Home life

Garden in Norfolk, July 2011

Outside work all is well, although you may have notices that my reading time has been reduced almost to vanishing point. Before work started: seven books in a month. After work started: just three, and that's been while I'm working only four days a week. I've had time to go to the dentist and the hairdresser and the optician, where I've been investigating a return to contact lenses. Their records show that I stopped wearing contact lenses nine years ago, which surprised me. I've enjoyed the feeling of being rid of glasses during a test phase, and the badminton didn't suffer too badly, with only a few complete misses, so I'm going to give it a try for a while.

Mr A: in brief, he has been working hard on his Open University course, doing some interesting website work including with the publisher of an online magazine, and dealing with his mother's dementia deteriorating to the point that his father has actually asked for help. He has also been running the Lola Towers Catering Department very effectively indeed, except at weekends when I do the cooking.

Meanwhile, Lola II and Mr M have been off on an overseas holiday. There is an Irish saying I've heard, when someone is extremely hungry, that "the stomach thinks the throat's been cut." In a similar vein, I've started to think that my mobile phone is broken - it hasn't rung for more than a week. On the bright side, I've had a couple of Skype conversations with Lola II - this new hi-tech world is extraordinary. I've commissioned a blog post on their return, so we may hear more.

In other family news, I have delivered two new (refurbished) PCs to mum and dad, although I have only set one up, since the other cannot drive dad's ancient monitor which is currently being driven from a PC card that is too big for the case of the new machine. And his keyboard has a PS2 connector rather than USB. And it took me more than 12 hours to get mum up to speed on the new machine, and I need a rest before doing that again. The computer now takes a blink of an eye to boot up a browser, rather than about 5 minutes; it felt like most of the 12 hours was spent sitting watching the little hourglass revolve on the screen.

I have installed remote control software on both machines, although I still have a small problem because all the sound from the remote machine is re-routed to me, which means that as soon as the remote control is initiated, the remote machine can no longer hear me using Skype. Which is jolly annoying, and I can't find a setting to stop it happening, and the software Help website is down for maintenance. But it is generally wonderful to be able to sort out little problems at a distance.