Sunday, October 27, 2013

Death of a million Hamsters

As anyone who uses iGoogle knows, it will be closing down in a few days. All over the internet there are people like me worrying about their pet hamster. Mine is purple and called Jupiter. She’s lovely and I’m going to be very upset when the plug is pulled out.

Jupiter was invented by a very nice person called Adam Bowman who has shared his work with millions of people over the years.

I've created a new home page using NetVibes.com   It’s not the same, but I will make it into my home very soon. Fortunately, Mr. Bowman has made a new hamster to live in the NetVibes home page and you don’t have to fiddle with code like I did for hours and hours and get nowhere. On your NetVibes page there is a button in the top left hand corner called “Add”, click on that and type hamster into the search box that appears. There is a choice of hamsters, click on ‘hamster widget’ and you can follow the instructions to put your hamster on the page. I haven’t found a way to change the colour so I have a pale grey Jupiter this time.

How else would my computer get the electricity to work on?

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Houses and stories

Today I updated all of my blogs! Some of them have been really neglected of late.

The main events of the last few weeks are having to continue antibiotics for a few more weeks. Fortunately, I only need one dose of orange flavoured power in water once a week. (and)  More pleasantly, we helped Dom and J-M move into their new house. It’s rather cutting edge, built to be ecologically kind and has solar panels and super dooper insulation. It was built this year. They have their own bathroom off the master bedroom. They were looking to rent an older house (including an old mill, but the ceilings were too low). Just goes to show, you never know what might turn up. J-M’s mother, brother and a friend as well as Olivier were helping too and Dom and J-M took us to a very good restaurant in Poitiers for lunch as a thank you.

All of a sudden it is autumn. The weather has changed, the leaves are falling and it’s becoming much darker in the mornings and evenings. I don’t know why this year a feel quite sad that the year is drawing to a close. We’ve had a good year and managed to fit in three visits to the UK.

If you’re interested; I updated my official writing blog with the next chapter of a longer story and I’ve started a new short story on my ‘culture’ blog. Inspiration is not flowing from me - I wrote both of the stories 3 or 4 years ago.