Awwweee.... Pool - warm and sunny weather. Pleeeeeaaaaassseeee send some of it over here. It's windy, cold and rainy... Way more like a late October - November weather than September. :( Many years September used to be a bit chilly but with lots of sunshine and beutiful autumn colours coming on the trees.. Good days to wander out in the forrest and pick autumn mushrooms. Sun!!! Where are you??!!!??
You'll have to show me your treasures! I wish now that I'd bought those games we were looking at. I'm going to see if they have them online. Roasted corn does sound yummy! Oh, well. We were ready to go. I could tell Witch Baby was getting a bit overwhelmed. She had a blast at the sleepover: our mutual friend tells me she took the lead in a long extended imaginary play session, in which they were all students at Hogwarts. They wove all the party activities into that scheme. Helen, do you live in the part of Sweden that doesn't see the sun for half the year? Or further south? I've always wanted to visit: it seems like such a lovely country. And I'm certainly used to the climate, living on the same latitude! (Or is it longitude? I always forget.)
I live near Stockholm, about a 1/3 up from the very south. Yes it's dark here during the winter. But not as dark as it is above the polar circle. When (if) the snow comes it's a total difference as the snow lights up very much. Here's some pics from the winter 2005/2006. Lots of snow that winter!!! And there were more to come.... Anyway. Summer is nice here - when it's not raining. And if anyone goes to Stockholm at any point - please contact me in advance. Would be SO cool to meet for a coffee or so...
Helen, I envy you soooo much! I absolutely love the snow and we just don't get enough here in Britain. I always wish we had more snow, and it's funny because today you're wanting the sun, yet today is the first day we've had a cold autumn day this year. Even when we had over a month of heavy rain and floods it wasn't really cold, but today it's brrrrrrr weather and I'm loving it! Of course, I like the autumn colours too - not just the leaves and so on, but the lighting too. Last night there was a gorgeous sunset that lit the sky with orange on the layers of clouds and it was just beautiful.
Boy, that is the tuth...There is something about the quality of light in Britain that is different than just about anywhere else...to me it has a kind of watercolour feel to it. Once in a very great while, we get a day here in Minnesota that has that same quality and it takes me straight back to England!
I just got home from my first day of practical experience at a stable near me. It was exhausting. The horses don't know how bloody lucky they are! Other than that, it was pretty OK. I got to go horse riding a little bit as well. Only two weeks to go... :sigh:
Two weeks until what, Muffin? You're finished with your stint at the horse farm? Funny, I was just now talking to a fellow horse lover here at work. I used to love to ride. I was pretty good, too. I keep trying to talk hubby into going to England with me, but he doesn't think it sounds like his cuppa. He'd rather go to Greece. Oh well. Maybe one year Witch Baby and I will go . . . and he can come if he wants.
Uh-huh. Two weeks sure seems like a long time. I'm going to die. :sigh: Either that or I'm going to get in super good shape, which is good I guess. And LOL "horse farm" is one way of putting it.
Lol we call them Horse Studs here. My family used to breed horses in syberia. I rode my first horse at five.
I know Hugz. So my suggestion to you is: Get over here in the winter and visit us. Snow inside Stockholm City is no fun whatsoever as they put out so much salt on the roads, so everything gets very Slushy and slippery... But on the country side... A totally different story. Also I've noticed that the coldness in UK is damp... And the temp is near 0 (zero) Celsius... That's the worse! When it's about 7-10 minus C here, sunny and not much wind - absolutely gorgeous! The cold is dry and that makes a world of difference. Also at that temp - no more salt. Take hubby and come visit us. Hopefully we get enough snow this year to make it worthwhile. January-February is probably the best time. Daylight starts to come back then as well. Or. Go to the Ice Hotel in Lappland. There you can see lots and lots of snow. It's dark most time day/night, but I talked to people from Uk that's been there and they said it was an experience worth everything. There's a button upper right for english. Muffin. I would LOVE what you are doing right now. :bunny: But it's for sure a real hard job. I used to work for a while in a riding school when I was a teen. After a while you do get way stronger. So you're an expert on the horseback Odin??
Lol Helen I would't say expert. But I have had years off and on Australian Stock Horses. Mostly in snow country.
At that time Helen I was in Cooma. A place near The Snowy mountains. Very Hilly and cold in winter. Very hard country.
Hugz, after having snow for what seems like years (really it's just a couple of months ) you start getting really-- and I mean REALLY-- sick of it. Snow is cold, wet, slushy and dirty. Sure it's all nice and pretty when it's white but it only stays white for about a day. Then it's gray until more snow comes. And more snow doesn't always come so we're stuck with ever lasting grayness. You should see Stockholm during winter. Gray slush everywhere! :yuck: I live in the city so I don't get to see that much of the white stuff when it's white. It's nice going horseriding in snow though. Horseriding and sledging (though people my age mostly think it's geeky to go sledging but that doesn't stop me and Ellen--we go sledging and make complete fools of ourselves :rotfl is the only thing snow is good for. Anyway, what's new with me is I got off from work at the horse farm early today. All thanks to me telling a white lie. Thank God I have a little brother to blame things on... Dunno what I'd do without him.
What's new ... mops brow .... Maybe I'll write up the upgrade saga as a blog entry, but I am too ashamed so maybe a brief reprise of the highlights, posted here, will just get lost and never again resurface to humiliate me. Last Thursday pm, after making a couple of discs of important data, I began disassembly of my only working puter. At 3pm I commenced rebuilding with new motherboard, cpu, ram, power supply and graphics card. At 3:30pm hit a small snagette ... realized that new motherboard only has one socket for hard drives (of the sort I possess) ... but also a lot of groovy looking sockets for hard drives of a type I don't own. 4:00pm travel to mall to visit Maplins where they have an offer on SATA hard drives. Purchase last one in shop. Travel home and uncrate the beast. Swear a lot. Stupid zit-faced twit has filled the space in the empty box with a Western Digital IDE drive. I now have one more IDE drive. Garrrrrrr! Begin kneading FIMO clay and make a fairly convincing voodoo doll of a Maplins sales assisant ... the zits are not exactly to scale ... suffice to say that the zits seem to have a minor case of sales assistant afflicting them ... nothing that a good scrub with bleach won't fix. Have lost will to live so drink some wine and try to forget troubles. Friday. Have hangover will travel. Return to Maplins and exchange useless IDE dirve for a SATA one. Attempt to engage (different) assistant in conversation, but wasting time as this assistant s almost as stupid as the other one. Home again, second cup of tea inside me and new drive installed. Gird loins to install Windows XP Pro. Extract Windoze disc from bottom of draw. Congratulate self for having foresight to write the unique ID code on the paper CD envelope. After doing silly BIOSy stuff let Windows have its wicked way ... format a nice partition on new disc, enter me details, like name and company. Aha. Enter 25 digit key ... ... invalid, please re-enter ... ... oops transposed two digits ... invalid ... try again ... invalid ... ... again. Looks like I wrote down the code wrong. Lose will to continue. Make lots of cats. Clean out garden shed. Attack garden with vigour. Monday ... reassemble old puter in the case of an even older puter rescued from shed. Doesn't work. Feeling sort of unhappy and depressed. Tuesday ... reassemble the even older computer back in its original case. Turn on. cpu fan sounds wonky ... well there was a lot of rust on it. After an age screen informs me that Windows XP Home is starting, but needs to make a few repairs. I'm like: WOW!. 25 minutes later I feel like I'm in a time warp. Seeing a desktop from 2003. Spooky. Try ... and fail to get online. Can't figure out my old file system and XP home edition is, to say the least, unhelpful. Suddenly the system reboots and Windows disappears. Won't even restart in safe mode. Heartened, rather than dis-, I reboot brand new computer and try to install Windows 98 (the plan being to use my XP Home upgrade disc). After taking a dog's age, I get a memory error. Evidently Win98 doesn't seem able to cope with 1GB DIMMs. Spend rest of day and the followng day experimenting with painting FIMO cats. Thursday travel to mall and hit Staples and PC World to price up a replacement copy of XP Pro. They ain't got any in stock, but if they did it would be 190. Come home with wine and pork chops instead Friday, awake feeling determined. Race to Staples and buy Vista Home Premium while the mood lasts. Race home and ... here I am. Am I mad? Yep. Would I hack that XP Pro disc, if I could. You betcha!
*blinks* Wow Mirelly...I don't even know what to say; except...that really really really really really sucks. :(
LOL ... I don't deserve much sympathy, really. I was far too idle, simply to rebuild the original puter and dive around in the registry for the XP reg code. It had always been my intention to rebuild the old machine's bits as a back-up device inside the older case that I dug out of the shed. The motherboard had to be shoe-horned in and I was never utterly certain that (a) it didn't get damaged in the process and (b) that everything got connected up right. I was always gonna get Vista (for 64 bit processors and for better Dx10 support) but I'd hoped to put it off a while longer .... What really get's me is the sad likelihood that my own strongly negative attitude in approaching the job was probably the least helpful part of the whole charade. That and the utterly useless staff at my local computer stores. Maplins, who employ Macdonalds rejects, are forgiveable since one can simply say to oneself: caveat emptor and go away with a wry grin. My real ire is for the tech geek at PC World who told me, emphatically, that it was not possible to extract the ID code from the registry. Since I couldn't get online to check for myelf, I was obliged to take his word for it. It's why I always chuckle when I see their price list. 29.95 to install an upgrade (you bring PC to store). What? You mean thirty quid to undo 2 screws, slide off a cover, clip a postcard sized piece of plastic into a slot, close up, power up and insert a CD, clcik a couple of times and close down. (10 minutes work behind a window where polo-shirted geeks pretend to sweat over wires and bits of electronic stuff while talking geeky gossip stuff to each other with their backs to the audience. 10 minutes work stretched to an unconscionable duration by time-wasting on a piratical scale ... watch them take a leg-stretcher, seemingly to take/seek/give advice, counsel. There should be an in-store tech-geek oscar ceremony. I could nominate a few for best performance. )
