:: loafing around

My second go at machine baking went a bit better. This time I played safe and did a plain white loaf, using newly-bought flour and milk powder, as per the recipe. Four hours or so later, I tipped out a big billowing loaf, light as a feather and with a crispy crust, the very opposite of Saturday's sour, leaden lump. Next time I'll try a mix of wholemeal and white flour, see if I can get something between white fluff and brown sludge.

The answer lies in gluten, I think. The recipe for the disastrous wholemeal loaf specified vitamin C powder, but I couldn't find that anywhere, so didn't dare try another wholemeal recipe. I've since done some research that revealed that wholemeal flour has less gluten than white, which is why you add vitamin C powder, to improve the texture. Some people also pooh-poohed the addition of milk powder, saying it's there to make machine bread more like store-bought, ie soft and crumbly, which is not what I'm trying to achieve - far from it. So I have a suspicion that my ideal recipe might be one with some strong wholemeal four, some very strong white four, olive oil and water. Plus salt and sugar (you need some sugar for the yeast).

:: Staff of life?

Recently I've gone a bit mad on eBay. One of the great bargains I snapped up was a breadmaker, a Panasonic. It arrived yesterday, in a parcel so gigantic the delivery guy nearly dropped as he heaved it through the door. It's enormous, too big for any of my cupboards. Anyway, last night I bought some new yeast and today set out to make some bread. Among the ingredients was milk powder. Hmm. Soya milk will probably do. Vitamin C powder. Nope, seem to be all out of that. Had the rest though - flour's best-before date was 2002 (last time I made bread, heh) but what the hell, it looks ok - so off I went.

The wholemeal programme is five hours long so I had quite a wait. Went out for a wonderful walk this evening, and when I got back the house smelt great, wow. An hour and a half later the machine beeped and I eagerly tipped out my first loaf:



Uh, ok. Shopping list: flour, vitamin C powder, milk powder.

Very nasty surprise in the post today: I was caught running a red light by the special red-light camera on my way to work. £60 and three points on my licence, argh. My first ever ticket.

:: a little miracle in the garden

The daphne bush that's been struggling along weedily for five years or more is finally flowering! I can hardly believe it.



The brown marks are from a recent bout of frost. It's been a very mild winter though - I wonder if that's it? Or maybe it just needed time. Lots of time.

I still haven't done anything about building raised beds in the back yard. Well, I did go to the fencing place up the road at the weekend but it was shut. I'm now thinking log rolls. We'll see. I thought I'd found the ideal thing in Homebase: sturdy wooden frames hinged at the corners so they fold down flat for easy transport, and clips on the top so they can be stacked to make a higher frame. Sadly it turns out they're not for sale - they belong to the (foreign) company that ships garden supplies to Homebase. Sigh.

It's been raining heavily this week so I've been back on eBay. A breadmaker this time, a Panasonic. I've been thinking about getting one of these but they're nearly £100 new, bit too much to justify. This was £40 - second hand but looks in good nick from the photos. It hasn't arrived yet. I also got a lovely bag for guess who.



How could I see that and not buy it? She is an angel.

Depressing news locally: vandals have burnt out the wooden part of the lovely new walkway through Ferry Glen. It's the second arson attack on the path: last year they burnt the bridge. It was replaced by a metal one, not as nice but at least impervious to fire-raisers. And now this! It's quite a long stretch, and the fire also damaged surrounding trees, as you can see:



Bertie, being a drongo, thinks that because he walked on the walkway a while ago he must be able to walk on it again now, even though it looks and smells funny.

The fight-back against litter also continues. A while back I joined a group effort at the roundabout by Tesco (as a reward they gave us lunch in the staff canteen), and this inspired me to tackle a really nasty corner near my place. I've dubbed it Vodka Valley - there must have been a dozen or more one-litre empties, as well as lots of beer cans, Buckie bottles, crisp packets and Rizlas.



I'm probably going on another joint litter-picking session on Sunday. They're a nice bunch of people and it is kind of satisfying.

:: Phew

The weekend starts here! I ended up working last Sunday as well - Alistair's wife developed a terrible all-over rash in reaction to the antibiotics and had to be rushed back to hospital with a raging temperature. (She's doing a bit better now, thank goodness, but will be in hospital over this weekend too.)

I'm having tomorrow off in place of Sunday, so will have a lovely long weekend. Lots to do too.

{tech stuff}

The new laptop is still working, and I've been going through the hoops necessary to get my free Vista update. Mr Gates is determined to make me prove I have the dogged patience required for a true Windows user. First I had to fill in a form at the Acer website - serial number, special code number from the bottom of the machine, £15 for postage and then got a confirmation email. You would think that was that - but no! You have to fax your receipt to the Netherlands to prove you've bought the machine within the qualifying period. Fiiiiine. But the number on the email wasn't a fax number. Confusion at the fax machine. So I phoned the number and after beeping through the menu got to speak to a lovely French chap, who gave me the fax number (which was actually on the confirmation email when I had a really good look). So finally I got the appropriate bits of paper off to the Netherlands. And now I have six weeks to get my laptop ready for the off. Six weeks!! It can't possibly be that difficult to run off a few hundred thousand DVDs and mail them off. Ridiculous.

I do have quite a lot of preparation to do, because I've discovered that my nice new laptop has a flaw. For some unknowable reason, the drive has been formatted in FAT32 rather than NTFS. I know! Stupid. How can it possibly have a sticker on it saying "Windows Vista Premium Ready" when Vista won't install on a FAT32 disk? Duh. It means that part of the upgrade process will be a reformat. In a way that's a Good Thing, because here's another stupid thing: the drive has been split in two. I HATE this! It's just plain irritating. It means I can't have all my programs and photos and music on the default drive, I have to mess around changing the drive letter when installing things, grrr. So I'll be able to change that. But I will have to back up absolutely everything in a nice tidy way on the portable hard drive (and on the desk computer too, belt and braces) - that will probably take me six weeks, ha ha.

{/tech stuff}

I got the most fantastic present the other day - a rhubarb crown. It's a chunk split off a crown that was being divided. I'm on this Freecycle email group, and it was advertised on there, so I leapt at the chance. The donor, Jim, showed up at the door with a big, heavy rubbish bag. I'll post some photos of what was inside - it's the most amazing thing... HUGE. I said to Jim the original must have been something else and he says it is; his wife got it when she was a girl, it was part of a crown that was 40 years old. Incredible! The roots are like a tree's, thicker than my wrist. I dug a huge hole, sprinkled in plenty of organic compost and covered it over. Jim says I won't get much off it this year, but it should come away well next year.



At the weekend I'm going to start off some of my seeds, feed the roses and do some more weeding. It's been such a mild winter the weeds are rampant. The bulbs Faye gave me are starting to show their heads, and the woods are full of snowdrops. I really love spring, but the weather right now is more like what you'd expect in March, not February.

I've fallen prey to the lure of eBay! So far I've bought two tapestry kits, both for a really good price, and a ceramic coffee filter holder thingie to replace a tatty old plastic one I've been gluing together for years. The first tapestry kit I won in a last-minute bidding war - so exciting! I can see how it gets addictive. The last seconds are ticking down and you've got the winning bid, yay! I'm watching another tapestry kit and a bread-maker, but might not bother fighting down to the wire for them. I'm thinking about selling some stuff on eBay too ... see how it goes.

:: nearly there

Blimey this has been an ordeal. But all that's still to come is the PIN for my credit card. I'll ring the bank at some point and see what's happening on that score.

Best of all, my spanking new laptop arrived this morning (Friday ... see below). I was too cheap to pay for next-day delivery - sloooow delivery was free - so was amazed when it arrived. I only ordered it on Wednesday. It's a wonderful machine. It's quick, has a beautiful screen and the setup was smooth and easy. And it cost a grand total of £570 - £10 more than getting my broken Sony fixed. I did pay another £50 for a three-year warranty, it seems like a bargain. But yes, it's lovely. I was a bit downcast when I took it out of the box; compared to the slick gorgeousness of the Vaio it seemed cheap and plasticky. But once I got it going and it had whisked through its setup routine I began to bond with it.

The real "oh wow" moment was running the Aquarium screensaver: the screen resolution is breathtaking. And when you set up the Windows Media Centre there's an HD video runs that's so sharp it's scary. So now I'm happily loading all my software and files. Right at this minute I'm testing the battery life, which by the way beats the Vaio hands down: the power management system is slick and easy, and the icon says I have three hours left. Yay! I'm a happy camper.


Later (Saturday in fact - I saved yesterday's entry as a draft & never did get to finish it):
Andrew came down from Sneckie yesterday and I'd arranged to have the day off so we could have a big catchup. But I'd had to warn him I might have to go in to work at short notice and so I did. Alistair's wife is very ill; she'd been in hospital and got out yesterday, but wasn't well enough for him to leave her. It also happened that John is away this weekend. I made lunch and we had about two hours to talk before I had to race away. Andrew came into town and met me in my break and we had a drink. He was in bed already when I got home, and had to leave before I got up (he did wake me to say goodbye). He'll be back at Easter, hope we get more time then!

So today I'm having a really good rest. It's cold and wet outside, nice and snug in here. And I have a nice new toy - bliss!

:: crash bang wallop

Every now and then, something major goes haywire at exactly the worst moment possible.

Like when I was trying to sell my flat and the kitchen sink blocked up and the plumber couldn't fix it and said he would have to tear down the whole wall to get at the drains and I had to wash the dishes in the bath for a week.

Or the time when Trevor and Jenny and Liz and Ken were over from New Zealand for the festive season and while we were all away visiting Mull and Iona in the snow one of my pipes froze and burst and flooded the whole downstairs and my neighbour had to get the police to break in and turn the water off and I had to find an emergency plumber at 10pm on December 30.

Well, it's happened again. First of all, I lost all my bank cards on Sunday night. A major inconvenience but not a disaster (not like the time my credit card was stolen right out of my purse in Sainsburys and the thief went on a spending spree before I could get to a phone). I called the bank, cancelled the cards and ordered new ones, and went to bed in a relaxed mood.

When I got up the next morning I found that my laptop had died in the night. My beautiful Sony Vaio, only 16 months old, stone dead. It only had a year's warranty, so this really is a disaster. Sony is showing its true colours - it cost me 35p a minute to call the helpline, for example - it's local rates when you're under warranty. I called the Sony Centre and described the tests I'd done & they said to bring it in. So I drove all the way in, paid for parking and waited ... and guess what they said? It's dead. Call the helpline.

The helpline (at a cost of almost £6) told me it was a board fault and would cost £560 to fix. They have a tiered charge system and this is the highest level of fault. For £560 I can get a whole new laptop, I wailed. Yes, you probably can, said the helpline boy. Oh, and there's another thing: Sony won't guarantee it won't have to wipe the hard drive.

So now I'm in a quandry. I can get a new laptop for that much, but it wouldn't be so gorgeous and sleek and lovely. But then if I get Sony to fix my dead one, it might break down again - maybe it's a lemon. And whatever I do, I have to first get my files off the broken computer (yeah, yeah, I know I should have backed up every day, I'm an idiot). And I can't do anything about that because I've got no cards and no money.

So actually, it turns out that losing my cards wasn't such a bad thing after all. It has forced me to think long and hard about the whole thing. I've moved my old desktop back downstairs, and I've been doing some online research. I might be able to get the files off the laptop myself, but I've discovered that a bloke who used to be in IT at work has started his own repair business, and his rates are not bad so I might get him to do it. Especially since I've been trying to rewire the hedge trimmer for the past two days (I trimmed through the cable last year) and haven't managed to get it working yet.

The other good thing about not having cards/cash is that I've had to taking my own dinners in to work - I'd gotten into a very bad habit of eating stodgy canteen meals every day. I'm going to keep up the home cooking too, I've been enjoying having decent healthy food every day.

Anyway, the replacement cards have all arrived. I haven't got the PINs yet so no cash, but I've managed to get groceries.

Next week I should be able to decide what to do about the laptop. I really, really loved having one and I miss it. I loved being able to take it on holiday with me, I loved writing emails in bed, I loved watching films on it, I loved lying on the sofa reading Popbitch while downloading mp3s. So I think I will either get a repair or a replacement even though I still have the desktop.

This time though, I'll do my research.

In other news, the wormery finally arrived, a fortnight after I ordered it despite a claim of "**PRIORITY DELIVERY**!". The poor wee worms were sealed in a plastic bag with a bit of compost in it, and a lot of them were dead. So I wrote and complained and they sent me some more worms, which arrived today. Sealed in a plastic bag, in an ordinary envelope. Not even a padded bag! I should report them to the RSPCA.

There isn't much worm activity so far, and they don't seem to have eaten much of the rubbish I've given them, so I've brought the bin inside. It's been in the shed, but although it's not been too cold lately a bit of quality warmth might help the worms get established. Hope they don't start creeping around the house looking for extras.

And finally: some really good news. Faye has at last sold her Milton house, hurrah. She's faxed off all the paperwork so should be debt-free very soon. She's really excited about it, as you can imagine.