Signs of Summer

The sizzling heat and clear blue sky?  Sadly not.  We’ve been through a week of intense showers which have either left us dripping or peering through windows and feeling thankful not to be out there in it.  But still, it’s the end of May and there are signs of Summer around.

This philadelphus by the garden room door has been in bud for a while, but this morning, I noticed that it’s finally come into flower.  We need some still warm air to bring out the fragrance though.

No such specific conditions needed for this not-so-little beauty by the garage steps.  The heavenly scent hit me the minute I turned the corner.  It’s not exactly a tidy bunch of plants, but oh my, it makes up for that in many other respects.

The colour!  No changes made to this picture – that fluorescent pink is straight from the camera.  I love it.

A quieter but equally pretty cousin is flowering in a different border, slowly being strangled by all kinds of thugs which need to be dealt with.  I rescued a few flowers and brought them into the kitchen.

It was the sight of the blowsy white blooms in the hedge which took me outside this morning, though.  At least a week earlier than usual, the elderflower blossoms are beginning to come out in force and knowing that we have only a limited time to capture their magic, I went out to gather a few.

Each one of those little flowerlets packs a punch of summery goodness to be bottled and enjoyed right through the year.

I cut a large bowl full, enough to make a couple of litres today, but will watch those blooms over the next couple of days and make as much as I can before other preoccupations take over later in the week.

Incidentally, the usual problem of sourcing any quantity of citric acid has been resolved this year.  When my local chemist couldn’t find any stock at all from their wholesaler, I resorted to looking online and found Intralabs, where not only was it considerably cheaper (even taking P&P into account) but their excellent service won them another enthusiastic customer. 

Learning curves

Gradually, I am finding my way around my Note (which I think was named especially to amuse people like me, with a Hull accent!) This afternoon I thought I'd try the next step. Can I remember how to write a blog post without Ms writer?  Since there isn't a Squarespace Android app right now, I'm back to the old days of writing directly to the Squarespace interface.

 

Patience needed then.

The other small issue is that I haven't really got anything to blog about.  So, I'll simply ask your advice about why the weeds are slowly strangling this hebe,  ask what you reckon is eating our irises, and invite you to enjoy the wonderful scent of the freesias on the kitchen windowsill.  You might also like to admire our one snail free hosta in its special snail resistant pot. We need more - hostas and pots with a lip which snails find too difficult to negotiate!

Meanwhile, George is wondering if he'd be brave enough to parachute from Linda's church tower.

I'm trying a new picture editor too, as I work out if I am going to manage without baby laptop on our travels. So far, it's not looking that hopeful.  But I am optimistic, because each day brings a new discovery!

Getting to know you

It’s a couple of weeks since I brought home this new distraction and I’m just beginning to feel in control.  Unlike the ipad, which I took out of the box and immediately started to play, the Samsung has taken a while to endear itself to me.  In the last five minutes, however, it has completed a small trick which I have been trying to coax my ipad into for the last four years without success and slowly but surely, the ipad is being relegated to ereader and gameboy status.

My intention was to use the Note primarily for creative purposes.  I wanted to explore the potential to create interactive journals, with photographs, sound and video, all of which are memory hungry and depend on being able to share media with other machines easily.  That’s probably the most frustrating aspect of the ipad and the main attraction of the Note.  The downside was that I’d already bought into the IOS drawing and sketching apps which I’d not be able to use, of course, so my first expectation was to have to load up the Note with a few before I could begin to use it.  What I didn’t know was that it came pre-loaded with all kinds of useful apps which would save me the effort (and the money).  So far, I’ve dl’ed just four (free) android apps: Photoshop Express, the Sonos controller for our sound system at home, a QR reader and the Eye-fi app for the wifi SD card in my camera. I extended the 16GB memory to 48Gb by buying a £7 MicroSD card, mainly so I can put photos on it and bought a card reader so I can upload photos to it without wifi. Apart from those things, I am using it exactly as I bought it.

Bearing in mind that we are a PC family, itunes is a source of much frustration, especially when it comes to moving pictures and music from one machine to another.  So, imagine my delight when I connected my Note to my PC using a USB cable and simply dragged and dropped files between the two.  Imagine even more delight when a screenshot taken on the Note (the first photo in this blog entry, in fact) appeared simultaneously on my PC screen.  It sounds so simple, but until now, it really wasn’t.

Another delight came in the form of the S pen, which comes as part of the Note and which is stored in the side of the tablet when not in use.  I spotted this article on the Yahoo Travel blog the other day and since our road trip this summer will take us to Cincinnati and Covington, I thought I’d save a few details.  Cue the S pen.

Point and click and a few options appear, including Scrapbooker.

I’ve still got the “training wheels” on, so left the help screen in place as I drew around the details of a restaurant in Cincinnati.

Having clipped the details, I selected the pen option from the top menu and made one or two notes alongside.

Having done that, I had a few choices to make.

Just where did I want to share that clipping?

I chose to put it in my Scrapbook, in the “places” folder (which might soon be renamed “road trip places”)

Bearing in mind my eventual intention to create a digital journal, I wondered if I could do anything else with that clipping?  After all, it could as easily be a bit of a photograph, a drawing or a clipping of a patterned piece of paper.  I thought I’d try opening up a new page in my notebook, which lives on the homescreen.  It’s got a lime green cover (of course )

Ooooh, look, I could insert a voice memo alongside, or a map, or a sketch…!!  Wooohoo!  But for now, I’ll stick with clipping those restaurant details.

Shall I leave it there, then?  Make it bigger, smaller, or…

Scribble a bit more on it in a different colour?  (because I can!)

Can you tell, I’m pretty thrilled with my Note? 

I haven’t even mentioned the major, earth-moving trick I discovered earlier.  No photos, because the forms and data are all work-related and confidential, but suffice to say that in just ten minutes I achieved the Holy Grail of moving a docx form from my PC to my Note, of opening it in the (already installed) Polaris Office 5 app and using the S pen to complete the form!  That means I can take my Note to do classroom observations and walkthroughs and scribble on the screen, saving the details to my PC when I get home.  I can’t tell you how many times we’ve tried to achieve that process using my ipad, several paid-for apps and the collected brainpower of anyone who could be persuaded to help me.  Until now, I have never been able to do it.

But is there anything irritating about the Note?

Of course there is!

The case, whilst not brilliant, is ok, but irritatingly, the Note USB connection is on the front edge, which means that it doesn’t sit comfortably in propped up mode unless raised on a book or something.

I’ll forgive it for now

In other news around here, we had a visit from a nice BT Engineer yesterday who kindly connected us to the new fibre-optic internet service, increasing the speed of our connection from 2Mbs to 44Mbs in less than half an hour.  With a new Smart TV, Netflix and all of the above, we are happy bunnies, I can tell you.

Whooosh!

All change

An empty fridge.

This beauty and its predecessor have given us much joy and brought several new friends into our lives, including a delightful Gaggenau engineer who is not only on first name terms with us, but with our Aussie friends too as a result of his frequent and well-timed visits.  On Friday, however, the game was up and after many phone calls and technical head scratching, the new replacement was expected.

Switching fridges isn’t quite as simple as one might think though, and it needed the expertise of our star kitchen installers to make sure all was well.  Even so, there was one big decision that only we could make.

In which language would we prefer the instruction book?  (nl, it, fr, sv, de, no, sl, pl, fi, pt, el, cs, zh, ru, tr, es and, thankfully, en were in the package)

Somehow we’ve managed without referring to any of them so far.

Waving goodbye (for now) to our Aussie friends and saying hello to Edward who’s home for a few days, we had other things on our mind.

The big question of the day.  As my cousins all headed to Wembley we found other distractions to keep us busy.

We had the company of our two small friends for the evening, so a double batch of rice krispy slices were made and four pairs of hands made short work of that.  Meanwhile, I cooked supper and as we all headed outside to eat it we listened out for cheers, checking the score and daring to hope…

Sadly, it was not to be but my cousins returned home to Hull full of pride, nevertheless.

Let it Go

The girls had brought Frozen with them and as we sang along with Elsa we reflected on how different life might have been with two small girls in the house.

I doubt that the rice krispy slices would have lasted any longer, though, do you?

In Cricklade

Seen on the walls of this Saxon town today.

The pub next door was the scene of another crime, possibly not quite a hanging offence though?

We all loved this small, unassuming plaque, set back from the road near the bridge.

Some signs were rather larger and seemed to indicate something more important.

Others told of the town’s long history.

And some told of nothing much at all.