Second Helpings

The Joys of Technology

I'm always wary of making plans as I know life has a funny habit of getting in the way. I was looking forward to a day at home today, as it's been rather busy these past few weeks and I hoped there would be more time to pursue interests now we're not doing the school run.

Alas. I made my morning cuppa and breakfast and returned to my trusty Mac to check mail and my favourite sites. Normally one mouse click and we're off. This morning several clicks of the mouse and nothing. Black screen, no cursor, a lot of cursing and several attempts at rebooting. Still nothing. I returned downstairs for batteries thinking that might be the problem. No batteries.

I took the batteries from my Wii, my torch, the kid's toys, in fact anything which contained batteries and tried them all in my mouse. Still nothing. I borrowed hubby's mouse to see if that would bring my machine to life, but still nothing. In the process his mouse temporarily stopped working so more cursing from him and I was not popular.

In desperation I set up a phone call with Apple and a very nice Irishman talked me through the problems. He seemed to spend an awful long time checking if I'd changed the batteries or put them in the wrong way round, which irritated me slightly as I don't think even I'm that stupid. By this time I had a message on my screen informing me the computer couldn't find a mouse, so he concluded said mouse was dead and I would either need to take it to a specialist several miles away for repair or buy a new one. Not what I'd had in mind for the day.

Hubby decided to venture out and buy some new batteries, but as I pointed out I'd already tried a dozen and none of them worked. He returned with a pack of batteries, replaced them in the mouse and voila. Lift off.

After sorting mail I thought I'd check Facebook quickly before signing in to WDC. It would just happen that today Facebook had decided to give everyone the opportunity to celebrate their time on the site by creating films. They are really lovely, so there was no way I could ignore almost all my 147 friends who had posted them. By this time it was way past lunchtime and I was still stuck in front of the screen.

The downgrading of my account here is still proving difficult and confusing. I'm now under 500 items in my portfolio, but not sure where to go from there. With hindsight I shouldn't have posted so many photos in my blogs. It seems albums containing many photos count as one item, but individual photos posted as static items are counted singly. Deleting them leaves many blog entries making no sense, but I have a feeling the albums will not be allowed as part of an Upgraded account anyway. Thank you to all those kind souls who offered very helpful advice, but it's still proving a very frustrating and time consuming occupation. Or maybe it's me who just makes hard work of things. If I could win the Lottery before May I'd say blow it and keep my Premium membership.

So, now it's dark again and time to start cooking. Sometimes I long for the simple days before technology, when reading, watching TV or going for a walk were as good as it got. Mind you, even walking is posing problems lately. I think I could count on one hand the dry days we've had this year and I'm no fan of walking in the rain. Plus the fact the new hiking boots hubby kindly bought me last weekend as a belated humbug gift no longer seem to like my feet and feel like lead weights, so will have to be returned. My old ones have been binned. Perhaps Id better indulge in an exercise and Yoga session on my Wii instead. But just a minute...no batteries

Life gets tedious don't it?