Many flowers will grow in my garden

It's official. Having my own home has given me a gardening bug.

Not a really obsessive, I'm going to start joining horticultural societies kind of bug, but it's quite clear I'm enjoying myself. The first big sign is that I'm thinking I really need to find out the names of all the plants I've got!

And that's because so many of them are looking really promising at the moment, and it's getting hard to say 'that thing at the back of the house' while describing how 'that thing' is absolutely covered in buds, a couple of which have finally revealed the colour inside - a rich, very dark pink. I'm informed by the most reliable source to hand (Dad) that it's a camellia.

I also know I have five roses, of at least three different varieties. A total of three of them appear to be having the time of their lives at the moment, which I can only hope will translate into more stunning blooms.

Apparently I have three grevilleas in the front yard - one has begun to produce red flowers, one has just started turning pale orange and the third is yet to commit itself. Nearby is a tall bush that is now displaying tiny clusters of rust-red flowers amongst green foliage that has occasional tinges of yellow.

On the other side of the front yard is an overly large tree that will have to be lowered a couple of feet lest it try to destroy my gutters. But before that, Dad assures me it's going to flower in truly spectacular fashion. Seems mine might be orange. No idea what it's called though!

A tree at the back is starting to produce white blossoms. I actually can't remember if that's the plum tree or if it's the other one! And finally (for now), one of the larger plants in my courtyard has little speckles all over it that I know are going to turn into blooms, and in one tiny spot, down towards the bottom, they already have. Also white.

I am truly excited by the potential of all this. My gardens don't look great yet by any means - the 'lawn' is really a pile of weeds that I took one step towards killing off this morning, quite a few more plants need trimming (I already attended to half a dozen in late winter), some scraggly things really should be got rid of to provide more space to their neighbours, I have two samples of a plant that Dad tells me is now a declared noxious weed and there are offspring of the tree I cut down that simply have to be poisoned out of existence (otherwise in 10 years time there will be 2-3 trees attempting to grow out of my bedroom wall)... but by golly there's enough good things here to make my first spring a joy to behold.

ALREADY?!

Let this be officially recorded as the day I saw Santa Claus hats for sale at the supermarket.

It's completely ridiculous. Seriously, how many people are in the market for one at this point in time? Is it really the kind of thing that people prepare to buy? I would have thought it was the kind of thing that bought at the last minute, right about when someone says "oh, by the way, wearing a Santa hat is compulsory for the party on Saturday night". Or alternatively, right about when the calendar reaches December 24th.

I just can't believe it would be a priority for anyone, is all.

Partial redemption

To give credit where credit is due, Windows Media Player 10 does have one major benefit in its array of features. It's remarkably good at recovering accurate information about the tracks you play on it. It very quickly undid almost all the remaining damage from this bizarre little incident. I threw it some tough ones - obscure Australian works - and it did remarkably well.

There's still a couple of unknown tracks that get John Farnham's Age of Reason as cover art though. Probably some American's idea of a joke.

PS To the user who submitted george's Unity with only the first song title included: are you COMPLETELY mad?!

Luddite pt.7

If I ever admit defeat and buy a digital camera, I think I've found the excuse I can give myself.

Portability.

Much as I love my current camera, I hardly ever take pictures. Basically I only use it when I go on a trip and consciously think 'I will take photos'. And then, look out. I can quite happily take hundreds.

Something in me objects to the instant gratification mentality of digital photography. I don't want to know straight away whether I took a good picture. I want to have to work at it, to learn from my mistakes. But if I do go digital, I would carry my camera with me as often as possible. That way, I could take the opportunistic photos I always regret missing...

...like the truly stunning crescent moon that's been accompanied by the planet Venus this evening.

Luddite pt.6

It's been a while since one of these.

I finally plucked up the courage to install Windows Service Pack 2. Yes, stop laughing in the back there, I know it's been out forever. But there were scary stories about what happened to some people's systems and my computer seemed to be running perfectly well without it for the most part.

I nervously backed up all the bits of personal data I could think of onto a CD. Only I missed something, because I didn't expect it to be relevant.

SP2 itself seems to have worked perfectly. My computer is behaving just as it did, except for the added bonus that the one program that wouldn't work - the game Myst IV: Revelation - miraculously started working after a couple of months of fruitless back and forth between myself and technical support on the other side of the world. I have sent them a somewhat curt e-mail to say 'thanks for nothing'. Dammit, I asked them whether SP2 might help!

The sting in the tail, though, was that SP2 comes 'bundled' with Windows Media Player 9.

I hate WMP 9. I already tried it, and greatly prefer WMP 8. But with the Service Pack, I can't go back. I've gone forward to WMP 10 instead, which is a marked improvement on 9 but still more fiddly than it needs to be.

The killer thing about WMP 9 though, the thing I truly hated, was that it couldn't keep track of playlists properly. It's lost them. If I'd gone straight from 8 to 10, I seem to recall from past dabbling that many of them would have survived, but now I won't have the chance to find out.

Of the really crucial playlists, the ones I slaved over, I can get two of them back because I used them to make CDs for friends. But what I can't get back is the 3-CD best of Tori Amos' Atlantic Years that I had constructed and was close to giving the official 'okay, let's burn it' seal of approval after trying out the track listing repeatedly over the space of at least 6 months.

I have spent the last couple of days playing detective, only to confirm that my written notes don't have the final version.

I could scream. Really.

It took me at least an hour to positively identify all 51 tracks (17 per disc), let alone where they belonged. I think I've succeeded in at least identifying which disc each song belongs on.

Of the 3 discs, I'm 99% confident that I have accurately reconstructed CD3. CD2 is in fair shape, with the first half almost certainly correct and probably only a set of five songs in the second half to re-arrange. CD1, the one that I altered the most from the first draft I have on paper, is quite a mess, especially the second half.

All because I trusted a damn computer program to remember something for me.

Hurricane Katrina

Once again, nature succeeds in making our obsession with the threat of terrorism look completely ridiculous.