…has been beautifully sunny – summer’s here at last!
I’m still not feeling too well – I’m still getting breathless and exhausted at the slightest exertion, and my legs are aching and bothersome. I can barely get any housework done – just sweeping the floor, or going up and down the stairs one too many times, brings it on. Plus, I keep getting this unpleasant feeling of having a tennis ball stuck in my throat. My nitro spray relieves a lot of the symptoms, so it must be the angina. Anyway, I’m seeing good old Doc G. on Friday afternoon – maybe he can hurry up my angiogram appointment.
But sitting outside this afternoon has been a pleasure. The swallows are out, and so are the local buzzards – three of them were doing long lazy circles of the area, and I saw one of them dive down to some prey behind the hill. It’s too early in the holiday season for there to be much traffic along the road, so it was a pleasantly peaceful afternoon in the sun, reading my book (all about prime numbers), watching the birds and eating my lunch.
And I’m getting some money! That Certain Person I was grumbling about has told me that I’ll be getting paid pronto – not quite as much as I expected, but more than enough to buy enough computer bits and pieces to fix my machine. So I’ll no longer have to keep borrowing B’s machine.
Hoorah!

Well, here I am, faffing again when I should be working. Woke up this morning from a fairly miserable night of nasty dreams of being choked and smothered; my sinuses were burning and blocked, so I’ve got a cold, obviously. And the blocked nasal passages led to the dreams.
My blood-pressure medication gives me vivid dreams anyway – some pleasant, some not so pleasant. But at least my nights aren’t boring.
Been having tremendous computer problems this last couple of weeks. First, my motherboard went so that I’m now having to borrow B’s machine all the time; then my internet connection started dropping every couple of minutes. I’ve tweaked, and uninstalled and troubleshooted for days – finally got things to the point where the connection drops only every ten minutes or so. So I can at least read and reply to my emails.
I’ve no idea when I can get a computer of my own – a certain person had promised to pay me a large sum of money last week. But it’s not materialised and now she’s suddenly dropped the subject of payment. I know she’s short of cash, so I’m not nagging her for it, but I do wish she hadn’t promised it; I was really looking forward to getting an upgraded machine, with onboard sound and video.

Oh well. This cold is making me feel tired and disinclined to work. So I think I’ll leave it for today. the TV tonight looks very inviting, for a change. There’s Dr Who at 7pm, followed straightaway by the whole of the first Lord of the Rings film. I’m intending to enjoy pigging out in front of the box tonight.

PS: There’s some really good stuff on that Dr Who website – but you have to look for it!

Well, got back from my daughter’s wedding. The ceremony itself went OK, except that Daughter no 1 failed to turn up, having fallen out with everybody (yet again); we delayed everything for 15 minutes, but she didn’t show. But all the other kids were there and the grandchildren as well, and lots of friends. The bride was horrifically nervous – she’d collapsed sobbing an hour beforehand; but when her big moment came, she was wonderful. The groom, of course, was equally magnificent.
We’d not met the groom’s family before – they were nice, but some of them seemed to have not much dress sense – the outfits ranged from Sunday best to “It’s a clean sweatshirt, innit?”
The reception afterwards had been arranged by the groom’s family. Held in a local drinking club, with a bar, buffet and karioke/disco. I began to regret it as soon as I saw the DJ – a fat bald man dressed in Hawaiian shirt and shorts; he did not disappoint, blasting us at 500 decibels with the latest Britney-pap.
Most of the evening was taken up with karioke. The groom’s mother, a self-described “Karioke Queen” fancied herself as a singer, taking to the stage several times; the highlight of her performance was a rendition of “Bohemian Rhapsody”. That left an impression with me
that far surpassed all the other performances of various pop numbers by her friends and relatives. For me, the pleasure of the night was the groom’s learning-disabled brother having a go at singing; he surprised me with his sweetly melodic tenor. But nobody asked him to sing again. Another highlight of the night was watching everybody dancing(?)
It wasn’t such a bad evening, really – just rather like being trapped in an episode of “Shameless”. (I’m pretty certain I spotted Paul Abbott lurking by the bar, taking notes.) The drink helped me to see the funny side.

Not feeling happy. Got the coal bill this morning. Ugh. And we have to get money together to go down to Preston at the weekend for D3’s wedding; we’ll be lucky if we have enough spare cash after filling the tank to buy a card.
And I’m feeling under the weather anyway. Saw the doc Friday – he said my heart, cholesterol level and blood pressure were all fine; but I was obviously not responding too well to the drugs. Too bloody right. I feel OK if everything is going well – but I cannot cope with stress or physical exertion at all. He’ll write to the hospital again to get me tested further. More bloody waiting. Why don’t I feel well any more???
But I’m looking forward to the trip, even though it’s costing us. Hey, I don’t have a daughter getting married every week, you know!

And C has rung, offering to pay me as soon as I produce the bare bones of the 2007 Elfin Diary this summer…. It’s a tempting offer. But I don’t know – I no longer like doing the Diary. It’s so frustrating not to be able to have an input. It could be improved in so many ways, but C just won’t listen to me. One of the things that could really do with improving is the daily celebrity birthdates listing – so many of them are old. For instance, who these days has heard of Nelly Melba? or David Kossof? Or Daphne du Maurier? The youngest person currently listed is Damien Hurst, born in 1965; he’s one of only three people listed who were born after 1950. I’ve told C that too many of the ‘names’ are throughly obscure for today’s readers (one or two are even obscure to me – I had to look up Arthur Whitten Brown, for instance) .There are loads of famous names born within the last forty years, but C doesn’t want to change any of it – she keeps saying “But that’s what they like! They don’t want any changes!”
Sigh 🙁
I wish I could change a few things…. And I’m not just talking about the Diary….

The Oakleaf Circle website has won an award! Here is the text of the email (all identifying stuff blocked out so that it doesn’t show up in the search engines).

Hello!
This is X, Junior Editor for XXXXXXX.com, the internet’s authority hub for spiritual related web sites. Welcome, and congratulations on such a wonderful site =).
As part of my new job here at XXXXXXXXXXX, I spend my time visiting sites and giving awards to those that deserve it.
So congratulations for having a VERY relevant, on-topic site, and thank you for making the internet a better place! 🙂
This is no small matter. This directory, with over 100,000 links, has
strict guidelines and your site has earned this exclusive, high-end
distinction. You may display this award anywhere on your web site, either with or without a link to us. You can download the award, or let our server host it, either way is fine, it’s your award, you earned it. Congratulations!
If your site was already given an award in 2004, and you have not displayed it, please do. It is not required (of course).
Your site is listed here:
http://www.XXXXXXXX.com/
——————————————————–
YOUR AWARD:
(HTML code for inserting the award logo on webpage)
———————————————————–
With hopes of love, light, music and happiness, thank you for your time!
BTW Feel free to write us and suggest a site for the Top Spiritual Site award, I will be delighted to visit it and review it. I love visiting sites like yours! 😉
See Ya!
XXXXX XXXXX
XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX Junior Editor
http://www.XXXXXX.com

Doing a quick google, I find that no less than 11 other sites have been judged by this person to be the Leading Spiritual Site of 2004. Wow – I can hardly wait to buy my outfit for the award ceremony!

But seriously, I won’t display this crummy “award” on the site – a standard ploy to get the search engines (Google etc) to list your site is to get your link on as many other sites as possible. One way of doing this is to mass-email site-owners that they’ve been given some fake “Top Site” award; if a site-owner is naive enough, they’ll want to proudly display this – along with the precious link, of course.
Gah. The Oakleaf Circle site has been going for three or four years now – I’m surprised it’s taken this long to “earn” such an award!

I thought that I had written a pretty definitive article on end-of-the-world prophesies, in 1999. I’ve been quite proud of my research and never let a chance to advertise it go by.
However, trawling though the blogosphere today, what do I find? Yes, the really definitive list of end-of-the-world prophesies. From 2800BC to, ooh, 4,000,000,000,000 AD, here’s the real deal.

…and, as the Americans would say: “It’s all Pope, all the time!”
I’ve just spent time trawling through the TV news channels trying to find non-Pope news. Apart from 10 minutes of sport on BBC News24, there’s nothing.
It was bad enough last week, when every news bulletin led with 10 minutes or more of reporters telling us that the old bastard still wasn’t dead. Now they’re telling us that he is dead, ad nauseum.
You’re quite right – I’m not a fan of the Pope or the Catholic Church. As an ex-catholic, I am repelled by such worship and obedience given to one old man. He’s dead, so bury the bugger.

Of course, once the funeral’s done, we’ll be inundated with speculation about who’s next for the big throne. Then of course, it will be the Royal Wedding…. Arrrgghhh!!!
Good job the internet news sites aren’t entirely given over to the big story – I can still find out what’s happening in the world.

This morning, the Universe played a joke on us, and it wasn’t funny.
Every four weeks, we get B’s pension paid into a bank account; this morning was pension payout day. So we drove three miles to the nearest cash machine, at Dalry. Get to the cash machine, check the balance – according to the machine, there is almost nothing in the account. Luckily, we have some spare cash; we buy enough deisel to drive back home, where we get on the phone.
The pensions department swear up and down that the money has been paid in; the bank assure us that the money is in our account, but cannot offer an explanation for the machine showing the wrong balance.
Reassured by the bank, we put more fuel in tha car and drive thirty miles to Ayr, where we intend to buy things like paint and shoes, as well as food. Go to a cash machine – no money. Go to another cash machine, and another. After visiting four machines, we are stumped.
This is not good. Not good at all. We have just about enough cash to get us back home, but then what?? I concentrate on keeping my blood pressure down, while we trek up the high street until we spot a branch of our bank.
Inside, an explanation at last. The bank’s central mainframe is down, so it isn’t communicating with ATMs. But the money really is in our account, so how much do we want?

Sighs of relief all round, before we start trekking around the shops.
But – oi Universe! NOT FUNNY! NOT FUNNY AT ALL!!

Yes, both of us are hard at work on our computers. B is laying out the Elfin Desk Diary for 2006. He thought he had done it all, and sent off the proofs to Caroline – who discovered that he had used the 2005 Diary data for most of it! So he’s having to redo everything from April 2006 onwards, just as we are gearing up to start organising the Lammas Camp. He’s not happy.
And I have reports to write, and a magazine to pull together, and letters to write, and a mailing list to organise; not to mention that it looks like I’m doing a website for Apra Books. It might take quite a lot of work – they want something that they can update themselves and which might be integrated with the specialist booklisting software they use.
They are such a small outfit – they haven’t even got a shop and they only do second-hand books – that I feel rather embarrassed at quoting them a price, even one that’s way below what I’d charge an ordinary business for.
Luckily, there isn’t any hurry for it – I had a long chat with the owner, Syd, last night, and he said they’d been waiting years for the opportunity to set up a website, so a couple more months won’t make any difference.

And I’m setting up an order page on here for my astrology reports – I’ve got myself a Paypal account, and I will be able to email charts and reports to customers. However, customomising the PayPay order page is proving a problem. I’ve tried to download their how-to manual, but it’s 12meg and will take all night to squeeze down our dial-up line – and that’s assuming the line won’t disconnect after an hour, like it usually does.

So, back to work.