Glimpsesofcolour

Should I be worried that I have started to call my husband ‘Dad’, while our son calls him ‘Ed’? There just seems to be something wrong with that…

Went to a session of my new choir this lunchtime. It’s a lot harder work than the old voice workshop – we are making a foray into Fauré (just had to get that in) and are supposedly performing, with several other choirs, at the Cadogan Hall at the beginning of March. Anyway before we started I was chatting to the lady sitting next to me and she said she lived at ‘the other end of the world’. On closer examination, it turned out that what she meant by ‘the world’ was Muswell Hill! It made me wonder about how far people are able to see more than their own little enclave…

The other day I heard from a Facebook friend who had met someone who remembered me from a long-ago women’s weekend in Bruges (when apparently, I was very sick on the Channel crossing to Zeebrugge). Any road, as they say in the Midlands where I come from, this friend of a friend remarked that I was a ‘real character’. I can’t help feeling flattered by that; it has long been my ambition to be eccentric, and now it seems I already was 25 years ago, without even trying. Nice.

So finally, after three days of no school last week (with GB thereby missing a German test yet again), we get a message saying there is school today. Only to find him just before school time saying he has a bad stomach ache, and can’t go. I tried asking if anything about school is worrying him, but he couldn’t identify anything. So one more day getting behind with coursework etc.

Oh well, I managed in spite of this to get back into some kind of work routine. It feels like Christmas has only just finished, and even now I can’t tell if it’s safe to go back into the office (ie across the landing into the spare bedroom…!). Still, I did finally take down the Christmas tree yesterday, with much sadness (I hate that task) and to the accompaniment of a CD of the Vienna Philharmonic doing the New Year concert (the Vienna Boys’s Choir singing German Christmas carols is my accompaniment for decorating the tree before Christmas).

Feeling a bit shaky after a day’s work, and not looking forward to doing minutes at the Inclusion Group tonight, but at least I’ve got some important admin done.

My son sweetly sent me a beautiful gift-wrapped link to Google Chrome, which he said was the best internet browser ever. I downloaded and installed it, and set it as my default browser. It kindly imported all my bookmarks, including all the links to Firefox sites which I no longer wanted. I then discovered it is almost impossible to delete bookmarks in Google Chrome for Mac. But I persevered and found a way to do it.

Then I gave up on it for the moment and went to log in to the Wibsite. Whaddya know, it had forgotten my saved password. I then had to hunt around Chrome’s online help, which is a nightmare, for advice on this. It turns out that in Chrome for a Mac, there is currently no way of transferring saved passwords, at least from Firefox. The powers that be are working on it.

Reader, I abandoned Chrome and went right back to Firefox as my default browser. Maybe I’ll try Chrome in a few months when they have caught up with Mac users. It’s all part of the evil conspiracy against Mac users….

…watch that didn’t need fixing. On New Year’s day, sitting idly at my desk, I thought ‘Oh, I must move on the date window on my old fashioned analogue watch with a face and a date window’. So I pulled out the knob and twiddled it (as it were) and then peered at the very tiny window, only to discover with alarm that it now said ‘2′. At which point I realized that in fact the only time I need to advance the date manually is when the previous month has had only 30 (or 28) days in it, and December has 31, so in fact my watch had already, automatically, said ‘1′. Now I had to sit there for hours going through the entire month to get back to 1. And as the watch also has a day and night setting ( a little window where a sun, or alternatively moon, comes up), I had to go through all twelve hours twice for each day. Which took ages.

Memo to self: before fixing, check whether what you want to fix is actually broken. There’s a lesson in this, I’m sure….

All right, so I haven’t blogged since the week before Christmas. All I have to say is, Christmas came, and it went, and it went well. I only got slightly irritated with my mother once, which must be a record. And as I said before Christmas, it doesn’t matter if you don’t get Christmas perfectly right, because another one will be along in five minutes. Or so it seems. Likewise with years – I can hardly believe that it is 2010, however one is going to pronounce that (I favour twenty-ten, myself – after all no one ever said ‘one thousand nine-hundred and ten’ a century ago, as far as I know).

Genius Brat went back to school today, with posh new clothes and shoes, and it seems to have gone well (he didn’t find his lost homework book but he did check out his teacher appointments for parents’ evening tomorrow, which he had lost with the homework book, and remembered to give back her Oyster card to his no 1 fan, who left it at our house before Christmas). Meanwhile I struggled to get out of bed and get down to work in what should be a very busy week. I didn’t do very well, getting out of bed at 10ish and going back there at 12ish for a couple more hours, although I did manage to read about half of the book for which I’m meant to be writing a foreword by Friday. I’m not getting very good sleep at the moment, as my jaw splint (which is supposed to open my airways and keep me breathing in my sleep) has gone back to the makers for repair. Hopefully it will be back soon.

Usual mix of success and failure, then. Also I have put on three pounds over Christmas, no doubt owing to consuming large amounts of chocolate. It’s all gone now, so the diet can start. Tomorrow. (Actually I ate a very frugal lunch today so feel quite good about that.).

PS Freecycle is offering ‘More baby hangers’. Are there so many people round here who want to hang babies? (on the Christmas tree perhaps…).