Op + 4. Getting out and about

 After dropping off a few goodies to Pirate, I went to Kilmarnock for some chiropractic treatment...one un-achey shoulder, and my lower back is gradually improving every time I go.. treatment finished off with a big hug...de-stressing me! He is a great friend...and a good musician as well.

I managed a brisk walk in the town centre first....

Couldn't miss this one for Cro....

And the swimmers in the main shopping street..I think that street it built over a river..

There are a few others dotted around the centre of the town, all related to it's history.

Back to Ayr, where the laptop has gone to computer hospital. It has decided to turn itself off. If they can get it going ok, it's operating system needs updating..which it would normally do automatically... usually it asks you first... unfortunately the working but of its brain...not the bit the user uses...is full for some reason, so hasn't been doing it. So I am on Linux 90.  

Linux has just updated to version 123.   Which I need for Ancestry as they won't even accept version 122.  Much discussion has been going on on farcebook groups about this. It also sounds as if with all the increased work, their servers might be creaking under an overload...

Then up to Cumnock...a nice new pair of jeans (mens...made better!) from an op shop...£7.50, I don't mind that, thankyou!!  Next a visit to Mary's Fabrics for pricing curtain lining and rufflette to take the curtain hooks. A lovely small local shop with people who know and love what they sell!!

On to Mauchline to "nae sae new" ( not so new) the secondhand emporium in a four storey feed mill.  They hadn't got what I need for the kitchen, but it was good to see the friends who run it and to see them busy too.

Back home for a rest...check in with Pirate to see if anything was needed..and over to see him by 4. Then we watched the rugby, the Calcutta Cup from Murrayfield, in Edinburgh, where Scotland beat England...30-21 I think..in the day room. With staff popping their heads around the door every now and again to check the score!!

It's good to see Pirate walking again, even with a frame..which they have extended tall enough, thankfully. Small steps in the right direction.

Back home under the full Snow Moon..at her furthest from Earth...to catch the next programme in the series of New Zealand by Train...

Tidying and reducing

 I think I have found a way around the computer and printer not talking to each other....I have been battling through this for a day and a half....and remembered that I could use WiFi.....and just after 10pm I found the email. 

That will be tomorrow afternoon's job!

Meanwhile I have started the painful job of rehoming my old friends......books.....

Slow progress

 Every day at the moment seems to be a bit of this and a bit of that, never really getting a decent job done satisfactorily.

Saturday mornings we...or rather I..listen to the Out of Doors" programme on Radio Scotland. ( He slept through it, after making us a cup of tea....) That is 6.30-8am.  An interesting programme covering...well, out of doors stuff!!..with the added Mystery Noise, which this week was unsurprisingly a Japanese Macaque monkey. ( One went walkabout a couple of days ago...)

By 9 am I had had enough radio listening...so up to finish making breakfast and put the house to rights...Pirate eventually got up by 10!! 

We needed to see our landlord for some grant application paperwork to be signed. He lives fifteen miles away..and we were there by 12.30...he wasn't there, but his workshop worker was...

We decided to go for lunch at a friend's cafe in the local small town near his village...and caught him on the way back.

Paper signed, we will give that to the surveyor who will look at our lack of roof insulation...saving postage!

The water board were at our neighbours house, clearing the drains for her..they sent the camera down and along from our drain to check...nice and clean, thankfully...and he put the collar back on the drainpipe properly for us as well. 

Then Pirate decided that a good siesta was overdue...and I thought great..I can get on with the Ancestry research...but came to a stop after two minutes.

I need to get information printed as well as downloaded...if the computer crashes terminally, I don't want to lose anything or have to go back through Ancestry pages again to find things.

However the computer and printer are not communicating with each other...

Sometimes I can just go in and print....this time it is "getting printer information"....even though I have okayed the printer on the system.

And what does "print using the system dialogue" mean?

I think I need a resident IT assistant/nanny.....

On other research matters.. isn't it fascinating how handwriting has changed over the centuries, when looking at documents....

Testing

 Life is testing us.. doesn't it always!

Pirate had an interesting conversation with the Macmillan nurse today.

From what I gather, he can have pain and manage that....or have a stoma.

That is what I had already thought...but I cannot say that directly to him, of course. 

He will decide mid February.   Unless of course the pain gets much stronger.

I am being tested by computer systems. 

We have our ancestry dna results...now to work out how to invite my daughter ( my genealogy webmaster) and myself to share these and all my research so far. 

I have her instructions.  I wish we were both sitting by this computer to do this, as I am scared if making a mistake and losing the lot!!

And we have eye tests this afternoon.

Testing times!!

Foxton

 Our rest stop was at Foxton...we had intended to have an overnight there, but the campsite has changed hands....and we just wanted to get to our base!!

It is an interesting town, a Māori settlement where Dutch settlers came.

The  i-site has a good café, art exhibition, library and an exhibition about the history of people here, Māori and Dutch. 

We went around there, and also the flax milling museum beside it.

I will add photos tomorrow if I can...the internet is being rather variable, and I need time to do my Duolingo lesson before it disappears!! (301 days so far.!!!....)

Print progress

 This evening I have been trying to remember how to add to my website...then severely editing images to get them on the newspost section....it isn't much, but it took well over an hour!

Hopefully I will remember next time! The aim is to add something at least twice a week...which is also incentive to do more drawing and printing!newspost ....sigh....no, I am not moving that....enough battling with IT on a smallish touch screen for one day!!

Bother!

Stalled.....and Turn It Off And On Again did not work.

Ah well, less weight to carry, and we made do with the old tablet last trip...this will have to be site when I see Brother next....next year 🙁

Mild frustration

At those wordpress blogs that insist that I sign in or open a wordpress account to comment.
Actually I do have one for my website ( thanks bro!!) But the password for that doesn't seem to be the one required.....
So if I don't comment but I do follow..you know why!!

Aoraki

I should have had the camera handy...but at times the experience is too good...
Twizel is in a dark Skies area. The moon..full? ..was beautiful all night and we could see the starry sky through the roof window of the campercar.
We woke at 6.30 and the rising sun painted the mountains orange as the moon set behind them.
We were off at 7.30 with about 300km to go..and we made it in 4 hours with time enough for a shower and change before lunch in the village cafe.
These are the views of Aoraki, New Zealand's highest mountain that the Pirate managed to take as we travelled.

Not in the right order..the tablet computer has just changed how I get to the
images...sigh...I'll be glad to return to a laptop and proper camera in April!!!
I wanted to put another image on..now it says unable to because of low memory..but doesn't say where.. defeated by technology again.

Heading Inland

We left Blenheim in sunshine this morning and headed up the Wairau Valley.
Lunch was by Lake Rotoiti as it started raining. We left At Arnaud and travelled through sunshine and showers to Murchison for coffee and a wander around Dust and Rust..a fascinating mine of antiques and collectibles..and usables!
As we headed towards the Lewis Pass the mountain weather really came down...sbowers with rain in between!!

Apologies for the jumbled pictures and less than descriptive writing...I'm not getting on with the tablet as well as I'd hoped!!
Hanmer Springs is very wet! And very touristy..but after 350 km we were glad to stop.

back into routine...sort of...

Easing..or rather rushing...from Summer to Autumn hasn't been easy.
We had a lovely warm two weeks away, but returning to the cold and wet has been hard going!!

I've been working through the bags of fruit..12 jars each of damson, and damson and apple jam. Four pounds of damsons in the freezer and another four pounds in the fridge.
Sorting through the pears, many are well bruised (after dropping from 20 to 30 feet...) have hard lumps in them and what looks like codling moth damage.
Two trays of pear slices in the dryer with two of apple rings,and a bowl of pear bits in water and lemon juice for a pudding tonight.
I'm hunting for a fresh fig and date chutney recipe....
Plenty more apples to be sliced for drying and juiced for freezing. I might try one batch of cider....

Pirate is fitting shelves in our kitchen cupboard...not the easiest of jobs as its 134 centimetres long.. and is at its widest 40 centimetres....and has an ordinary door to access it in the middle!
Much banging and a modicum of swearing...and stops for tea and toast with vegemite!!
It will mean the kitchen bench will be (fairly!) uncluttered and the preserves and cordials can be stored in the kitchen cupboards instead of the living room sideboard.

We've had one half-day garden job...paid in kind...overnight stay, supper, breakfast and lunch and a bottle of Rioja wine!  Four others are waiting for the grass to dry (some hope!) but that does mean things are getting done here.   I'm planning on moving the fruit bushes from their pots into the present deep beds, and starting on new beds for veges...so they need to be ready for the autumn planting of garlic,onion sets and broad beans.

I've had weird computer problems since updating the linux/ubuntu operating system...some have been solved by changing from firefox to chromium browser...but then have disappeared! I'll keep firefox as a backup in case of more problems.  However it sits on the "front page" for five minutes before flashing through a problems report page so fast that you can't read it...the general consensus is that something is interfering with plymouth, the front page programme...a plug-in or some such that didn't get deleted during the system upgrade... I have access to people with knowledge of linux, but not in person here!

Everything is eating into our Travelling to NZ cash..getting wed, keeping the car on the road, possibly getting a new laptop (or tablet).....all sorts...but we are determined..Pirate is 80 next year and reckons that this will, sadly, be his last trip to the other side of the globe.

So we are back into a sort of routine, ticking along, trying to keep warm and fit.

Whilst away I caught up with a potter friend...and now I know how to get the flue on the kiln!!...Now I need some breeze blocks to start the job....

computers...again!!

Blogging has been on the back burner, as we've been busy riding bikes...and driving...I've done over 2,500 km on four wheels in the past fortnight....
The Pirate was only out of the top 6 in his World Masters events once...and then he was 7th! He won one bronze and one silver in the track events on the Avantidrome in Cambridge and I won a gold and two silvers there.
We have caught up with most of our old friends and made many new ones. If all goes well we'll be back for Summer 2018/9.......
I've managed to cook the battery of the tablet computer on top of all that... When you plug it in to re-charge, and instead of seeing a grey battery shape filling up with blue, you see a thin red line at the bottom, and a large yellow, black edged triangle with a large black exclamation mark.......I think that the battery, at least, is dead!!!!
Now we have landed back in Whanganui to return borrowed kit and say farewell for now to friends I can use the i-site computer and catch up online, before we head off home on Thursday.

garden inspiration, Pollard Park, Blenheim

Apologies for the layout today, sometimes the tablet computer has a mind of its own....but we did have a good hour wandering around the park. The Potager was especially inspiring, having seen how it has developed in the pastfour years. It has got me thinking how the garden at home will change in May...

computers continued...

The laptop is sick...but working with a cable,not Wi Fi....
so we are up and limping..

Time for a new laptop come July...the fan is working overtime even when nothing is being used, so that is a hardware problem.

Computer problems yet again

Sorry for the break in writing...modem problems now sorted by my brother, but it caused the operating system  to have crashed and now isn't communicating with anything.
At least the tablet is working, if slowly..it is far from new! But at least it does do things..and I have to learn how to use it as well!!