One for the toad...

Five minutes ago Barry jumped as he moved the old divan base in the back
bedroom - and so did the toad who was crouched beneath.

I don't know who was more surprised.

I scooped up the smaller, wartier of the two, and carried it to the
door. It was cool and light and a little cobwebby, and gazed at me with
yellow and brown eyes.

Last seen dragging its dusty tum into the rockery.

"I'm not so keen on toads" said Barry, and fetched his thermos.

Halfway through the day:
-replace the glass in the living room window. DONE.
- scrub and air mattress DONE
- wash the bedroom and living room floors - 1/3 DONE
- stitch and render the interior of the back room - about to start,
after a toad-free teabreak.

Didn't get to make shortbread last night, thanks to an infestation of
ankle-biting rug rats, aka my nieces.
But I did drink whisky, and discover that "Twilight" the movie is as
inane as I had feared.

ok, better now...

I scrubbed down the living room, the last (but one) major patch of black
mould in the house. (there is still quite a bit in the "kitchen"...)
So everything looks just a little less grey and blotchy, and I can get
on with cleaning the floors tomorrow.

While I was on the step ladder scrubbing the wall above the open window
Papa Swallow flew straight into my bobbies. At least there were shock
absorbers to take the impact.

He flew straight out again, and seems to be flying unimpaired...

Jobs tomorrow:
-stitch and render the interior of the back room (the swallows will just
have to cope)
-replace the glass in the living room window (it's been gaffer taped in
place for at least 3 years...)
-wash the bedroom and living room floors
-scrub and air my mattress
-order propane (hot water! Yay!)

Jobs tonight:
Make shortbread, drink whisky, sleep (well)

Not so cheery today

It might be the hacking cough, or the runny nose or dull grey weather,
or the thought that I won't get the cottage clean and habitable before
the end of my week here, but I just don't feel chipper up here at the
moment.

I thinks its just not knowing where to start work next - I'm hitting
dead ends, where I can't clean "this" until "that" is done... and
"that" needs to be fixed, or bleached, or moved...

Barry is at work stitching up the cracks in the back wall, and devising
long term plans to improve the drainage - I'm just very aware that
another summer has slipped by without me spending time up here doing
anything but sweeping and washing and shovelling out bird poo...

Actually - it's definitely the cough. I need whisky. Everything will
look rosier through the bottom of a tumbler of amber fluid!

Northumbrian rain is pretty hard core

Yesterday was all golden light and soft breezes. Today is all green and
grey stair-rods, a solid sheet of water imprisoning me indoor with a
shovel and heaps of beetle infested swallow droppings and an owl wee
tideline.

And swallow mum and swallow dad swooping past my ear. Which is nice.

I need it to stop soon - sometime tomorrow Barry the Builder is going to
try to get his van up through the pasture (past the cows) and start
repining the Victorian half of the cottage, and if the ground is too wet
he's not going to get half-way before he slides to a muddy slushy stop.

to clarify on the subject of owls

The only evidence of owl is the pyramid of pellets, pools of white wee
and drift of feathers around my desk and mantelpiece.

I love the way my housemates have moved up the food chain:

spiders - mice -swallows - weasels - owls...

Now the mice are in the owl pellets, and I am wondering what will move
in next week.

O bugarit - I've got owls in the living room

...and a whole new family of infant swallows in the back bedroom.

Argghhhhh!

It's nicely dull in the country. Its not quite warm, not quite wet, and
I am allergic to something in the vicinity - because my nose explodes
every time the door opens to the outside world. Something damp and
fungusy, probably. Hope it passes soon.

I have a new pet - a pot of fermenting milk. I was given a handful of
Kefir grains, a strange gelatinous mushroomy culture, which lurks in a
plastic pot in my suitcase. Every day I feed it fresh milk, and 24
hours later it gifts me a few glasses of fizzy sour mildly alcoholic
liquid which is oddly addictive. Its nice plain, nicer with a few
berries crushed into it, and now I'm looking for recipes...

Kefir is apparently well known and widely drunk in Russia and Poland -
all and any recipes from that region very welcome!

Back Up Back Up Back Up part 5

The really great discovery to emerge from the whole debacle was that
Mozy delivered on the promise.
I had all my files backed up, even the music files and the stuff I'd
saved just 12 hours before the disaster.

All I needed to do was download Mozy's interface onto the new baby and
log on (I'd forgotten my login details, but mozy emailed those to me
within 5 minutes)

As soon as I logged on I was asked if I wanted to register the new
computer and restore.
It took 24 hours, non stop, but I went home with all my data.

I will never, NOT NEVER, work without a continuous online, offsite
backup EVER again.

And neither should you!

So sleepy...

Didn't get much sleep last night - and now I think the anti-histamines
are kicking in....
- yes, "may cause drowsiness"

I was going to swim, but I think I'd better give that a miss, and get
some zzzzz instead.

Better still, I will be in the Stone Caravan for 10 days from Saturday
night onwards - that's the longest stretch in over a year, and the first
in (cross fingers) warm weather.

grrrrr

I have insect bites on my feet the size of cupcakes. That's the price of
walking through the park at dawn and dusk, watching the geese settle on
the lake. There are beasties lurking in the grass, which leap out and
chomp on my exposed skin.

I look down at my puffy ankles and think "this is what my limbs will look like 40 and more years from now, peeping from under a tartan
rug." It's like gazing down a time-telescope and rather sobering.

I am popping anti-histamines, to stop me from scratching down to the bone.

Back Up Back Up Back Up part 3

I walked into the kitchen carrying the remains of my laptop at 11.30pm.
The lights were all on, and there, at the table, tiptapping at a netbook
was the one person in the house best qualified to understand what had
just happened to me - my step-brother-in-law (I have a highly hyphenated
family) Simon, who 10 years ago guided me through the creation of my
first commercial website.

We fell on the corpse with ghoulish enthusiasm, and dissected it
together, discovering after a very few minutes (and a cup of tea) that
the harddrive had just about ceased to be.

No problem - I could slot a new hard drive in myself, what could that
cost? £30 - £50 max. We hopped on line to check - and learned that the
cheapest HD on offer for my X40 was $285, plus shipping, from the US.

Oh well, so this was going to be one of those expenses failures - and
there was still no promise that I could restore the data after the event.

At 12.30 I crashed as suddenly as the computer, just about hitting the
spare bed on the way down.

I slept surprisingly well - because there was one spectacular upside to
our autopsy.
.
We managed to get the harddrive turning for all of 5 minutes before it
went for eternity into that dark night which awaits us all. And five
minutes was just enough to snatch the finished draft and splat it onto a
borrowed thumb drive.

Everything else might be gone, I might not have the means to edit or
send it - but the script was safe.

Back Up Back Up Back Up part 2

Now - here's where synchronicity comes in.

Until last week I had a fairly limited back-up via Mozy
<http://mozy.com>. It was free, but limited to 2GB, so I just set up to
copy the crucial bits (work in progress, admin etc).

Then, out of the blue I realised how much I would miss the other 30 odd
GB of stuff - pictures, music, etc, and signed up for the paid option,
at $5 a month.
For days the laptop chuntered away to itself, uploading all my rubbish
to mozy's servers, bit by bit, until early last week it flashed up COMPLETE.

Talk about timing!

So, on that last leg of the delayed train into darkest Hereford, I was
left with 4 questions:

1.) Had I been on-line in the morning, between 10 and 11, to ensure that
the Film draft was backed up with the rest? (Mozy runs in the
background every morning - no connection, no backup)

2.) Would Mozy live up to its promises and allow me to restore all the
files it had so laboriously backed up a week earlier?

3.) Was my baby repairable or would I have to buy yet another little
machine to save my life?

4.) And just how long would all this take?

Back Up Back Up Back Up Back Up

So this is how it goes.

Thursday. 10.00pm - Finish draft - the very first time in 18 months
that I get to the end of my character's story without scratching my
head and thinking "I know what they are doing but not why the freak
they would!"

I stare into the darkness of the park with a sort of exhausted wonder.

Friday. 7.30am. Overslept. Understandable. Shower, pack, get to
work, planning to clean up the formatting at lunch time, and email the
copy to my first line editor before she heads off for the weekend (she
asked for a copy for her long and dull train journey on Saturday.)

Friday. 12.00pm. Team lunch. I let slip that I have finished the
draft, and several glasses of prosecco get ordered. Nice. Very nice.
And earned. But the clean up doesn't happen, naturally enough.

Friday. 4.00pm. Start cleaning up. Rush job comes in - we need to
create a sales brochure by midday Monday, and I have a train to catch
at 7.00pm. I get stuck into to Adobe InDesign to create the
template. this is what I am paid for, this is what allows me to take
the long lunch breaks on quiet days and get the writing done.

Friday. 5.00pm. The office wifi is down. This makes it impossible
to email the draft over before I leave for the station. I call my
editor. She disappointed but sweet.

Friday. 6.00pm. I leave the office and head to Paddington.

Friday. 7.00pm. No train.

Friday. 7.30pm. Still no train.

Friday. 7.31pm! Train, yay - only 16 minutes late, and they can't
leave me stranded in South Wales if we miss the connection. Can they?

Friday. 9.15pm. Oh yes they can....

Friday 9.30pm. Never mind. There's another train in an hour which
will get me *almost* all the way home. And I have done all the
formatting on the draft!

Friday 10.30pm And here it is! And I still have a hour's juice on
the laptop.

Friday 10.45pm. BANG.

My laptop is DEAD. TERMINAL. NO MORE. GONE WEST. TIT'S UP.
DECEASED.

And all my lovely data with it.....

To be continued....

did it did it did it

Made the deadline *and* finally made sense of the 3rd act.
There is, for the first time in over a year, a coherent version of the
film on my hard drive.
Just in time for the collapse of the European film industry, but what
the hey.

Afterwards I lay on the beanbag in St James Park in the dark, listening
to invisible geese on the invisible lake, and the clock on Horseguards
striking 10.

No coffee in my coffee!

I made a Thermos of coffee before I left the house for the 30 minute
climb to the cottage - but seem to have arrived with a thermos of hot
water and milk. Yeuch
I can remember spooning the coffee - but into what?
No popping to the corner shop for a jar of instant, and all the old
stuff got thrown out last week- I'm pretty much screwed.

I don't think I'll last more than another 2 hours without hot strong
java....