Bugs

Granny has been tagged by Beate of this address: http://violainvilnius.blogspot.com/. She cannot give you a direct link as she currently working - with difficulty - via dread (on a MAC) Internet Explorer which allows no formatting facilities WHATEVER, let alone links. photo uploads, etc. She is working also with the expectation of being disconnected any moment. The on-off cold + gut bug that affected her over the entire Christmas period seems to have infected her telephone line too; it keeps going dead, thereby cutting her off the internet besides.

To make matters worse, such frequent disconnections seem to have effected both her usual browsers; Safari keeps disappearing. Firefox first kept refusing to quit, now won't show its face at all. Granny will put up new versions of them when her telephone works properly, but now doubts if she will be allowed enough time to download either. And yes - she has called Telefonica; many times. Madrid answers promptly: Madrid is Madrid. The rumour round these parts, on the other other hand, is that all functionaries of all utilities, spend the entire festival period drunk. Admittedly the one who rang up and promised to turn up the very same day to sort out her problem sounded sober enough. But that was at nine a.m and maybe he went off and had a festive lunch, because he didn't appear; either that day or the next or the next. It may not help that Granny and Beloved's farm, a mere twenty odd minutes from the main town is considered to be in outer space by all local operatives. 'Out in the sticks' doesn't cover it. Granny explains the route in her best Spanish but it doesn't avail.

(Things get particularly bad, she has noticed at any time the internet is likely to be heavily used. This morning for instance saw the execution of Saddam Hussein. Her absence of a phone line meantime, she assumes, means everyone was looking up the gory details. Obviously curiosity is now satisfied. She has been allowed to stay connected for a good twenty minutes: a miracle.) Whoops. A mistake to say that: phone line is dead again.

On top of that; new improved Blogger which begged her to change to it requires 2 separate sign-ups, and takes double the time to connect to. Obviously it is not designed for those who are obliged to stay with dial-up, let alone with a dodgy phone connection. Sigh. (So what is improved about it? Someone please explain.)

The tag is as follows:

Pick up the nearest book. Turn to page 123: find sentence number 5 and copy out the next 3 sentences. Then name book, author, and tag 3 more people. She tags - again no links for obvious reasons - Pat - of Past Imperfect, Carolinkus of Beelzebublog and Lin of Dotty Nana; all of them on her sidebar. They will all probably curse her, but she has tried to pick people who are not - she hopes - up to their necks.

Problem of picking up book here; everything to hand is either a dictionary/thesaurus, a cookery book, or in Spanish: um. She looks for inspiration to the kitchen table; ah, Beloved's Christmas present; one of them. (Another is very abstruse and philosophical; luckily this isn't.)

I still live here with my partner, as the phrase is, who is fonder of the house and village even than I am. He is thirty years younger than me and what the village makes of this I do not know and now at last I do not care. That, at least, my parents' lives have taught me.

Author? Alan Bennett. Book? Untold Stories. Beloved hasn't got round to reading it yet. On the strength of this Granny thinks she will beat him to it.

Tomorrow - or more likely next year - ie Monday -Telefonica permitting, she will be back with goat stories. Can you wait?

Meantime, everyone:

HAPPY NEW YEAR.

(Further hiatus; IE doesn't seem to have any means of her publishing this. She will have to copy, hop over to Safari, connect to Blogger, and post there, hoping, just hoping, neither line nor Safari itself will chuck her off. Growl.)

Her new year resolution ought to be; learn patience. It isn't.

HAPPY NEW YEAR: AGAIN.