Four days after the thaw started there are still piles of snow lying around the edge of the garden in the lee of the hedge. Grubby and tired with rounded edges where they have been melting, but hanging grimly on. It goes to show what a difference the sun makes, since the base of the hedge is in shade for most of the day, and how much energy it takes to melt a big lump of snow. In the bathroom a sad little pile of dead ladybirds has appeared on the window sill. I can only assume that they were hibernating behind the roller blind and that during the gale from Siberia the extreme cold got to them.
The garden today felt not extremely cold, but definitely chilly, a miserable dank chill that came from the air being damp. Dry cold is not so bad, but damp cold is a horror, and I decided it was a day for getting on with indoors tasks. I needed to revise a talk on garden bulbs. I last gave it several years and one laptop ago, and wanted to make some tweaks and include some more species. It was a pity that the only copy of the images I could find was as JPEGs on a memory stick. Converting them back into PowerPoint to enable editing turned out not to be at all straightforward. I had to ask for the Systems Administrator's help, and may yet end up starting again.
The talks are not for a few weeks, so there is plenty of time to mess around. I remember some of my more youthful fellow students at horticultural college tripping themselves up when they had to make presentations to the rest of the class because they had left preparing their visual aids until the day of the talk, only to hit technical problems. One of the aims of the assignment was presumably to teach them not to take that risk. The lesson I must learn this time round is to be more careful when transferring files to a new computer, and maybe not to leave it next time until the old laptop is at death's door. And I should be more thorough about backing files up to central storage, or the cloud.
I wish it would warm up.
No comments:
Post a Comment