:: tinkering

I made some minor changes to Pinky's latest website -- as well as putting the extra shell in, I've added her headshot and fiddled with the picture-gallery page.

Today is truly spring -- warm, sunny, just wonderful. So wonderful I rushed out and tidied the garden up a bit. As well as a spot of weeding, I swept the back yard, cleaned up the dog poo and put some more stakes in to keep Bertie off the extremely feeble onion patch. Only half a dozen plants are still struggling to grow, the rest have been trampled. The garlic is sturdier, it's growing like nobody's business, and the blackcurrant bushes I transplanted are looking brilliant. Spring! I love spring.

The builder says the joiner will probably come next Thursday. He'll give me a ring on Wednesday to confirm. Yeah, right.

:: dogsitting deluxe

Colin is going to mind Bertie while I'm in London. I thought he could just pop in to walk him at some point in the middle of the day, but no, he's taking full advantage of the opportunity for some quality dog time. So Bertie's being collected on Monday night (after a key exchange at work) and will possibly stay over until Wednesday -- this is because Colin's partner Jenny is away on Tuesday too, and won't see Bertie unless he stays over another night. Yes, he is that popular.

:: btw

I did sign up to Abelgratis and got my free webspace. Haven't done anything much with it yet though.

:: wedding blues

Someone else is having a wedding, I've got the blues. Waaaaah! Liz and Ken are getting hitched and I'm not there, waaaaah! I've got a copy of the ceremony though, so I could always get up at 6.30am (or is that 7.30am?) and read it out loud while drinking champagne and crying. My wee niece! I remember changing her nappies and now she's all grown up! Sniffle, sob. Yes, I know she's been all grown up for at least ten years, but she's getting maaaaried!

So that's Saturday, kiwi time. Sigh. I hope everyone has a wonderful time, and I also hope there's a video. Sigh.

Back in Britain, life is pretty frenetic. I got a letter today from the radiologist, Dr Gillespie, saying I hadn't turned up for the appointment with him on the 5th. Uh? But then they'd realised the appointment letter had been sent to my old address, so they've made me a new appointment for next Wednesday. This is to look at the latest scans.

Also next week, I'm to go down to London for a day to train the staff at our City office in the new software. Timetable: finish work at 1am, drive home, sleep for five minutes, leave home 6am or so to catch plane at 6.40am, battle through London traffic to office, train staff, have lunch, battle through London traffic to airport, fly home. This is on Tuesday. I'll have to get someone to mind Bertie for the day. It was supposed to be my day off, and I was meeting Faye for lunch but we'll have to put that off until Wednesday, which is now my day off. The day I have the appt with Dr Gillespie.

No sign of the joiner, I bet he wants to come on Tuesday. Or Wednesday.

:: back to the minutae ...

Today and yesterday I finally got the quote for the shed doors sorted out and cleaned the carpets. Whew. The quote for the doors was £275. I had been hoping for £300 but expecting more, so I was thrilled it was less. That's for everything -- two fire doors cut to size, new "stannards" (jambs, I think), locks fitted, the lot. The joiner will probably do them Thursday or Friday. He will start at 8am. In the morning.

The carpet steaming worked reasonably well, especially in the hall. I might have another go at a couple of other patches. While I was at it I cleaned the floors downstairs too and did all my laundry and ironing. The house is gleaming! Apart from the bits I didn't dust.

Last night I went to see Far From Heaven, which I loved. It's set in the 50s and it's done just like a 50s movie, with stilted dialogue ("Say, Pop, guess what I did at school today?) and fabulous clothes. But unlike 50s movies it deals more honestly with attitudes to race and homosexuality. I read and heard a lot of opinions on the film before I went and didn't really agree with any of it, though they were all different. I think a lot of younger people can't understand that the main character isn't just a repressed housewife who realises how empty her life is. She's like the chairman of a highly successful company who discovers the CEO's been embezzling it and they're going bankrupt. Women back then were trained to be housewives and she had it all: stunning big house, two lovely children (boy and girl, polite and obedient), handsome, successful husband. She was a star, featured in the society pages, her dinner parties were fabulous. Then she discovers her husband's gay. He gets "treatment" and for a while, everything staggers along as normal, until he falls in love. The other strand is that meanwhile, she's finding that the gardener, a kindly fellow, is a good listener. But he's black. She's tremendously naive, doesn't realise that it's all very well for her to play at being liberal, treating him like any other person, but for him it is actually dangerous. It ends up with her being the talk of the town for being seen going into a restaurant with him, and with him having to leave town because the scandal kills his business. Also, his young daughter is injured by boys taunting her about her father. The thing is, they never even kiss -- a touch on the arm is enough to provoke disgust and horror in onlookers. Even her best friend is disgusted, more so than by the revelation about the husband's gayness. But it's not like the character, Cathy, is even very PC by today's standards: she never stands up for her friend, for example. When he grabs her arm during an emotional scene in the street and a passing man yells, "Hey! Hands off boy!" she doesn't say a word in his defence. When the NAACP comes calling, she gets her black maid to sign their petition for her. I thought it was a wonderful film, lots to think about in it.

:: reality check

So there I was fretting about the builder still not having given me a quote for the shed doors let alone fitted them, and about the as-yet-uncleaned carpets and a myriad other minutae, when Andrew rang with some terrible news. His friend Kate, the artist we stayed with in the Western Isles, has had her baby -- a wonderful event of course, but Calum was born with heart defects that mean he'll probably have to have surgery in the next couple of weeks. He's in an incubator and is doing a bit better now than when he was born (on Wednesday I think) -- he had quite bad breathing difficulties that have eased. He also has a couple of other physical problems which may be minor or may be symptoms of a syndrome of some kind. Everyone at the hospital has been wonderful, but Kate and her partner have been on a real rollercoaster ride, hoping and praying that all will be well in the end.

Lots of positive thinking, good vibes and prayers please, for Kate, Robbie and wee Calum.

:: doors

The builder came this afternoon and after a bit of tooth-sucking over the non-standard size of the doors, said he could get a couple of fire doors and cut them down. They''ll be completely flat and plain, so they won't look as nice as the originals did when new. They'll do the job, though, so I'm not fussed. He's going to quote me for new locks as well -- I figure I might as well have locks on them. If he gets everything organised and the quote is ok by me, they'll be done some time the coming week. Yippee!!

:: on a roll!

Today I finally managed to track down a joiner to come and look at my shed doors. He's coming tomorrow morning (or later this morning, as it's now after midnight). I'm stupidly thrilled at the prospect of having new doors on the shed and have all kinds of plans for improvements. I'm also excited at finding someone who seems keen to work for me. Mind you, I didn't talk to the joiner himself, I talked to his new boss, who has a building firm. The builder himself is booked up for the next seven months. Anyway, he says fitting new doors and surrounds sounds straightforward and no trouble. Hurrah!

Then I made an appointment to get my hair done. My hairdresser is also terribly busy, but the receptionist booked me in for his lunchhour, next Friday.

Then I went to the DIY shop and got a carpet-cleaning gizmo to fit on my wallpaper steamer. This is because I couldn't find anyone to clean my carpets. The only carpet-cleaner who even answered his phone quoted me £140 in a very grumpy way and then said he probably wouldn't be able to get the stains out. This is without even seeing the carpet! I pointed out that his Yellow Pages advert said "stain removal a specialty" and that made him even grumpier. The steam-cleaning attachment cost £16 and doesn't come with a grumpy man attached. It's worth a try, I guess. Actually the stains don't look too bad, though I might have another go at a couple of them with the Carpet Rescue spray before I let loose with the steamer.

At the DIY shop I also bought a nice stainless steel garden fork. I've been making do with a spade, but I really do need a fork. It's lovely.

The other major DIY event looming is that I've decided I really must paint the livingroom. I changed the red sofa covers for the natural ones the other day (the sun has started streaming in through the french doors) and the wallpaper now looks really horrid. I'm going to do it pale green, same as my old flat. The natural sofa looks great, very swish.

It must be spring that's bringing on this great burst of activity. If it's not raining tomorrow I'll get out into the garden and do some tidying up.

:: wed site

I've spent most of the day working on Pinky's new website -- I've been working on it for just about a year, I think, and I just needed to sit down for a few hours and get it working smoothly. It doesn't look quite the way I wanted it to, but I'm quite pleased with it. I hope Pinky and Suzanne like it.

Otherwise I just walked Bertie a couple of times and had dinner. I went to Blackness, because (oh, this is so dumb!) I got a kilo of carrots for 10p at the supermarket last night and thought the carthorse might like some. Ahem, she did. When she saw me standing by the fence with a carrier bag she actually galloped over, which freaked Bertie out completely.

He got a snack later on though, when we met an elderly gent who used to race greyhounds and now has a portly Westie. He also had a bag of really tasty dog treats in his pocket. I thought Bertie might abandon me, he was so taken with this man. It was mutual!

:: should I stay or should I go?

I'm seriously considering moving to another isp. There are a lot of reasons to move on; but there are equally compelling reasons to stay.

What's tipping me towards change at the moment is that Easynet's webmail, which I use when I'm at work, has developed some kind of intermittent fault; it's possibly at this end, ie to do with the firewall or whatever, but Easynet's techs are baffled.

So I'm using another webmail service (hushmail) in the meantime.

The webmail problem is just the latest in a line of problems. None of them alone is enough to persuade me to give up on Easynet, but en masse they're getting pretty irritating.

Like when I discovered on uploading the famous helicopter photos that I'd exceeded the 10Mb size limit on a website I'd previously believed was unlimited. Easynet very generously upped the limit to 20Mb -- which I notice from their website is now what they're limiting all users to. It's too complicated to go into here, but the kerfuffle meant I had to move my site from the hockadilly.co.uk "free domain" back to the clunkily-named easyweb.easynet/bja domain, where apparently I can still have unlimited space, doled out in grudging increments. So that makes having a free domain name fairly pointless (though I still have an index page there). Another irritation about that whole business was that there are two different methods for moving files around; FTP for the easyweb space and Microsoft webfolders for hockadilly. Why? Just to annoy me, I think.

The other reason for going is that by today's standards, Easynet is reasonably expensive. It's £12 a month and I pay for phone calls on top of that when I connect. By contrast, I could get 50Mb of webspace at Abel Gratis free, and they offer a bunch of techie stuff like my own cgi-bin, PHP, MySQL and ASP to boot, plus they allow e-commerce on the webspace, which Easynet doesn't without an extra charge (or so I was told ... their website implies that it's jim-dandy). Also, Abel's tech support is on a local rate call, which is something you have to watch out for -- some isps charge 50p a minute for support.

Abel is a Scottish isp, it has a lot of other services with varying rates. But I'm a tiny bit dubious, mainly because it's a small firm and if it goes belly-up I'll have to pack up my tent and move on again.

Another option is BT. Their Openworld Anytime account seems pricey at £16 a month, but you get 50Mb of space and you don't have to pay for connection for up to 150 hours a month. And I wouldn't be on that much. Oh, I've just checked my last phone bill and from 20 Nov to 12 Feb I was only online for about 20 hours in total. Hmmm, I might be better to go for no monthly charge and pay for my connection on the regular local rate. I'd still be saving a bit over Easynet though, and I'd be able to go online a lot more without worrying about the extra cost.

The reasons for not moving are that I'd have to change my email address and website url (though this blogspot address wouldn't change) and go through all the palaver of moving the site and informing everyone of the change. What a pain! But it's starting to look like a worthwhile effort. Having the blogspot makes it all a bit less hassle.

:: a very trying week

Have you ever read Why Cats Paint? Well Bertie took a leaf out of that particular book last week, only he gave it a twist -- he used body fluids.

In the bedroom: Jackson Pollock, on one of the walls as well as across the floor. In the spare room: a Daliesque touch -- melting clocks, in a variety of colours and media. And for the hallway -- Hockney's A Bigger Splash, what else. The earlier works, created in the livingroom, kitchen and diningroom, employed an impasto technique, giving a rugged, painterly effect. The later works weren't as flamboyant, due to a shortage of materials, but were perhaps more subtle and detailed. The addition of specks of blood to the final works hinted at the artist's pain.

Yeah, that was a real good surprise for me at 1:30am. Thanks Bertie. I wasn't cross with him though, because he'd obviously been through hell (and back, a couple of times), and I think he was quite distressed at having made such a huge mess. It took me two hours to clean it up after work on Tuesday night, and there was a fresh splatter on Wednesday morning -- on a previously unmarked stretch of carpet of course.

So anyway I dragged him off to the vet in the morning and spent £30 on antibiotics and special dogfood. Leaking car: £20; leaking dog: £30. Something wrong somewhere.

In case of further problems, he spent the next few nights imprisoned in the livingroom, with the (shit-stained) Persian carpet removed and the sofa pushed against the door that doesn't close. He had also crapped on both his sheepskins, but not on his actual bed, so at least he had somewhere clean to sleep. He wasn't allowed to eat anything for 24 hours, which he found deeply unsettling. He was mightily relieved to get a few spoonfuls of the dietetic delight the vet supplied -- it seemed to be mostly rice -- and even more relieved to finally get back to normal feeding, including treats.

However, it hasn't stopped him trying to eat shit -- which is what I think caused the whole gut-explosion drama in the first place. Apparently when it's frozen it's mighty tasty; he's even going for it now the thaw's set in. There's one little dried-up scrape of poo on the footpath that he always tries to gnaw off, every day. I've left it there as a training aid, but so far he's learned nothing. The vet says it's not uncommon, and she also says dogs don't seem to make the connection between eating rotten, foul food and gut-ache.

So anyway, after all the horror of scrubbing doggie-do and vomit out of the carpets and getting up early for the vet and early/difficult shifts at work, by the end of the week I was knackered. Yesterday I did yet more loads of laundry and hoovered everything in the house, including Bertie (I used the upholstery brush; he didn't seem to mind too much). The carpets upstairs still look pretty bad, I'll have to get them professionally cleaned.

Otherwise, everything is fine.

:: catching my breath

Whew! it's been all go since I said, "More later! Andrew just showed up..." on Friday night.

Cooking oil: well, I just think that if you can run cars (and presumably trains and much else) on cooking oil, the government should be carpeting the land in oil-producing crops, not fighting wars over dwindling, non-replaceable stocks of highly-polluting fossil fuels. That's all.

So on Saturday, all fired up, I headed off to do a spot of protesting. Andrew and Bertie walked me to the station; neither of them came along -- Andrew was too ill (flu) and Bertie too cowardly. The man in the Dalmeny ticket office sucked his teeth; "Are you sure you want to go to Glasgow? It's chaos..." And so it was. There was a huge, stationary queue at Waverley station, and I was in it for about an hour. However, eventually, I got to Glasgow. I'd managed to leave my map behind and feared I'd never find the SECC rally-point. Walked out of the station and thought, hmmm, I wonder if those thousands people waving placards and shouting slogans know the way? I joined at George Square, just down from the station, and the march stretched as far as the eye could see in both directions. I found myself behind the Scottish Socialist Party banner, with a very lively bunch of people.

I'd had a couple of calls on the train from my old boss, who was on his way to the rally with his wife, so I called him when we arrived at the SECC and got vague directions on where to look for him. He's very tall, so he was easy to spot! They left soon after that, and I declined their invitation to join them in going to Loch Lomond, or even just going for a drink, because I wanted to listen to some of the speeches and generally soak up the atmosphere. I heard the Socialist MSP Tommy Sheridan speak, quite the fiery orator ("Brothers and Sisters!") and someone else who didn't speak up well enough for me to hear. I roamed around looking for people I knew (didn't see anyone, though they were there) and admiring the endless variety of protest (Squirrels for Peace: Nuts to Bombs).

Finally I was weary enough for home and made the long trek back to the station. "Would passengers travelling to Edinburgh please begin queuing on Platform 6," said the tannoy. There was only a tiny queue! Hurrah! But it was a trick -- "start queuing" meant queue at Platform 6 to hear someone say "go out into the car park and join the real queue". It snaked all the way round a really large area! However, it moved quickly, so in the end it was only half an hour or so before I was sitting in a train seat, opening my flask of coffee.

Andrew phoned; he was on his way back to my place from town (no jeering, he really was sick) and said he'd take Bertie for a walk and meet me at Dalmeny or thereabouts. And we timed it perfectly.

After a meal (pork and noodle stir-fry, cooked by me), we decided to go to see Gangs of New York. We left it a bit late and ended up sitting down in the last seats -- front row, far corner -- just as the film started. Despite the neck-cricking view and the violent content, I enjoyed it. It's a part of American history I knew nothing about, and it's very well-made. I'm a fan of Daniel Day-Lewis, and he acted everyone else off the screen. I hope he gets the Oscar, he deserves it.

Sunday, after walking Bertie, we went to IKEA. Andrew's in nest-building mode and wanted to get some ideas for interior decor. We didn't buy anything -- I couldn't bear the thought of standing in another queue, and Andrew was getting the train home -- but had a good time looking at everything. Andrew hadn't been before and was a bit overwhelmed by the totality of the IKEA experience. Yes, you can furnish an entire home at IKEA. We had intended to have lunch at the cafeteria, but it was too crowded, so we just grabbed a hotdog and fled.

On the way home we stopped at Holyrood Park to walk Bertie. (Yes he had been left in the car, but it was freezing cold, so that's all right. And he enjoyed his IKEA hotdog.) During the walk we saw some crows (or are they ravens? I can't tell) curling on the frozen pond. At least that's what it looked like they were doing. After watching them for a while, we realised they were trying to crack open chunks of ice, thinking they were snails. They even fought over them, poor things. They were flying up and dropping the chunks on to the frozen surface, pecking at them to see if they were "open", then dropping them again.

Back home I cooked Andrew a quick omlette and drove him to the station for his train. Then I had a quick breather before going off to meet Fiona for another film, Two Weeks Notice. Her choice, not mine, and I can't say I enjoyed it. It was ok, there were a couple of ok jokes, but it was ... dumb. And I hate Huge Grunt. However, it was nice seeing Fiona again and catching up over a drink.

Monday morning I was up at sparrow fart, walking Bertie in the permafrost before going into town on the bus to see my craniosacral therapist, Joanna, and then on to the hospital for the follow-up MRI scan. Both involved lying down, which was welcome. I was also supposed to take my car in to the garage to have its oil leak diagnosed but put that off due to lack of time. After the scan I went to a bookshop and bought some poetry (a Fleur Adcock collection and Milton's Paradise Lost) and Computing Projects for Visual Basic. I also got some music, a cheapo early music compilation and a collection of Persian classical music.

When I got home I walked Bertie and had something to eat and then pretty much conked out. I gave Bertie some leftovers, which apparently had an electrifying effect on his innards. He had to go out into the garden urgently at 3am and again at 7:30am. Sigh.

This morning I finally took the car to the garage. The mechanic had said he was too busy to fix it but would see what was wrong and book it in. He took a look, measured the oil (almost empty) and said it was so bad he would fix it today. I was imagining the worst, but it was only the oil filter, which was so old it was corroded through. I was "this close" (tiny amount) to a catastrophic engine failure, apparently. But hurrah, it was only £20 for a new filter and two litres of oil.

And now I'm back at work. I was on my own tonight, so it was mega-busy all the way through. I have a last go at learning the new system on Thursday, then we start training on Monday. After that it will be insanely busy for six weeks or so, training and trouble-shooting the new system on top of this job. But there's my lovely holiday to look forward to...

:: march pix

No time to catch up just yet, but here are some photos from the march on Saturday:


The queue in Waverly Station, Edinburgh -- the first of much queuing..


I'd forgotten my map of Glasgow, but fortunately the march was easy to find ... I just joined in.


It was huge. You can't really tell from the photo but it stretched as far as the eye could see...


In both directions.


It was freezing, but Scots are hardy folk when their dander is up.


At the rally point, the SECC, the crowd was massive, and still arriving.


Police estimates were 30,000, organisers said it was more like 80,000 or more.


Tony Blair was supposed to speak at the conference at 2pm, but chickened out and spoke at 10am, the time the marchers gathered at Glasgow Green. Here, we're listening to Tommy Sheridan, the Scottish Socialist MP. Excellent speech, stirring stuff.


Some Iraqis were there too.


There were lots of dogs on the march. Bertie would have hated it -- too noisy for my delicate pooch.

:: well i'll be jiggered

It did work ... kind of. I can post here by email. Kind of.

Today was lovely. Andrew arrived last night but he'd gone to bed by the time I got home. I got up early this morning but he'd gone out shopping: for flowers and a Valentine's card, the sweetie! Awww, shucks! Then we had a long yacketty-yack breakfast, catching up on everything. After walking the dog we went into town for lunch, which was delicious ... that restaurant's a find. We both had "petits pates" for starters, little lamb-mince pies that were like more sophisticated versions of Scotch pies (mutton pies from Mosgiel, for kiwis). Then Andrew had squid pockets with a seafood stuffing and I had a stunning dish of farmed rabbit with creamy mash and dreamy veg. All the waiting staff were lovely, the decor was stylish and the chef kept popping out to see how we were getting on. He even shook hands with us as we left and thanked us for coming!


After that we went shopping for a mobile phone for Andrew and then I went to work. Did I mention it was a sunny day? Heavy frost on the ground, but crisp and dry. Andrew went home and walked Bertie, and right now he's out on a date. He may show up here (at my work) later for a ride home, depending on how the date went and how he feels -- he's got a heavy cold, poor man.

Work was manic, beyond manic at times, but I enjoyed it. A daily deadline suits me; if I had a weekly one I'd be bound to procrastinate and end up in a mad rush, but this way I have to be disciplined to get everything done. Very little time for emailing and blogging, unfortunately.

I'm pretty sure I'm going to the protest tomorrow (or later today, now it's after midnight). My former boss is going, and so is his wife, even though she's not feeling very well, because she's so aerated about the prospect of war. So I'll wrap up warm and pack a flask and my hillwalking whistle. The plan was to drown out Tony Blair's speech at the SECC, but apparently he's going to speak earlier now. I'll probably go straight to the SECC rather than to Glasgow Green -- the march will have finished by the time I get to the starting point!

One thing I remembered today in relation to the whole war-on-Iraq scenario is the story about running your car on cooking oil.

More later! Andrew just showed up...

testing

An experiment. I'll be amazed if it works.

---------------------------------------------------
This mail sent through http://www.easynetdial.co.uk

:: so anyway...

I've been trying to remember what on earth I've been doing that's kept me so busy.

I went to Ingliston Market on Sunday, always entertaining. It's shabby and shady and chaotic, but also cheerful and brash, and there's usually something interesting going on. I got peanuts and fat treats for the birds (over two dozen regulars now; happily the starlings seems to have deserted me but sadly so have the ring-necked doves) and visited my favourite computer software stall, then fell right off my moral high horse (which is actually more of a moral pony) and bought a couple of pirated videos. I make a fairly feeble point of not buying anything pirated if it's something I could easily afford, so normally I wouldn't get a video. But hey, they were films that aren't out on video yet and I hadn't seen them in the cinema.

I bought the Banger Sisters and Star Trek: Nemesis. I got my come-uppance with Star Trek, or Star Drek as it should be called. The sound quality is rubbish, it's as if someone has taken a video camera into the theatre and filmed it, and the visuals are muddy and blurred. It's not helped by a clunker of a plot and grotty acting. Boo! And I speak as a Star Trek fan -- I once queued up outside a science fiction bookshop to get the signature of Chakotay (Ellen made me! And he wasn't wearing his uniform, or his tattoo). The Banger Sisters is ok though -- it's like a normal video and it's a lively film, though a bit cliched. I haven't finished watching it yet, I haven't had time!

Weird dog story: Regular readers may recall the story of Sandy and his dogs, Amber the alsatian and Cassie the poodle. Shortly before he died last year, Sandy asked Pat, a neighbour, if she would take his dogs if anything happened to him. At the time she had one, a fairly elderly black lab cross. Sandy helped her find a nice white alsatian as a "replacement". So when he died, she suddenly had four dogs. First to go was her original dog, which was expected. Then Cassie was put down -- she was about 14, so again, no big surprise.

The other day I bumped into Pat and she only had Amber with her -- Kita, her other alsatian, had been put down after suffering severe fits and finally going into what the vet said was a state of constant fitting. She was only 18 months old, and she was doing well under Pat's care. She'd been kept shut up in an upstairs flat with very few walks before Pat got her, and she'd made great progress at learning to walk quietly on a lead and not bark hysterically at people and other dogs. She was lovely. Amber's always thrilled to see Bertie, relieved to see he's still alive I guess. She used to bark at him, but now she licks his face. Unfortunately he misinterpreted this as a come-on, and made his first attempt to try it on with a bitch. Pat threatened him with castration, so I guess he and Amber won't be allowed to play together any more!

Work has been great, I've been enjoying learning the new software. We start training the other staff a week on Monday. Oh, next Monday I have my follow-up MRI scan. Mum, if the CDs you've sent arrive in time I'm taking one with me: they have a very limited selection there, and you have music playing (with earphones) because of the noise the machine makes. They also talk to you via the earphones, so you have to wear them.

:: safety first

I bought a car restraint for Bertie today, after reading an article about how an unrestrained rear-seat passenger can kill the driver in an accident. Apparently even at town speeds, braking suddenly can send your back-seat pal flying into you with enormous force. There's also a fairly scary ad I saw in a cinema recently that shows a boy killing his mother in a prang. Lots of blood and screaming. Then there's this, from Pet Planet. Baby elephant! A baby elephant with bony elbows!

It's also for Bertie's own good -- a few times he's ended up in a heap in the footwell after a brisk traffic manoeuvre on my part. And just the other day he was panting out the window when he fell over, and caught his top jaw on the glass. I thought he'd broken a tooth, he carried on so much, but I think it was just fright and maybe a sore tongue.

Anyway, from now on we'll be motoring in complete safety. Heh.

:: busy week

It's getting to be spring -- snowdrops are out, the daffs are in bud and I today saw a branch about to burst into blossom -- but it's turned cold again. And it's muddy too, which means that although I cleaned all the floors with astounding thoroughness on Monday, they're already all dirty again. Cleaner than they were though, so that's something.

That's the other thing about spring -- sunlight finds my house again, and shows me just how clarty it is. Grimy windows! (On the inside; the outsides are now benefitting from hired help) Drifts of dog hair! Muddy paw prints! It'd be a relatively clean house if it weren't for Bertie, I have to say. For a clean dog he's very grubby.

Big treat for him tonight though -- Andrew's arriving! He does love to have visitors. We're going to lunch tomorrow in town, at La Garrigue. I haven't been there before but it gets good reviews and looks nice from the outside. And it's French! I like the French again since they started standing up to the Americans. I even forgive them slightly for the Rainbow Warrior.

Speaking of which, I'm thinking of going to Glasgow on Saturday for the peace march. It's a bit of a long haul, and it's early in the day, but I'm annoyed enough about the whole Iraq thing to make the effort. I first went on a peace march in 1972, how about that! A guy at work says his first was in 1961 -- we're just a bunch of old peaceniks.

I've finally uploaded the slightly gussied-up version of my website and it works ... it's not dramatically different, but the coding is cleaner. Yes, that will be a relief for those visitors appalled by my messy coding.

:: Snow pix

Here are some photos from the weekend:

First a "white hell" shot of Bertie in a slight blizzard. It was quite dark, but I turned the flash off after discovering I'd taken a photo of lots of bright white lumps. 

And a few from Cramond: 

 

Bright and sunny, but snow right to the water's edge.

Brrr. On the left, across the River Almond, the little Cramond ferryboat is tied up ... you can't see it, it's too dark. It's closed until further notice - ie forever - which is a shame. It was lovely being rowed across the river for 50p. 

The goose in the foreground and the swan just off to the side are obviously King Pins of Cramond. They had followed a couple with a small, nervous dog all the way from the boat sheds, quite a distance, walking quite slowly because of the slippery snow, but menacingly in a Jaws "dum da dum da dum da" kind of way. Bertie was terrified when the swan hissed at him, amusing considering he'd been excitedly chasing swans just the day before.

:: winter wonderland

Well I got my wish -- I was walking Bertie in the Braid Hills park when it started snowing seriously, on Sunday that was. There's still snow in my back yard, but only because it doesn't get much sun in winter. We had some good walks over the weekend. Saturday I drove out to Gullane and walked along the Bents past the golf links. Then on the way home we stopped off at Holyrood Park. Sunday was Braid Hills, and Monday Cramond -- where snow was lying on the sand, right down to the water's edge.

Saturday's visit to Holyrood Park resulted in me booking a holiday to Greece. I was just loading Bertie into the car (wet and in disgrace after dashing into the pond in pursuit of swans and nearly catching them) when a young woman came up and asked for a lift. She'd climbed Arthur's Seat from the other side of the park and had gotten lost coming down. It was almost sunset and she wasn't wearing a jacket, poor thing. So I gave her a lift, and it turned out she was Greek! I said I was thinking of visiting Greece, blah blah, and when I said Halki, she nearly leapt out of her seat with excitement. "Oh that would be perfect! You'd love it!" etc. So I've booked! I'm going! It'll be May 7, for a week. The flight (to Rhodes, the nearest airport) leaves from Gatwick, so I'm also going to spend some time in London catching up with friends and seeing the sights.

I'll post some photos tomorrow, of snow and swans.