I have done it.
I have made the Christmas cards.
Well, I haven’t really. I have made one, and even that one still needs the glue and glitter bits, but it is a start. The system is all set up and apart from the usual tongue-sticking out and puzzling how to get things to go through the printer and come out the way they are supposed to, I have got the general idea.
I will get the glue and glitter bits done to the one I have got and post it to somebody abroad tomorrow.
It has been such a horror, because the computer decided halfway through that it did not want to work any more.
That is, the mouse decided not to work.
You are absolutely lost without a mouse. Lots of things sit on your screen and you can’t do a single thing about them, except stare at them helplessly, pressing keys on the keyboard that make no difference whatsoever.
In the end I rang Apple, and spoke to a very nice lady who hardly rolled her eyes at all when we jointly discovered that the battery was flat.
It took ages before it charged again, so I occupied the intervening time with wrapping Christmas presents.
Really I should have occupied it with washing up, because I still haven’t done it, although it is eleven o’clock. I am going to have to go downstairs and get on with it shortly. I do not want a re-run of last night’s performance, when I got down the stairs at one in the morning to discover the fire out and a pile of dirty dishes in the sink.
It was only a small pile. I have been too abstracted to eat very much, I will be thin for Christmas at this rate, hurrah. Actually I won’t be, because I cooked some beef burgers for Jack’s dinner this evening, and when I went rushing out to do a taxi job a little while later there were some still left in the pan, and I ate one on my way.
Readers, it was practically the nicest thing I have ever tasted, junk food is truly marvellous when you have become accustomed to a diet of fish and lettuce. It was practically made of fat and sugar and salt, and it was truly divine. I felt so energised when I had eaten it that I charged back home and practically bounced up the stairs, completely untroubled by the computer’s determined recalcitrance.
We also learned today that Mark will be going offshore again in early January. Part of me is pleased about this, because it means that we do not need to worry about saving up. This is a splendid worry not to have, especially since I have already saved up and am now contemplating the possibility of spending the cash without guilt.
We can buy things for the camper van, not that these will be much use since Mark will not be here to glue them into it, but I do not mind very much. January is always a bit of a rubbish time for doing things that are not next to a heater. There will always be time in March when it is starting to warm up a bit.
I am printing out Christmas cards as I talk, and this entry is being regularly interrupted as I leap up and down to try and organise the printer. I am not very good at the sort of spatial awareness thinking that gets tested in IQ tests, so probably I am a bit thick really, and I can never work out how to put things into the printer so that the picture comes out in the bit where you want it to be.
It is getting late and I have just messed up the last half a dozen cards by not concentrating, so I am going to go downstairs and wash the pots and try and get the fire going again.
I will see you tomorrow, when with any luck I will be done.
Fingers crossed.
