We must chat about a very important matter

The computer isn't very happy at all. I didn't know it was possible for an electronic clock to be quite so inaccurate - it's losing about half an hour a day. Anyone know what causes that?

Confusion

We're having horrible computer problems. Despite running anti-virus software and stuff like that, and not downloading any strange stuff or even visiting unusual websites, and never opening suspect emails, the past few days have been infuriating. It takes about half an hour and seven restarts, including a couple of system restores, to be able to get the damn thing going, and then it's liable to crash at any moment. It looks as though we'll have to get a new computer and have no idea what's the best deal for us, and how to reinstall the stuff we need, and all the absolutely vital work which is stuck on the external hard-drive and didn't want to transfer to the new hard drive after the last explodification, or the new info in the folders.

We tried to save the folders and pictures to disk, but hadn't installed the disk writing software. So Ned installed that, and was told to restart the computer. That meant all the start up problems started again, and we had to do a system restore, which means that the CD writing software needs to be installed again, which will mean a restart, which means a system restore .....

Do we dare risk doing another backup onto the external hard drive, or will that just transfer all the problems to a new computer when we eventually get one? A new computer will mean installing everything from scratch, and a new running system might not recognise the saved information anyway. And whether we can ever get back online again is anyone's guess. I feel a tad stressed.

Pounding away, pounding away

Friday was a very busy day. Ned and the Boy were Frogbound for the day so I walked the dogs before going to work to hold the hand of the trainee. I'm not sure that she's going to last. She's very nice and all that, but she's taking ages to get to grips with the job. When the person before me started she had five accompanied training shifts (15 hours) before having to go solo. I was luckier - I had eight (24 hours). The new girl had seven (21 hours), tried a solo shift and had to call me in to help, so was taken to the main branch for some intensive training. She had another 25 hours training during the week but still needed assistance on Friday morning. She's written the procedures in a notebook but doesn't refer to it, and stands staring at the computer screen waiting for it to tell her what to do while the waiting clients get fed up.

The trouble is that, although everything's quite straightforward, you do have to multi-task. A client will come into the reception area to buy something and immediately the phone will ring. The phone has to be answered (it might be an emergency) but the client who's there mustn't be ignored - you have to smile and apologise and if necessary take the phone client's number and offer to call them back in a few minutes. This is the PR side of the job and is very important. None of the things we have to do are difficult in themselves, but they do all tend to happen at once! Tomorrow she's supposed to be going solo for real - if she can't manage after all this training I don't think she ever will.

Anyway, I did the (very busy) afternoon shift (all appointments booked) on my own (apart from the vet for the second half of it) and felt a headache brewing. And it built and built. Nothing would shift it. It was still there yesterday, and when I woke this morning as well. Pound, pound, pound. Over the course of the day I tried ibuprofen, aspirin, feverfew and paracetamol, but nothing made any impression on it. The next step was going to have to involve sawing off the top of my skull to let the pain out.

Now it's just getting dark, and the pain is starting to ease up a bit. What a washout of a weekend this has been.

Girl, don't be scared to move

I'm going to have to warn a neighbour about livestock-worrying. After last night's few drops of rain the ground of the ploughed field where I often walk the dogs was claggy and sticky, so I thought that going into the pasture would make a nice change. It's a bit more awkward going in those fields than it used to be because although I was given a key to the gate-padlock a couple of years ago, the lock was changed during the summer and I haven't got a new key. So we have to walk further up the road and cut through the hedge, jumping a ditch as we go, to get to the top entrance. Here we have the use of three lovely secure pastures, totalling about 50 acres, where the dogs can run free as long as there's no livestock in them, of course. Well, in the top field were my neighbour's sheep and a few cattle, so I decided to walk the long way round them to get to the gate into the next field, with the dogs still on their leads.

Sheep are afraid of dogs, aren't they? Try telling these ones. They all came running up to us, bleating away, and I found myself with three very good dogs and about 100 sheep walking nicely at heel. Then the cattle saw us and decided to come and investigate. I'm not very good with cattle. I like to have a barrier between me and them so that I can admire them at ease. (Even better, I like them on a plate, surrounded by vegetables.) In their natural state they're a bit too big for comfort, and they have a tendency to want to 'play' with dogs. So not only did we have a flock of sheep following, we were being circled by nine galumphing and bucking cattle, rather in the manner of Red Indians circling the wagon train, which just didn't seem to understand what bugger off meant.

As I said, I shall have to complain about the livestock-worrying; they were worrying me!

The clinking, clanking sound

Every week the takings are counted and balanced against the till sheet. Sometimes it balances exactly. Sometimes it's a few pence up or down. This week the cheque takings balanced exactly, as did the credit card takings. The cash takings, however, were exactly £50 down.

Now, that's a huge sum to go astray. It's more than I spend on a week's food for three adults. It's nearly a week's income. There are several possibilities.

1) A client reached into the cashbox and took it.

Unlikely. There are very few times that the cashbox is unattended, and it would mean lifting the coin tray to reach the notes beneath, removing a minimum of three notes but leaving the rest and returning to one's seat without being noticed.

2) One of the staff took it.

I didn't. That I can say for sure. And I don't think any of the others did either. I'm the 'junior' and I've been there for 18 months and we've never had this problem. And I don't mistrust the trainee we've taken on this week either because I find it hard to step back and let someone learn the ropes and tend to hover annoyingly and help, so there was no opportunity for her to swipe it either.

3) It's an accounting error.

This is my last hope. Possibly someone's mistaken an 8 for a 3, or a 7 for a 2 - when scrawled hastily they're very similar, and there's a difference of 5 between them. The problem with that is that, in this particular week, we never took as much as £50 in a single cash transaction - unlike the following week when we took four times that amount in cash in a single day.

We've searched the till and the drawer it lives in and the safe and checked and double-checked and triple-checked the books. No sign. And it makes me feel sick.

Ned says I'm 'going down, and'll dance the hempen jig'.

Hey rock'n'roll king is down

As an anniversary celebration we went to see Stardust. Fantastic! I loved every minute of it.

We fade to grey

When Beattie was a young girl she had quite a spotty face and muzzle. When a dog's predominantly white you don't notice the gradual effects of age until ...



... you take another photograph and realise how many of the markings have vanished.


Where does the time go?

May be the last time

Okay, so I was wrong. The previous last-blog-about-Cropredy-2007 has been superceded by this last-blog-about-Cropredy-2007. The Mike Harding show on Radio 2 tomorrow (Wednesday 10th) is featuring the live performance of Leige and Leif that a regathered as-nearly-original-line-up-as-possible Fairport Convention presented for their 40th birthday celebration. 7pm to 8pm. Be there - we were!

What's new, pussycat?

Today a woman brought her cat into work, saying that it had been in a fight with a car and had lost; she didn't know how to dispose of it, and could we 'get rid' of it for her? A little suspiciously, we took the bag she handed us - recoiled slightly and asked when the cat had died. "Last Thursday."

Anyone know of a really effective air freshener?

Coming for to carry me home

I guess Stu will be going to see Stardust.
I predict a riot.

Who's going to drive you home?

Tip to Ned: Try using the brakes rather than the garage door to stop the car.

I said "What?"

According to the experts it's time to harvest ones apples for storage before the wind blows the all off and spoils them. When the trees in our garden were planted (before our time) they were cleverly planted in a row and laid at an angle to limit their height and make a nice fruitful barrier. If they'd been properly pruned every year they'd still be nice and low but before we bought the house they'd been allowed to go feral and we've spent the last 18 years trying to get some control over them. This has mainly involved severe pruning which has the side-effect of removing all the flower buds, so they've never been very productive. Because they're a bit gnarled and split and past their prime we decided this year to grub them out and start again, so last year I didn't really bother with the pruning - only the lowest branches; with the result that this year they've cropped quite well, but all the fruit is about 18 feet up. The trees are the wrong shape for ladders to be either secure or helpful, so I wriggled and squeezed my way up the tangled branches to try to reach the apples. That's when Ned said it. "You're fifty years old and shouldn't be climbing trees."

I said "WHAT?????"

EIEIO

We're reliably informed (yes, I was watching QI) that methane gas is twenty times more dangerous to the ozone layer than carbon dioxide. As the producers of the greatest quantites of methane are herbivores, does this mean that vegetarians should be eliminated?

Walk this way

I turned up on time at the cardiology department, and was swiftly whisked into a small room for the ECG, which involved several people with very cold hands putting sticky patches on various parts of my anatomy ("top off please"), wiring me up to a machine that went 'ping' then before I knew it, whipping them off again ("top on again thank you"), then out into the corridor again. No sooner had I got my book out to calm down a little than I was called into another small room full of people and machines that go 'flub-dub', ("top off please"), had my chest covered in gloop and an echo-gram thing done and various measurements taken. It was at this point that the consultant came in and said hello. Nice. Then I was handed some scratchy paper to mop up the gloop ("top on again thank you") and sent back to the waiting room. Then the consultant reappeared and I was ushered into yet another room to discuss my symptoms. Which he didn't seem to believe any of, sent me into the side room ("top off please"), used his stethoscope and took my blood pressure ("That's quite high but I expect you're not very relaxed but your pulse is slow so that's good top on again thank you") and that was it. Apart from being positioned slightly lower than they expected - from a certain age everything's lower than it used to be - they couldn't find anything wrong with my heart, which is good, but I left feeling like a complete fraud and a twit and a waster-of-everyone's-time. I knew I should have cancelled.

And Ned's sulking because it usually takes a good meal and a nice bottle of wine to get my top off.

And the eyes in his head see the world spinning round

Whether it's reaction to the gallons of local anaesthetic I needed yesterday to get a filling replaced without having to be enticed down from the ceiling, or tiredness, or what, I don't know, but all today I've been alternating between feeling pissed and feeling hungover. Walking in a straight line was tricky, and I found I couldn't write properly when filling in the order book at work. Seeing that I haven't had anything stronger than tea since Sunday, and only 2 pints of water to drink yesterday evening, it's a bit odd. I hope an early night will sort it; I've got some driving to do tomorrow.

She's filing her nails while they're dragging the lake

Although I seem to have spent most of today on the computer I don't think I've wasted my time. Ned and his pals went walking in the Peak District, so once I'd walked the dogs and spent far too much money shopping, I settled at the screen to keep up with the gossip.

As some of you might have guessed, I'm a bit of a dog person, and go on several sites with fora for passing on information and general chat. A few days ago someone on 'my' breed site asked a question about genetics, saying that someone on Site B had posted pictures of newborn black-spotted puppies from liver-spotted parents - was this possible? The short answer is 'No' - basically black pigmentation the dominant colour, and dals will only show liver coloration if they have no black gene. As both 'parents' were liver they therefore had no black genes to pass on, so the black puppies couldn't be sired by the liver dog. With me so far?

So I joined Site B so that I could be Mrs Interfering and suggest that the proud daddy had probably been cuckolded and that mummy dog had been playing away. This went down like a lead balloon and I let the usual newbie-flak bounce off as it's only to be expected.

Then I went to look at other posts on the site. This same person had proudly posted pictures of the four dobermanns she was rescuing. Curiously they all had cropped ears (ear cropping's been illegal in this country for over a century) so were obviously imported, and I was curious and asked about them. Apparently they'd been imported illegally and had their ears cropped on the dockside at 8 weeks old. Anyone who's done any research at all about the process knows that's an ipossible scenario - after the actual cropping there are months of taping and posting to get the ears to stand upright. So that didn't ring true either.

There's also a section for cat posts on this particular site, and this same person had posted pictures of all 7 of her pedigree cats, all different breeds and confirmed when asked that all were on the active register (you'd understand that Lorry). One of the cats was very attractive so I went onto Google Images and typed in the breed. Well, I nearly fell of my chair. There were the exact same photos - one on the Wikipedia page for the breed. I put in the name of another of 'her' breeds, and blow me down, there they were - this time the exact same pictures were of a stray cat found in California.

That's when I had my Miss Marple moment. I google-imaged all the breeds she'd posted pictures of, and there they all were - her elderly 'Belgian Turvuren (sic) cross' was actually a blue merle American champion rough collie that died 17 years ago. The puppy pictures were from a dalmatian site about mismarks. The picture of 'her and her husband and their four dobermanns' was lifted from an American breeder's site.

So, 'she' was obviously telling porkies. But why? A sad, lonely attention-seeker? Maybe - but it turns out (after I'd subtly ("Wow! Your cat's picture's on the Wikipedia page! How cool is that?" etc) posted that she'd been rumbled, other people found even more evidence of the fantasy.

Then came the rather scary bit. Over the past few weeks 'she' had been in contact with other site members by email & PM and, with some of the younger ones, had offered to send more puppy pictures in the post if they'd let 'her' have their addresses, and would they like a holiday job with her, to help look after her dogs and puppies and horses (oh yes, she's been posting on a horse forum as well - her Shire horse had to be shot last week. Much sympathy ensued).

Am I right to find this very alarming? I've heard of 'grooming' before but I think I might have exposed a groomer (stop sniggering Mal), who of course will now vanish for a while, to reappear somewhere else. I've suggested to the Admin of the site that, while it could all be the work of an attention-seeker or a bored youngster, it could equally be something more serious and perhaps making a note of the IP might be a good idea.

This could be the last time ...

... this year at any rate, that I post a blog about Cropredy. But at last! Someone's put up this year's version of Matty Groves, and the follow-on choon. Remember that this is very near the end of a four-hour set, with only the finale to follow.

Ahh, magic! That's why we go to Cropredy each year.

It makes the world go round

Wahay! I've had a payrise!

Its a bit old but its mine

The lovely ArAySee Boy - I'm not sure he's old enough to have left school - brought along a chum and they looked under the Pug's bonnet. I turned the ignition key and there was just an impotent click. I explained what used to fix it (first wiggling that bluey-green wire, and then when that stopped sorting it, putting it in gear and rocking it back and forth (in my case looking helpless until some kind strong Young Man took pity on me and did the rocking)), but that now nothing was working. They ummed and thought the starter motor was probably dead, and took out a Birmingham Screwdriver and whacked it a bit. No joy. Then they checked the strength of the battery and that was fine. Then just as an experiment they bypassed the connection between the battery and the starter motor. Brrrrrrmmmmmm!!! Hurrah! But it still wouldn't start on its own and I began to wonder if I was going to have to adopt the lad and keep him as a pet mechanic. A little more discussion led to them replacing the bluey-green wire and Bingo! The car now starts happily all by itself! We now have a car again and not a fully-comprehensively-insured driveway ornament.

He's a Nice Man. He's a very very Nice Man. Oh no, that's the Other Lot. But he's very good anyway, and we like him.

I'm a tiger

A few weeks ago I cut some comfrey from the garden (caution - wear gloves and long sleeves because the hairy leaves and stems can cause a nasty rash), chopped it up a bit and put it in a lidded bucket with some rainwater to steep and make a good rich organic plant feed. Today I bravely opened the bucket and put a little of the liquor into the watering can to dilute and feed the plants. Poo-ee, what a stink! I hope the plants appreciate it because it's truly disgusting.

In other news Beattie's nose has pretty much recovered from the nip it received last week. At first,as you recall, it was a bit scraped and bloodybut then it scabbed over and was scratchy. Now the scabs have come off and it's all healed nicely, except that the scars aren't yet pigmented properly so she has a very fetching stripy nose.