September

Well, what have I been up to.? Both Olivier and then Dom and J-M came to visit. Dom and J-M are now living in the UK and Dom has started work. She also went off to a conference in Malta at the beginning of the month. She said that the weather was very hot over there.

Olivier popped home for a weekend as there is a holiday mid-August. He seems to be happy and this year his sessions at university will be 4 weeks long alternated with work for 4 weeks.

Christian, who I’m unsuccessfully trying to call Chris, helped me to install Windows 10. He used team viewer to take over my computer. I’m used to Window’s 10 now – it’s not much different to Windows 7. Mahjong and Spider Solitaire aren’t there anymore. All my scores over the last 4 years have been lost. There is Spider Solitaire, but it’s not the same. I’ve managed to find the original Shanghai Dynasty Mahjong that I used to play. I need a bigger version nowadays so that I can see the pattern on the tiles.

All of a sudden the weather has turned Septemberish. We still have lovely sunny days, but with very cold mornings. The washing doesn’t dry in a couple of hours outside anymore.

 Some blue sky for you, taken in the last week of August. Even the leaves aren’t as green now…

Coming up next... Christmas!

Not long to go now.  I put the Christmas decorations up last Tuesday and even if I say so myself; they're looking good.

Dom and J-M will be coming for Christmas with Holly the cat.  Olivier might be coming.  He will have to spend a lot of time and money on trains so he must decide if it's worth it.  He's at work on the 26th.  Rob will be working on the 26th too.  We still find the idea strange, even after 30 years.

When I was teaching at the language school years ago.  I had a lesson at 7.30 in the morning on the 26th December.  My student didn't show.  It turned out she was very ill on Christmas day and tried to contact the school, leaving a message on the answer phone in the office which was locked.  I managed to get the next bus home after waiting around for half an hour.  The sun still hadn't risen by the time I got back!

I haven't been blogging much, or visiting.  Rob is borrowing my laptop most evenings as his is very slow.  hopefully we will be reorganised in a couple of weeks - a friend is fixing his old laptop.

The Christmas post

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Rob’s computer died on him, so as we were sharing I didn’t have time to wish everyone a Happy Christmas. I even had a postcard ready to scan to illustrate my post. It will keep now until next year.

We had a lovely Christmas, Olivier, Dom and J-M were here with us and I spoke to Christian on the phone. Dom and J-M left on Boxing Day to finish preparations for their wedding.

As the blogging world works upside down, if you are reading this you’ve already read the wedding post!

Dream time

Rob’s computer died on him last weekend, so we’ve been sharing – he’s also had a few days holiday, so I haven’t had the time on my computer at all. Our postcard business has to come first. We have managed to have some fun just the same. Christmas shopping, going to see the lights in town one evening, walks between downfalls and generally getting ready for Christmas. The presents are all bought and now need wrapping up.

I thought I’d better post as I had a rather strange dream about blogging last night: I was reading a cookery blog, which came by post in the form of a magazine. The problem was that the pictures were taking a long time to download. When they did they were like videos. The blogger was making whipped egg white with canned peach slices. The slices were very small and fragile and a lovely orange which went well with the egg white.

Funnily enough, I knew exactly why I’d had this dream as soon as I woke up. The Saturday supplement which comes with our newspaper was running a feature on a French blogger who writes a cookery blog and takes lots of photographs of everything she makes. The white whipped egg white came from some eye shadow I received in my latest Glossy Box. It was described as mousse and is white, when applied to the skin it gives a golden sparkle. (Will go very nicely with my little black dress on New Year’s Eve – not).

I wonder what peaches and egg white would be like…

It’s Red Bull time again

For the third year in a row, the Red Bull cliff diving event will be held on Saturday in La Rochelle. The divers will dive from the top of the St Nicolas Tower. Both Rob and Olivier have extra hours, being around while everything is set up in the evening after the tourists have left. Rob got home at 2 the other morning. We’re still tired! No exclusive pics I’m afraid, everything is strictly controlled and copywrite.

Dom and J-M came for the weekend. Dom has had her hair cut to celebrate the end of her master’s years. She looks like Meg Ryan in ‘You’ve got mail’, especially when she runs around the house in her jim-jams. In September she starts her Doctorate, she’s managed to sort out her funding without too much trouble (but a lot of stress). We had a great time. We went to a brocante (boot sale/ garage sale) and found some interesting bargains.

Yes, I now have my very own laptop and it has a web cam (don’t they all?) so I might do a vlog one of these fine days. Just have to wait until there is no one at home…

Changes

Our AOL box died on us in the early hours of last Friday morning. It was so frustrating, so many things to do with no internet. I worked offline as much as I could, but I do a lot of research too, so I was pulling my hair out by the end of the day.

Dom and J-M arrived that eveing and he was on his phone straight away trying to sort it out. Would you believe his call was answered immediately. It seems the box was at fault. On Saturday, Rob went out and bought us a 3G key (I’m not sure what you call it in English). This gets the internet out of fresh air as far as I’m concerned. The only problem at the moment is that the key is only on one computer at a time. It is also very slow. Rob is going to buy a box so that 5 computers can benefit from the key at the same time.

I wouldn’t have thought it but I was suffering from severe internet withdrawal symptoms most of last Friday and Saturday.

Another week skids by on the ice rink of time

After getting wet and frozen on a visit to the next town for an auction. last weekend was spent in the company of Dom and J-M. Dom has decided that she wants to study more about artificial intelligence – does the name Susan Calvin ring a bell?

On Wednesday I did something really stupid. I couldn’t get online. I was really pulling my hair out. Fortunately Rob had a half day and when he got home and couldn’t get online either. He telephoned one of his colleagues who is geeky. He told Rob to try pulling out the plug and putting it back in again. It worked – why didn’t I think of that? We’re still suffering from very poor internet connection, nothing to do with that though

Yesterday was the day that we woke up to snow. No school for the children and no buses. It was nice to walk through the village and, because of the snow, to see everyone enjoying themselves. It started to thaw out pretty quickly and now we have nasty frozen, half melted snow.

Warning - Don't follow me!

Last week I received an email supposedly from my sister. A company called Feed Share was asking me to follow her. There were ‘yes’ and ‘no’ buttons and it said that I could choose to follow or not but I must click. I didn't like the way it told me I MUST click on 'yes' or 'no', so I Googled it and discovered that it was a virus.

I wrote to my sister who already knew about it via other friends who had been victims. Her sons dealt with it as they are both in the computer business. The part that is worrying me a bit is that she said she didn’t click but she opened the mail. I hope that no one has received an email from me inviting them to follow me on Feed Share. I don’t like those kind of things anyway.

Over the last couple of days I’ve turned on my computer twice to find that it’s gone back to the beginning, as it were. I’ve been invited to take a tour an find out how to set up the computer as I’d like it. Fortunately I’ve turned it off and left it for a few minutes and everything is back again. Anyone any ideas as to why it should do that?

I’ve posted some history that I’ve recently learned about the occupation of the village on Still Learning. I thought it was important to write it down as quickly as possible so that it’s preserved. I hope that you find it as interesting as I did.

(M)cAfee break

I was just writing a comment on a forum on Wednesday evening at 9 o’clock when I was told that the system was closing in a minute and the seconds started counting down. Of course I panicked and tried to open Word in order to save my comment and close down both AOL and Firefox – impossible within 40 seconds. It was impossible to hide from Rob that I had a problem and he accused me of going where I shouldn’t and letting in a virus. Half an hour later his laptop went through the same. (Na, na! ) Try as we could there was no way we could get back online, the scanner had disappeared and we could do nothing to correct the problem. I sent Dom the names of some files in a text message to check on Google that they weren’t viruses. I think that she was probably asleep as it was getting close to midnight.

Rob and I are opposites; he was sure we wouldn’t be able to carry on our business on eBay and I went to sleep positive that a good night’s rest would mend the computer problems. We were both wrong. I could use Word the next day, but I couldn’t copy and paste, so I could still prepare the descriptions of postcards for sale and record them onto Rob’s key. Rob could then put the descriptions online at the cyber café. What to do about the scans we just didn’t know. Olivier phoned as I’d sent him a text warning him not to bring his laptop home as we had a virus. I explained what had happened and he looked the symptoms up on Google. Apparently McAfee sent out an update which took something in Windows as a virus and put it into quarantine. I don’t know about your country, but in France McAfee are used by hospitals and universities, so you can imagine the chaos.

When Rob arrived home on Thursday evening we set about starting to re-install XP. This was another problem because our computer was more up to date than the original discs. We decided that we’d get someone to clear off the computer and we’d start again.

Olivier arrived home on Friday lunchtime ready for battle. Using his laptop, he could get online. French websites are useless; very pretty to look at and that is all. The link to the solution to the problem went nowhere. We both thought of looking at forums and he found exactly what he wanted. Rob’s laptop was easier to fix than the main computer but after three hours we were back in action.

All I have to fix now is the media thing so that I can listen to my music again - and would you believe that Deezer France was out of action this morning?…

Dark and gloomy and a glimmer of hope.

As the roads of France are blocked with cars either coming or going on holiday it is a very dark and dull Sunday morning. Dom went to the mountains with her boyfriend mid-week. They went on the night train which reminded me one of my favourite Alfred Hitchcock films; North by Northwest. I wonder if she managed to sleep?

Talking of sleep, or lack of it, none of us slept very well last night. Rob got up at five to start work on the postcards. He sent off an email for confirmation of an auction we’re interested in and our ‘expert’ replied almost straight away (someone else who had difficulty sleeping perhaps?) Olivier got in at 5 too and when I got up myself just before 7 I could hear his TV so I went in to turn it off and he was awake and watching the news. He’s got to get up at 10.30 to got to work – I can see we’re in for a struggle this morning.

On Friday evening I got a message from Google every time I tried to visit a blogspot blog using Firefox. It told me that my computer was sending out multiple requests. When I tried using AOL (or whatever it is called nowadays) I had no problems. Yesterday morning I managed to pick up three Trojan horses – there seem to be a lot of problems around at the moment.

Finally on a feel good note, I’m linking to a YouTube video as I don’t like to put up screens in every post. A dog rescuing another dog. You might have seen it already. Am I loony for saying it restores your faith in human nature when you see something nice like this happening.?

Computers and Postcards

We had no internet for most of yesterday afternoon. There were so many ‘things to do’. Now I’ve discovered the new widget where blogs that are updated come to the top I’d like to put everyone onto that and show the top five. I’d keep the ordinary blogroll too. On my other blogs I’d do the same with the blogs that were relevant to them.

We’ve been digging through our ‘put to one side’ stock. Rob had the idea of selling lots of 50 postcards. So far we’ve come up with two good lots. We’ve also found some gems which we overlooked in the past because of lack of experience. That gave me something to do away from the computer.

Someone is selling a lot of 100,000 postcards on eBay (yes, one hundred thousand). We’d love to have them, the starting price is only 14,000€. It is, in fact, a bargain at only 14 cents a card. It's fortunate that we can’t afford them as we haven’t got the space to store them. I think we’ve got around 20,000 postcards at the moment, which is just about manageable.

Where have I been?

Last week was very busy for us. Wednesday was auction day so we went to the viewing in the morning and stayed in town for lunch. To kill time we went for a walk along the port to the marina. We walked on top of the wall and it was windy and sunny. On the way back I walked along the side so now I have a half red nose. The auction went very well for us and we came home with nearly 2000 really interesting postcards. Thursday was spent catching up with Wednesday and sorting out cards.

On Friday morning we headed for Poitiers to collect Dom and all of her belongings. She’s been looking at apartments. She’s seen a really nice one right in the middle of Poitiers. I hope she can have it, though it will stretch her budget. If she does move in there it will mean she’s really left home. Still, it will be a good excuse to visit Poitiers which is a beautiful old town. Needless to say I’ve had a lot of washing to do over the last few days.

The plug of the adapter of Rob’s laptop started to make noises. When I tested it in the kitchen it really sparked. Rob phoned up the company, Packard bell, and they found him another adapter. His Laptop doesn’t exist anymore and it’s only 11 months old. All the pictures on the site showed the adaptors complete with plug. The adaptor arrived without a plug. The people at Packard Bell were very helpful but kept disappearing for at least 15 minutes every time Rob phoned. Olivier discovered the CD player plug fits, now he’s not happy. We haven’t found another plug anywhere else. Sharing a computer has been hard as both Rob and I usually work on two computers. Needless to say I always come second…

What Anji Did Next

Rob was using the computer on Friday afternoon when there was a bang and the smell of burning. The fuse blew too. On Saturday morning we took it back to after sales as it was still under guarantee. Hopefully we should have it back in two weeks. Please, please, please let the memory be okay. I’ve got so much stuff stored on it, pages and pages of writing. I always meant to record it onto a disc but never got round to it. Now I’m struggling on a laptop. I know I’ll get used to it but….


There goes my fridge

What Anji Did

Rob was on holiday last week so I didn’t get near the computer. The bar on my fridge broke off so now I can’t store any bottles or boxes in the door (the first bar broke off about 18 months ago). The fridge is over 20 years old and the ice box door broke off within the first few moths of the life of the fridge. It hasn’t had a door handle for ten years. We planned to buy a new fridge next month – at long last!