NANO Camp continues…Soon
Tricky Easter weekend.
Good Friday. Seemed innocuous. I was at the desk continuing with the story work, and my husband was out in our orchard with the chainsaw in a desperate attempt to cut a pathway for the mower.
It was sunny and bright. When prepping lunch, I noticed that our hot water was, in fact, lukewarm, and the boiler faulted 20 min before lunch. We got the boiler going again though lunch was an hour plus late, and we were flustered, and neither of us had finished our pre-lunch tasks.
Saturday. We progressed OK though both of us were carrying our injuries and pretending we felt fine.
Easter Sunday. It started at 4 am, for me, at the desk, and my older ASUS laptop behaved like it had swallowed glue as it had done several days in a row. It is old, and the battery no longer works etc. But it runs two screens, has a huge hard drive, and sits up there, out of the way. I brainstormed my lack of progress – it hadn’t even opened an email in two hours. I have an older iMac I had set up in the downstairs front room some weeks ago when that room was the warmest place. I did not think the iMac fit under the sloping ceiling of the dairy office. I was wrong it did, but then both machines behaved as if they were full of glue. The Broad Band appeared fine, but I could not make progress. The iMac wanted time to update Evernote notes, DropBox, and One Note since I last used it in January 2023, and that meant I carried it up and down stairs trying to get the best router signal over the room extenders. This took all day and seemed completely pointless beyond the fact that the iMac did fit on the desk.
Bank Holiday Monday. It seemed amazing compared to the above when I got up at 4 am ( I do this for some reason unknown!), and both the iMac and the old ASUS performed like a well-practised choir and orchestra. The problem was I got stuck in a cycle of checking them! Opening and closing programs and software ‘just to make sure it was OK’! By tea time, I had done nothing else. Gordon was also struggling with his knee issue, and though he had done some of the jobs he wanted to do, the list was considerably scaled down, and the looming weather change – in which his lorry would be worked on and have a re spray, was undermining his sang -froid.
Tuesday. Don’t tell me computers aren’t the Devil’s spawn! Tuesday was supposed to be all about Gordon and the lorry, and I was on call to be taxi svs. In fact, at 4 am, when I arrived at my desk, the EE Broad Band went down and did not pop back up. We have an antenna on the back of the house to a router and individual TP links in each room that we use. It wasn’t at all obvious which or both had a fault, or even if it was EE that was down. The phone worked. It was impossible to get any service from EE, and by the time poor Gordon arrived to start his day, I was already grim-faced and out of my depth. I abandoned the BB to get on helping him. On my return, I took the components apart and replaced a cable, and it all started working again – that was about 9.30 am – at 10.30 am, in the middle of an email, it dropped again. After another session of switching off and on it seemed to come back and has kept working since. I do not trust it, and maybe I shouldn’t anyway – it is complacent to relax when things ‘just keep working’ but it is human! As am I! Gordon’s day was exhausting, and the weather truly grim wild and wet – I lit the fire just before he walked in, and our otherwise trusty house chimney decided it couldn’t draw in the twisting winds and filled the house with thick smoke – we were too tired to laugh about it.
It’s Wednesday, 12/04/2023. As I type this, I decided to blog about this today as sometimes I feel when these things occur that it must just be us. I doubt that is so, and we don’t even have children with their issues ( and their gadgets and devices!) – though Mum adds to the mix every now and again.
What was good about the Easter ‘break’ for us? We had some good home-cooked meals that I enjoyed cooking and eating, and Gordon cooked us breakfast each day. We were warm enough. The fire was great – if we overlook yesterday. I do have my iMac upstairs now to use in a place where it will get used. I have continued to read the novel I was using as a guide for handling ‘time passing’/ pacing in the story I am working on. Gordon has tidied the orchard up and mowed the grass in the garden. He is at the workshop now, and the lorry is in bits for re-spraying despite the weather. I also trimmed a couple of the goats’ feet and had a round bale of hay delivered by my neighbour to cover the glitch in supply I was getting irritable about. (Oh, for a large dry barn!) but that neighbour brought news of the community I have lost touch with, which was lovely. I also had pictures sent of my baby 3rd cousin smiling, and who couldn’t be cheered by that? 🙂
I have not come up with an answer as to why computers sometimes gum up, nor Broad Band fails, nor why Help Bots exist – when they don’t actually help – and neither have I cured the common cold nor created peace in the World nor discovered I can be near toxic people. Still, I have seen that the family goes on, friends are where they are in their lives and that there are some smiles left on the planet.