Steady rain most of the day

I didn't really expect my camera, or my Picasa, to do justice to the colour of this 'flowering currant'.

If the little Casio compact has a weakness, it is reds. The roses last year, particularly the deep reds, like Hannah, were difficult to capture. But it is it's only slight defect and has lots of other qualities to make up for it. The picture loaded straightaway without any excessive delay. On the top of my Blogger page today was an announcement "Scheduled outage at 4pm". English (US) can't be complimented on it's beauty can it? When I first saw it, I read it as 'scheduled outrage' at 4pm which captured my interest. Presumably the system was down, to allow technicians to fix some problems, one of which might have been the uploading of images. But I had decided not to join in the 'chorus' on the Blogger-forum anyway. Things get fixed sooner or later.

Before I leave the subject of 'flowering currant' I would like to warn inexperienced gardeners against cutting some for a vase indoors! It will look fine, but your house will stink of cat-pee for days afterwards. Bob says that Hyacinths have that smell to some people although most, I think, find it delightful. I hope I didn't mention this yesterday but I would bet anyone a fiver that, blindfolded, I could identify Blue against Pink.

In response to yeserday's point about Yvonne's bright idea to extend our house-search to include 2 bedroomed bungalows, Bob came up with the magnificent offer that he would give us his professional advice on what was possible at the potential-purchase stage. And then when bought, he would do us the necessary preliminary drawings etc., in return for a bowl of soup. He says he has stopped working for money! Yvonne has authorised me to offer a roll, in addition to the soup. In email correspondence Bob says that he was surprised I had never been a trainspotter. He had been one - for a fortnight. I told him that the closest I got, was trespassing on the lines as a 12yr old when we used to put pins on the rails so that the train would squash them into little swords. He said that they also used to do halfpennies, which were squashed nearly into pennies.

This afternoon I finally got round to reading my current WebUser Magazine and there on the Problem Solver pages was my answer to a problem 'posted' about Wi-Fi hotspots. It was rewarding to see something in hard-copy again. Whoever would have thought I would be answering questions instead of answering them? In the magazine, a site Webaroo was mentioned which sounds the complete answer to 'offline' working, as it allows one to download whole websites and read them at leisure without an internet link. Before downloading it I took the precaution of using 'siteadvisor' which said the site was 'untested'. So I've submitted it for tesing before risking a download.

Steve has now acquired a 'mike' and between us we persuaded Yvonne to join in. All I need to do now is to acquire a webcam and we can give it a whirl. It would be lovely to get all the family linked up. I'm sure it will come.