Making plans

Canary Wharf, March 2015

A significant event took place this week - Tech-boy over the road dealt with my PC! Mr A recommended him and made the arrangements, and he took my slower-than-a-snail laptop and reinvigorated it with a new hard disk and operating system. It now boots in real time rather than geological time and the little issues it had with launching various applications have mostly disappeared. My PC hero is the eldest son of one of our neighbours, keen on motorbikes, and Mr A has let him use the garage and helped with various matters relating to internal combustion engines and their associated motorcycles. He is also delightfully polite and helpful. I have given him more money than he strictly deserves (he was happy to do the job for nothing) on the basis that I will pester him at any time when I have technology-related problems.

The only slight impediment to boundless joy is the need to reinstall a few key applications and transfer a load of data over from the old hard disk. It's not going too badly, although I had forgotten how much I had tweaked and tailored the interface. Just when I need to do something (scan, print, edit photos etc) I realise that something is missing e.g. the printer needs installing or the software application isn't there. There will be many situations over the next few days and weeks that will catch me out. But on the whole it's a great improvement.

So two nights with no PC and then a sunny weekend meant quite a lot of work in the garden, filling rubble sacks with vegetation - one carload has gone to the dump already. The lawn is mowed and strimmed and further operations are planned, including the deforestation of the paved areas and possibly training the wisteria so that it doesn't take over the whole garden. I missed my opportunity to prune the rose, so it is forming a wall between our garden and the neighbour's that is now about 15 feet high. There's a lot of rose bush out there.

It has been raining quite hard on and off so I have put off the next stage of guerrilla gardening, and resolved to do a whole lot of the desk work that has been waiting along with further indoor spring cleaning. I have had a bit of a blitz and have cleaned many of the windows that have not seen soap and water since our house was painted, and that was a few years ago. It is still a novelty to be able to view the the scene of devastation that is the garden through clean windows.

Desk work included an assault on holiday plans, where dates and/or accommodation had not been finalised. Both are clearer now for holidays in May, June and July, there is already a firm plan for New Year and I'll look at a ski holiday for 2016 at a later date. Now I'm busy reading a travel guide book and websites with tourist information. I'm also spending next weekend in the town where I work, because I'm often talking to patients who assume I know all about the shops, cafes, restaurants and pubs in the area. So I'm going to have a good look around and get familiar with at least some of the local attractions.

It feels as though I have made a lot of positive progress on putting my life in order, which makes me feel pretty good.