The Bird Man of Cumbria is Coming

You will be excited to learn that I was finally able to finally pry my laptop from the hands of the Computer Doktor.

This was no easy task – he was reluctant to part with it as he was building a Jeff Koons Puppy replica out of laptops and my Dell was forming part of the left eyebrow.

In recognition of the six trips I made to his establishment he gave me a €30 deduction from his usual fee. I must say that it now works very well indeed although I do of course have to load all the damn software again.

Oh – and to all those people who wondered why I remained so calm – it was of course a second laptop and I have another smaller one that I can drag around with me – in addition to my iPad which goes with me everywhere.

I am in the process of stealing enough money from the housekeeping to buy a MacBook Air and this should happen later in the year. These are expensive so it will take me a while to accumulate this amount of money. Cate gives me no pocket money so I only get what I can steal – which I must say is a substantial amount. It helps if you have sole access to the bank accounts and Cate has to ring you when she needs money to ask you what her PIN is.  

My main PC is of course the iMac but there is some stuff that I cannot do with it – mainly to do with website maintenance and the use of FTP software – for which I still need Windows. I am immensely inept with this type of software and HTML and try to keep things as simple as possible when dealing with websites as I have had some truly awful experiences.

One person called me the ‘magician’ because I kept making his website pages disappear – so I am very careful when dealing with a site which is not mine – and in this case I am maintaining a site for someone else. 

There has to be a way around this and I am working on it but it requires time of which I do not have enough at the moment. You would be surprising the amount of maintenance that is required by a Cate and three Cats - plus photography and Blogging and all the other bits and pieces.

Maalie the Bird Man of Cumbria is coming to see me on Friday before going on to his usual birding spot near Lake Neusiedl. We shall have our usual knees up which consists of a glass or two of red wine, a Wee Dram and an ancient black and white war movie from my vast library of DVDs. Cate will groan quietly (or perhaps loudly) and disappear into her study to work.

Meanwhile in the UN. Two factions are at loggerheads within the various committees charged with the responsibilities of looking at No-Fly Zones for Libya. The ‘Orange Pekoes’ have split with the ‘Earl Greys’ over whether or not the statement condemning the actions of Colonel Gaddafi – due to be released in May – should be a ‘firm’ statement or a ‘strong’ statement. This may slow the release of the statement which is a precursor  to the establishment of any No-Fly Zone – now expected in 2012.