ELECTRICAL GREMLINS.

This post is going to require the patience of a saint and that folks I definitely ain't! The only reason I'm doing it because of the circumstances in which I am doing it quite amuse me. There are electrical gremlins in this house, pesky little invisible critters that cause mostly minor problems like lights that will work mostly and then for no logical reason won't. I think they're related to ones that hide things shortly before you need whatever those items are and next appear in a place where you're searching for something else days or weeks later. The electrical ones love modern houses, there are so many things to play about with, the television being one of them. They must have been quietly laughing last night. Just when I was celebrating the fact that the Rover was back, after weeks refusing to start due to the electrical gremlins playing havoc with the immobiliser system. I had written the post for the day and settled down to watch T.V. in the evening. Could I get a picture on the screen? No. After much button pressing and increasing levels of swearing at the inanimate object in the corner I  eventually gave up, went early to bed and read more of a fascinating book that I've just been given. Enticingly entitled ...

"THE WILD PLACES." by Robert Macfarlane.

This morning it is working perfectly normally ... not so the computer. It refused to start and when it did there was no screen to see ... ho hum here we go again. Ironically Dad rang to tell me that the reason there was no email this morning was that ... his confuser (as we often call our computers) was not working properly either and refusing to send emails. That annoying little on screen message kept popping up "You have unsent messages in your outbox. Do you wish to send them now." Answer simply "Yes!" and after many attempts the answer lengthened into one which included expletives. I had a similar one way conversation with mine, due to the fact that I had no screen on which messages asking me what I might want to do next appeared. So ... I pulled the computer table away from the wall and investigated the spaghetti junction tangle of various cables to try and identify why. In the process ... ... ... the screen fell off the table! 

(Air getting bluer with large clouds of expletives non deletable.)

I made a mug of tea, calmed down and went back to the computers external intestines and in the process had a long overdue clean up of the dust that seems to be drawn, magnet like to the usually more unreachable corners of the room. This also includes finding lost dog toys and things like paper clips, ancient caps for pens that understandably dried out and were thrown away ages ago. All these items are of course wearing varying amounts of moulted dog hair that has been hiding from the hoover for a while. Anyway ... after much untangling of cables and resuming some sort of neat order behind the scenes ... bingo, the machine started, the screen lit up ... Great! ... ?   Oh No!!! 

Can you believe this  ... the screen now has the whole lay out placed at right angles to the norm. So the menu and everything else reads not top to bottom but left to right. Seriously.

To add insult to this currently unresolvable problem, this of course being Sunday  so P.C Doctors is not open ... the mouse is also playing silly games not doing what I want it to.

Looking on the bright side of life with a Monty Python sense of the ridiculous  I thought I would set myself the challenge of writing today's post for the day and share this with you.

Writing this entails trying to follow my typing efforts, the lines lengthening from bottom to top and ... occasionally tilting my head to one side like some blackbird listening for earthworms or a heron looking for fish in the river. Add to this there is the recalcitrant mouse that seems to want to put the cursor where I don't want it to be and trying as hard as it can not to rest on the place where I want to click it so I can do things. AAARRRGGG!

and that's an extremely polite way of expressing the blue clouds of fume over my head.

"Oh cursors!!"

I have even tried (after much searching for it) my old & very slow  mouse. No difference apart from the cursor now ambling to where I don't it to go and it seeming more interested in exploring the drop down menu, which drops the menu I don't want all over the screen, covering up the text with choices that I don't at this moment want to use. In actual fact the menu usually enters stage right but with the screen at this altered layout, it pops down from the top of the screen. To put it mildly it is all been rather frustrating. Nearly done.

I now have an aching neck from trying to create this post with my head on one side, so I'm off for a long hot bath to soak my frustrations away and having drowned them will drain them with the bath water.   I am sure that I can hear the gremlins quietly giggling.