Saturday 19 June 2010

I'm sitting up late tonight (probably as a result of the killer Enric Rovira hot chocolate I had earlier) putting together a folder of notation for Friday's gig in York with Shirley Collins and Catherine Bott. I'm still very excited about it. 

I took a break from academic form-filling today: this evening I was lying in the hammock and watching all the birds around me in the garden: dunnocks hopping under me, chattery families of great, coal and blue tits taking their turns on the fatballs in the tree above me, sparrows swooping in for raids on the seed feeder a few yards away, and a pair of pigeons hanging around to pick up what the sparrows would drop or throw away in disgust.

This week's irritating technical hassles have included ... Mozy refusing to backup my email but crashing instead every time (after going round the houses with their tech support, I'm now trying a previous version of the software, which used to work fine); discovering that our broadband internet which falls off and has to be rebooted three or four times a week is probably OK: it's the router that crashes for no reason; and the kitchen computer giving up completely and refusing to load Windows at all. 

While getting help with one of these today, I got a firsthand account of the Israeli raid on the Gaza flotilla from one of those captured by the Israeli soldiers. Besides confiscating the aid, the Israeli soldiers also took his iPhone ... I'm not sure if they've been trying to use his credit cards though.