but we will enjoy him while we have him back.
The weather is sunny - as usual for Perth - it would probably be good to get some rain soon though.
Uni is busy - learning lots more about teaching maths and social studies and things I thought I would never have to think about again once I left school.
Exams in two weeks, a couple of assignment to complete, then my last long prac. and I have finished - officially a primary teaching (assuming all goes well).
I spoke to Zena on the weekend - and it seems that wedding preparations are in full swing now. Lots of talk of flowers, music, dresses and that sort of thing. All very exciting - but I think if I was getting married again I would just have a party on the beach for whoever wanted to come!
Anyway, best go.
I will have to download some of the hundreds of photos in my camera and post them to the site. Soon...

Pursuing the Cultural Programme

Blimey, but it's a long time since anyone posted anything here! To me, then, falls the, er, "honour" of catching everyone up with what we've been doing....

....except that I can't actually be arsed to trawl back through the past four months looking for the highlights. The rain fell, the sun arrived, the temperature went up, the sun went away again, it got colder, the volcano spewed more ash, und so weiter. Then, just as the gardening was about to swallow us up, Judith and I sat down with our diaries to map out a cultural programme for the next few months, to ensure that we at last get to visit the various places in and around London that we know we wish to see (and which have been on our lists of things to see for, like, totally forever, dude).

First up, a couple of weekends ago was a visit to the Linley Sambourne House and the Leighton House Museum, both in Kensington (follow the links for more information). The former is accessible only by guided tour, which had to be booked in advance and required an early start (on a Sunday); once inside, you realise immediately why only small numbers are allowed in at any one time, because it thoroughly exemplifies the Victorian fashion for filling one's home with unbelievable quantities of clutter. (The amount of dusting that would have been required to keep it all clean, in an age when open coal fires were standard, is perhaps best left to the most overactive of imaginations.) The Leighton House, by contrast, is much larger and airier -- purpose-built by and for the artist Frederic Leighton rather than a redecorated mid-terrace property, and emptier because his sisters (the philistines) sold off much of his art collection after his death. The date of our visit, however, was chosen to fit in with the recent re-opening of the house following its renovation and the lending back of pieces from his collection by the institutions which had bought them. (It must seem rather empty without these displays.)

Then, since we were in the area, we went to see the State Apartments at Kensington Palace, although much of the building is currently closed to the public while it (and its grounds) are refurbished as a full-on "visitor experience" (yeuch) in time for the 2012 Olympics (the quid pro quo presumably being that the tourist dollars hoovered up by the refurbished Palace will be a small recompense for the money squandered on the Games. Hem hum).

The Sunday just past we ventured further west, to see Kew Bridge Steam Museum and Kew Palace. The name of the former is potentially misleading: it has a short stretch of narrow-gauge railway on-site, but the building's origin was as a house for the beam engines which pumped water around Victorian London. The beam engines are still in situ, and have been joined by other steam pumping engines from around the country. On the day of our visit, there was a static display of old fire appliances in the museum forecourt, including (of course) a couple of Victorian-era horse-drawn steam pumps. None of this was of much interest to Judith, so she went off across the river to Kew Gardens ahead of me, leaving me to potter about taking photographs of all and sundry for another hour.

Kew Palace can't be visited independently of the Botanic Gardens, although they require separate tickets; it's a large house rather than a proper palace, and was first opened to the public in 1898. For much of the time we've lived in London, however, it seems to have been closed for one reason or another -- it was closed on my first visit to the Gardens, way back in 1990 -- and for the ten years 1996-2006 was shut entirely for a thoroughgoing restoration, which inter alia has put on display parts of the underlying fabric, showing brick and wood back to the seventeenth century: most interesting. (But the voice-overs from hidden speakers in several of the rooms, by actors pretending to be members of George III's family, are a bit annoying.)

Following the visit to the Palace, we spent a couple of hours meandering about the Gardens, which might have been more enjoyable if it hadn't kept trying to rain. By accident or design, we ended up in the Palm House shortly before the clouds were finally rent asunder, sending people scurrying into shelter in flurries of weatherproof anoraks and inappropriate summer footwear. I was up in the Palm House's gallery taking photographs as the rain started, and one could certainly hear it on the glass -- which, it turns out, has a few leaks here and there.

The journey home required a long wait for a bus, about which the less said the better. But below are some photographs of the Palm House, inside as well as out.