A better day but still cold

Hurrah! The picture has finally appeared. Had to put it in Walagata - get a URL and load it !

The reason for the daffodils on the sideboard is a determination by one means or another to bring on the spring. According to Bob the blue crocuses featured yesterday look remarkably like some purple crocuses that Sandra has been trying to get rid of for years. I assured him that ours are blue and very small and delicate not a bit like the purple big ones that I think he means. A nature comment - I've noticed, over time, that the birds seem to attack either blue/purple or yellow crocuses on alternate years and 2006 is a yellow-year !

We finished off the chicken-casserole and, as often seems to be the case, it tasted even better today. Dishes seem to mature overnight. I once heard somewhere that in Victorian England street-traders used to hawk stew around with the street-cry 'seven days in the pot'. With it we had the usual fresh veg. and mashed potatoes with chopped basil mashed in as an experiment. Although the basil sounds unusual it does actually go rather well. And I've got a glut of basil. It's a variety called 'Minette' and has very small leaves with a very subtle flavour. Very easy to root from cuttings and also easy from seed.

The highlight of the evening was Planet Earth which yet again was superb. This week it was mountains and there was some marvellous footage. Pictures of snow-leopards hunting which apparently were unique. The diaries at the end, explaining the procedures were fascinating.

I sent David the explanation to his 'Mind Reader'. Not my find I hasten to add but Ray's. Exchanged emails with Bob who I thought had sent me some pictures via Picasa which hadn't arrived. But he hadn't sent any - I don't know how I made the mistake. I fixed my problems with Picasa by uninstalling it. Checking that it had gone and then downloading a 'fresh one'. A brutal solution but it worked and the duplicated pictures, the wrong picture appearing when clicked, seem to hae been solved. But I DID have problems with 'Blog this' and the daffodil picture. I went on the Blogger forum asking for solutions to the probs and received a very succint reply from one guy who just said "Happens all the time". If I continue to have Blogger trouble I might try an alternative programme. Not just yet though.

Yvonne rang some agents to send details of houses which I hadn't been able to track down on the net. I had a nice PM from Pete (Manxislander) who had been so encouraging about my blog I replied and we discussed digital photography and that we are both fans of straightforward cameras that simply do the job.