Storm Callum and Dance Madness

My neck, arms, upper back and chest are all stiff and achy today, but not from the dance weekend we had planned. I'd been looking forward to it for weeks and had, I thought, put together a good running order for the show. In the event (ha!), it had to be cancelled due to extreme weather.

I am risk-averse to the point of being cowardly. I cancel classes when a yellow severe weather warning is forecast. I know from experience that it doesn't take much to block some of the local, rural roads with flooding or a fallen tree and have attempted to go out to events anyway, exhausting myself trying to find a way round or creeping along in the fog and heavy rain. Very few are as dance-obsessed as I am, so would not go out anyway, so it's just not worth trying to run the class.

So I was a bit wary when I saw the storm warning for the weekend of the Lampeter Dance Festival, but hopeful that it wouldn't be so bad. We had Serena Ramzy, one of my teachers and a very lovely person, booked to do workshops and perform in the Saturday night show. I haven't seen her for years, so was looking forward to my weekend very much. The show was all planned and I thought I had put together quite a good running order.

When severe weather is forecast, do you cancel/postpone your event as soon as you know, and risk the weather warning coming to nothing? Or go ahead, with the possibility that by the time it's clear the event should have been cancelled/postponed, it's too late anyway? So many times recently, the severe weather warnings have been updated or disappeared entirely, or I have been out in it and the local weather didn't warrant the warning.

By the time we knew that it was going to be bad, it was a bit late to cancel, so I packed the car and some lunch and tea-time food and drink, checked the roads and flood alerts for road closures (none found), made sure I had my phone and charger, picked up my friend Rachel, and set off in the blustery wind and lashing rain.
It wasn't until we were half-way to Carmarthen that we could see water lying on the fields. In Carmarthen, the level of the River Towy was alarmingly high and the road running parallel to the old quay was already flooded and closed. As we drove north, it became clear that it was worse weather in Carmarthenshire than Pembrokeshire. Water was coming off the fields, bringing stones and other bits with it and forming ponds on the roads. There were a few people out in the vile weather, trying to clear drains of leaves.

I'd left a little early and we were still on time, despite having to navigate deep puddles and the road completely awash at New Inn. We got as far as a place called Cilblaidd, just outside Cwmann, when the traffic stopped. A monster of a 4x4 with good ground clearance was coming from the other direction. The driver wound down his window and said that there was no way that cars would be able to get through on the bridge ahead, and we should just turn round. I relayed this information on to the car next to us, who had pulled in to a little lay-by. They shrugged and went on ahead, so I used the lay-by to turn around. As I drove off, I could see them in my rear-view mirror, stopping, and then reversing and turning around themselves.

I was a bit dithery after that. What should I do about all the stuff for the show? Could we find another way around? With the worsening roads and weather, should we even try?

Even before we got back to Llanybydder, there was a place where the flooded road was deepening fast and the car coughed and almost stalled, which would have left us in the water. Rachel was a perfect passenger, letting me know how things were on the passenger side of the car, doubtless as stressed as I was, but no complaints or even a peep when I gunned the engine and shouted at the car 'no no no no NO!' and got us going out of the flood. I considered holing up in a pub that we passed but pressed on to a garage to use the toilet and see if there were any updates on other routes. One of the staff was on Facebook, picking up videos of raging water and updates about fallen trees and closed roads. Along the route, the heavy rain was playing havoc with the phone signal and I couldn't get live traffic updates, or call my friend Rose to let her know what we were doing. Rachel took care of the phone, looking for map and Facebook updates, messages and texts, whenever patchy signal allowed.

We decided the best thing to do would be to go home, back to my place, where we could hang out with the cats, eat our packed food, watch the telly and generally vegetate for a few hours. We got back down the Carmarthen, where Pensarn trading estate, which was just heavily puddled on the outward journey, was flooded (a few hours later, the river overtopped the 8-foot high flood walls at Llangunnor).

Once home, we could get updates. It seemed that the Bridge and Co-op on the way into Lampeter were already flooding at 9.30 am, after I'd set off. Llechryd bridge, which is usually a problem, wasn't just flooded but the water was running over the top of it, just the tops of road signs visible. The amount of water coming down the rivers was incredible, and many places were flooded up to at least a metre. And there was a sad fatality when a bus stopped because of a fallen tree, and a young man got out to see what was going on and was caught by a landslip.

And the dance studio where the workshops were based in Lampeter had also flooded. The whole event was cancelled. Even though the weather on the Sunday was due to be fine, with no dance studio and many of the roads still impassable, it was impossible.

It must have been a moment's madness to think this would be okay; things could have gone so badly wrong! The tension from driving for three hours in lashing rain, blustery winds and negotiating flooded roads means that I'm still aching, a few days later. Next time I shall listen to my instincts.

Learning Curves

I'm having a love-hate relationship with the learning curve involved with getting everything working and myself up to speed with my new laptop.

I had a lovely time at the music course weekend and loved having K to stay. She was the perfect guest, easy, accommodating, unfazed by my chaos and clutter. We chatted almost non-stop.

And so to the homework assignments which are part of the course. I have CDs where I need to identify rhythms, musical instruments and music styles. I have a portable/external optical drive in the form of a DVD/CD read/writer. I haven't used it since my old computer died, but it worked fine then, so I should be able to plug in and play, right?

The new laptop has a couple of USB 3 ports, but only has one USB 2 port. Although you can plug a USB 3 connector into a USB 2 port (it just runs slower), you can't plug a USB 2 into a USB 3 port. It doesn't fit, and needs an adapter which I don't have.  I have a little multi-port hub plugged into the USB 2 port, into which I plug frequently used things, like leads for transferring things off camera and phone, the dongle for a wireless mouse, and then there's a port free for anything else. My optical drive has a USB 2 port, so I plugged it into the free port on the hub.

The drive showed up in the Devices and Drives, and I looked at the properties to see that my laptop already had some sort of generic driver for it and thought that it was working properly. Cool!

I popped a disc in and closed the tray, and immediately the drive's icon disappeared. No error messages. The drive was stuttering away, evidently not reading the disc, the green light flashing on and off. I tried ejecting the disc but nothing happened - the button on the tray front wasn't working.

Okay, well I know this one of old. Into the desk drawer for a paperclip, open out one of the arms, poke it into the little hole next to the eject button on the tray, and it releases the catch.

Take a look in the tray, blow a few times just in case there's dust or fluff or something. Try again.

Same problem. Sounds as though there's a problem with the hardware, it's making such a horrible noise.

There is plenty of help available through the internet, lots of experts out there, although it really takes some sifting through to find the thing which might be the solution.

I searched using the make and model of my optical drive, adding 'troubleshoot'. The first thing I found was a video from some chap who was reviewing the same optical drive that I have, and had found that neither of the ones he had from new worked. Then there were lots of other reviews which said that it worked fine. No help there, then.

I found the manufacturer doesn't make it any more and had no information on it. I bought mine in 2013, I think, so it's 5 years old, which is practically antique in IT terms!

There were quite a few discussion groups and a couple of sites offering help for a 'modest sum'. Reading some of the discussion groups, with lots of experienced, possibly expert users chiming in, gave me plenty to explore.

From the various opinions, I gleaned the following possible issues:

• Too much play in the disc tray (= tighten up some little screws. They were already tight)
• Dirty head (= clean it. I would, but it can't run the cleaner disc)
• Drive failure, or all sorts of other impenetrable issues with the optical drive hardware (= so buy a new one. Even though they are relatively cheap, I'll hold off from spending if I can possibly help it!)
• Faulty lead, USB connector, USB port. (The former two were working, the latter definitely works).
• Faulty leads or connections in the hub. (Nope, other things plugged into the hub work fine)
• Original drivers needed (there's nothing available to download except some rather suspicious non-specific stuff, and the original drivers are on a disc, which, you guessed it, won't run)
• Windows 10 is not designed to work with external optical drives (I seriously doubt it, although there are a LOT of comments about the unreliability of optical drives, internal and external, with Windows 10)
• Updated drivers needed (Windows 10 doesn't give you an option to look for updates if it's only just installed a driver - logical, providing the driver works, and it thinks it does. It also thinks it's just a CD ROM, so I wonder if this is the source of a lot of the complaints that Windows 10 doesn't work, because the driver doesn't provide the full functionality?)
• Outdated USB controllers (it's a new machine, unlikely)
• Eject/deinstall, reboot, reinstall (the old, reliable 'turn it off and turn it on again'. No change)
• And then, four hours later the very last suggestion; to use a powered hub or plug the lead directly into the USB port, no extensions, as apparently optical drives use a lot of power to start up. I plugged it directly into the USB 2 port and it worked. Hurrah! However, it means I no longer have a USB2 port for anything else, so I could do with an adapter, as I automatically reach for a mouse. (And then tap it a few times and wonder why it's not working, forgetting that its dongle isn't plugged in.)

I was so excited, I let the system rip the disc without setting any options and then spent another ten minutes wandering around my new system trying to find where it had put the tracks. When I found them, they were .wma when I would normally have gone for .mp3 (but what do you expect when you let Windows Media Player loose on them? Tsk!). Then I found that my old reliable audio file converter software is no longer free. Okay, I get it, it's good software, why should the company maintain and update it for free? But it was the final straw and so late it was early (in the morning!), so I took my grumpy face off to bed.

The following day, I wondered about the complaints I'd seen that Windows 10 was unreliable with optical drives and wouldn't play DVDs; also the way that my system just saw this as a CD ROM drive. I had a look and could find options to burn discs but no, it would not play a couple of DVDs I had to hand, and therefore no options to rip or burn video off a DVD formatted disc either. Indeed, it turns out that Windows 10 is not supplied with this, assuming that everyone now streams stuff and uploads/downloads via cloud storage. Or something.

So every issue spawns another few, in this case, a USB 3 to USB 2 adapter, or possibly a powered hub, as I could do with being able to type without resting my arms on the front of the laptop, and a separate keyboard will either need a port for a connector or a dongle. Also, file converter software and DVD read/write software.

The list of things to learn and buy in order to give myself the capability I want seems never-ending. I keep asking myself when the complications will decrease to a level where I appreciate the benefits.

Ho hum, better get on with this running order for the weekend. Funny, I had one to do only 10 weeks ago or so, when my old system died. I never really appreciated how WYSIWYG and plug-in-and-play it was! I was wondering though: do others go through this learning curve with their computers and if so, how do they cope, or is it just my lack of knowledge? Comments welcome!

Fire-fighting

My jobs for this morning included cleaning out the veg racks, making vegetable curry and tomato soup, mounting new cork boards in the kitchen, sorting some laundry, stripping and remaking the bed, … actually, the list is endless. It didn't include washing all of the cat toys and the basket they live in, nor this blog post, but I so need a quick rant to get things off my chest.

It doesn't help that I was woken too early. At about 05.20 (the shipping forecast was just starting) I was awoken by Greebo yodelling at me and a strong smell of cat wee. I switched on the light to see his tail leaving the bedroom and went out to the toilet to find him sulking (lying with his back turned and taking the maximum amount of space) on the landing. I returned with loo roll in hand, just in case, to discover that he had sprayed my make-up case and peed in the cat toy box. I've no idea what this protest was about. It could be that I was ignoring him, which was because I was fast asleep. I cleaned up as best I could and left the yuk until I was feeling more human. The little beast sashayed back in some time later and woke me again (still too early!) by jumping onto me and purring loudly, butting the hand outside the duvet for head rubs. So cute, (apart from 6 kilos of cat landing on my ribs!) butter wouldn't melt.

The reason I need to clean out the veg racks (and their cupboard) is that a couple of onions I had in there suddenly collapsed into smelly pulp. The rest are okay, but having been in proximity to rotten ones, it's best they're used, hence the need for some cooking.

Several weeks ago, the sticky pad for the hook holding the kitchen notice board suddenly gave up and the board crashed down, breaking the dustpan and brush which were neatly standing beneath it. So in the meantime, I have had to buy a new dustpan and brush (which I find I like very much, but which I have also had to wash already. Greebo decided it needed scent marking, so he sprayed it and the utility room skirting and wall where I'd placed it). I also found that the pine frame of the kitchen corkboard had broken and there were a few holes in the cork too, so I needed a new one. And something to mount it on the side of the cupboard. And therefore also to clean the side of the cupboard so the mounts will stick well. And a trip to the dump to ditch the old board.

I know life is a problem-solving exercise, but it's not surprising I can't make any headway on my To Do list when new tasks which need some sort of urgent resolution suddenly appear, spawning a number of dependencies and sub-tasks. Fire-fighting (in the time management sense) is a good analogy, except that there's generally a team of fire-fighters. I can't delegate, there's only me.

The single-handedness is getting to me as I can only get so far with multi-tasking. I'm grateful for the technology which allows my coffee to percolate while the washing machine spins and I'm doing the washing up, having left the cat bowls to soak temporarily, but I can't change the light bulb at the same time as I'm putting a battery in the kitchen clock or mount cork boards while hanging out washing (not that I can hang out washing, it keeps raining. A tumble drier and new dishwasher would be nice, but no money for them!).

I went out to empty the kitchen compost, to find last night's wind (the tail end of Hurricane Helene, for which the met office removed the severe weather warning, since the gusts were only 40-ish mph instead of the forecast 60) has led to a massive tear in the canopy of the swing seat, and some of the attachments for the canopy frame have sheared and broken.

The compost trug is now full, so that will need to go into the compost bin, which itself is nearly full, and bin #3 will need to be dug out into bags to make more room for compost making. (So much gardening to do!)

I'd be much more relaxed about this, but I've got a guest this weekend, a fellow dancer doing the JWAAD music course. We have dance in common but don't otherwise know each other, so I've warned her that this place is chaotically messy with added cats. I've just been into the guest room to find coats and hangers all over the floor, where the clothes rail that they were on has fallen over. And the reason for that is because the plastic thingy which attached the rail to the stand at one end has split. Yet more things to do.

I've just saved and previewed this post, only to find that some of the text which I'd edited appeared in a different font. I couldn't immediately see the change of style in the editor, and ended up editing the HTML to fix it. Add 'finding out what's up with the insertion of a different span style when I've moved text' to the ever-growing list! Not such a quick blog post after all!

I suppose I'd better get on with it. Thanks for listening. Comments welcome below!

Hang the Diet!

Saturday lunchtime, I took my bleary, scruffy Saturday self off to Milford to buy a few everyday basics (milk, coffee, bin bags …). There seemed to be a lot of traffic, so I followed it (out of curiosity)  down to the docks and found a food festival on Mackerel Quay. It turned out to be the Welsh heat of the British Street Food Awards. The place was absolutely heaving with people (and lots of dogs on leads!) but I found a (free) parking space easily enough. Having skipped breakfast (no coffee in the house!), my tummy was growling at all the delicious smells wafting around. Free entry. Oh yeah, hang the diet, let's eat!

With 15 or so stalls, including a beer tent, there was plenty to choose from. My first stop was for a vegetable Malay curry, sweet and fragrant with coconut rice. A sign for squid attracted me, but I went for their monkfish taco with a charred sweetcorn salsa and mojito dressing, which was superb. I finished my three course lunch with a very gooey brownie, which was described as chocolate and laver (the seaweed), but I couldn't detect any trace of the latter. It did contain pistachios, which I love, but I didn't like the extreme gooeyness.

I spent more time chatting than eating. There were deckchairs (including three giant ones facing the waterway, which the kids were loving to clamber onto and sit three abreast!) and benches in the centre of the stalls and it was a very relaxed atmosphere, despite the lack of sunshine. It's perfectly normal here to fall into conversation with complete strangers, and have other people join in. The general consensus was that the event should be held every year, or perhaps even have just local producers every month.

Yes, it really was that grey. I hung around for a bit, waiting for the doughnut stall to reopen. It's difficult to see on the photo, but there is a long queue. Their light, fluffy doughnuts were worth the wait, but they were having serious difficulty meeting demand.

Something I should have filmed was the rather surreal effect of disembodied masts slowly moving past the back of the stalls at the end of the quay, as yachts moved through the lock between the marina and the Haven. With the weather becoming increasingly drizzly, I decided to go, stopping to shop (coffee!) on the way home.

The Sunday was a little brighter, so I fetched a friend from Haverfordwest for a spontaneous spot of 'Sunday lunch'. I had a barley and bean 'risotto' (overpowering herbs!) while my friend had sausages in a bun (but what sausages, with onions and sauce, I was almost tempted myself!) and I treated myself to sweet chilli squid. We finished with a luscious ice cream and a cuppa back in the chaos of my place (so my friend can feel better about the state of her flat, because it's tidy compared to mine. It's all relative.) My cats proved, once again, that they are antisocial little furbags.

I could so easily have missed this event. I don't generally get the local papers, Facebook frequently doesn't bring up the local stuff I might be interested in, and I often only find out about things after the event. Overloaded with information, it's often only by looking for something specific that I catch what's on. I made a pact with myself to make an effort to get out to some more cheap or free and fun things to do. Which, I've a feeling, is something far easier said than done!

It had to happen ...

There's no good time for a computer system which is in daily use to go down. I'd been expecting mine to die for a while, and had been thinking long and hard about what I needed for the past couple of years. Bought in 2005, there was no doubt mine was extremely outdated. It had XP as its operating system, support for which was withdrawn a few years ago. It was a good operating system, but my PC didn't have the processor speed or RAM to cope with an upgrade, nor (I suspect) the internal space for new cards etc. so it became one of those 'if it's not broken, don't fix it' things. However, as versions of operating systems and the main Microsoft Office package moved on, it became increasingly difficult to maintain compatibility.  I bought a terabyte external hard drive a few years ago as backup, and then started using it as my main storage too, as the 145 GB hard drive seemed permanently full and the whole thing was getting slower and slower. Then my dear old PC started making some alarming noises (especially when Norton kicked in and hogged the processor). So I started looking seriously at what I would need by way of RAM, processor speed and storage, checking the requirements of the applications I rely on. At least a new computer with up-to-date apps would support more work potential for Plan B.
My stepson, who works in the industry, observed that it didn't much matter what I went for, as it would be so much better than what I had. Knowing that modern apps come with system requirements, I'm unconvinced.

As a friend who used to work in IT sales observed, it's a minefield out there, and this may be an understatement. Computer hardware and software are fast-moving beasts. When I started looking, Windows 7 was just moving to 8, and then almost in a blink of an eye to 8.1 with Office 13 the latest thing. Each upgrade required more RAM, more processor speed, more storage, and more of anything means more expensive too.

My Dad and I had been talking about getting a PC built to order, but I thought this might be an expensive way to go, and it seemed like it was necessary to know more about chipsets, graphics processors and internal gubbins than I could get my head around. I'd got to the point where I thought I probably needed a laptop to act as a backup system and provide a flexible, mobile solution (it's great having a smartphone, but I'm hardwired for a qwerty keyboard and preferably a mouse, and proper word processing capabilities at the very least),

And then, just as I was starting the running order for the Cardigan Belly Dance Festival a little over a fortnight away, and just as I had seen an email requesting changes to a book I'm editing, my old computer went FUT! Literally, with a bright flash from the back and a smell of scorched dust. And a lot of loud swearing.

I used my phone and a library computer (almost as slow and unreliable as my old one!) to do some searching and had several conversations with my Dad about requirements. I went into the local branch of a chain store which sells computers and had a browse around, gravitating immediately to a couple of laptops which turned out to be top end, though not gaming machines, with prices starting at £1500. Typical of me to go for the expensive options; even so, I was a bit shocked at the prices. So many advertisements with offers on laptops would lead you to believe you can get something really good for under £300. Yeah, right.

It's always a case of any two, but not all three, of fast, good or cheap. I needed one quickly, with a reasonably good specification in terms of RAM, processor and storage, and it soon became clear that in order to achieve the latter in particular, it would be rather more expensive than I had intended. The cheaper laptops were fine for social media and online shopping, but wouldn't support any productive work on documentation. Even the next level up, marketed for students, weren't really up to working with the full Office package. We excitedly explored a 2-in-1 Microsoft Surface Book, until it became clear that even the 13" screen with an i5 processor was approaching the £2000 mark, and even then, it would need a faster processor to run the Adobe Creative suite software which I'd intended learning into and exploring to take my digital art to the next level. We'd be looking at £2500 before adding the cost of software and other peripherals, like a wireless keyboard, new monitor, new printer - even the stylus didn't come with the machine, which seemed like a damned cheek for something so expensive.

In the end I chose a machine with 8 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD, an Intel Core i5 DDR4/quadcore processor, with a clock speed of 1.60 GHz, but with a maximum 'turbo frequency' of 3.40 GHz. Just looking at the numbers, that didn't seem any faster than my old Intel Pentium 4 running at 3 GHz, except that it's not meaningful to compare processors like that. Used to a 19" monitor, I went for a 15.6" as the 13" seemed too small, even though I intend to find a way to plug my old monitor in. And like my trusty old workhorse, the new one is also a Dell.

As a not-very-techie-but (I think/hope) fairly competent user (#itsnotrocketscience!) moving from an old XP desktop to a Windows 10 laptop, I expected a steepish learning curve and to have to take time to get apps and other things set up and learn where everything is. The user interface is quite different, so I'm gradually fumbling my way around. The track/touch pad is the best I've used in my admittedly narrow experience of laptops and the keyboard isn't too bad, although the different layout and key spacing from my old one has me hitting hash instead of return a lot of the time and inadvertently putting caps lock on. Having my forearms resting on the front of the laptop while typing isn't ideal - I could do with a lower desk. It's really fast and the fan, when it comes on, is so quiet, compared to my old system. I plugged in my external hard drive and found to my immense relief that I could read and use the files immediately.

I've had it a week and the teething troubles are still outweighing the good bits. I'm permanently in a state of how does this work, what-does this mean, why isn't this working, what am I supposed to do? Grrr, aggravation, right from the start when registering the machine. Why do I have to select business or personal. It's both, why can't it be both, what's the difference? Much of the online help and feedback, which Dell and Microsoft invite, seems to go unanswered, or has answers which take three paragraphs to give no intelligible information and are applicable to a previous operating system.

Things have been somewhat erratic, Having watched something on YouTube, a few hours later, it wouldn't work. I can't remember the exact wording of the error message that came up, but it wasn't clear whether it was a problem with YouTube or the browser, or possibly something else. 'Try again later' didn't work and eventually I gave up and went to bed. It worked the next day.

Having set up the printer, everything apparently okay, I went to print, and the computer told me that the printer was offline. It wasn't. It was on, both in terms of power and on the WiFi network, and the computer could obviously see it because it queued the document. Switching various things off and on, retrying, etc, didn't do anything. I wondered if I needed drivers and went off to look, but found conflicting information. And lots of unanswered feedback and questions about whether Kodak printers were compatible with Windows 10. There was very little information and only one driver on the Kodak site, and something about drivers automatically loaded from the Windows end, which left me none the wiser. A couple of hours later, I jumped out of my skin as the printer started printing the page I'd sent. No dialogue from the computer. What the hell happened there?

The LCD screen seems to have a grey-blue colour cast and isn't reproducing colours at all accurately. I didn't really notice how bad it was until, fed up of trying to find a way to adjust brightness and contrast, I was looking at some photos and found that the colour reproduction was way off. Again, conflicting information - apparently the LCD screen on a laptop shouldn't need adjusting, but this looks like a colour profile issue. But instructions on colour management seem to be aimed at monitors as separate devices, So the suggestion is to plug in a monitor to test the LCD colour reproduction. I'd need a VGA-USB-C adapter and even the expensive Dell version doesn't include this laptop in the models with which the adapter is supposedly compatible, and I can't find any reason why. I might buy a cheaper one just to test it out, otherwise I can't think how I'm going to make any progress with this, short of taking it back to the shop ...

,,, which I'm very loath to do right now, as I'm in the middle of gathering all the music and dancer details for the show this weekend. I have the running order and playlists to do, as well as preparing my own mini workshop and notes for attendees, and finishing my choreography as well as preparing my costume and trying to find some time to rehearse. Some music tracks which played yesterday now don't play today on Groove Music (which was the app which popped up automatically to play tracks). Okay, so I'll play them with Windows Media Player. Nope, 'a problem occurred' and when I clicked the link to take me to the Windows help and support, I had half a dozen lines applicable to Windows 7, starting with 'Unfortunately, specific info about the error isn't currently available'. If not now, then when? And lots of forum posts wondering whether Windows Media Player works with some update or version (or something) of Windows 10. Which left me wondering how I could find out which version or update I had. Again, Windows support was no help, I found what I needed from How-To Geek. See, if they can do it, why can't you, Microsoft? #notrocketscience.

In the meantime, I thought maybe the tracks would play through iTunes and as I generally sync my iPod to ensure I have the show tracks backed up on there as well as on a USB stick, I tried downloading iTunes. And found that apparently it's not available for my laptop. According to Apple, this laptop should be capable for it, but Windows store only offers it for a different version of Windows 10. I managed to find my system information; my version is 15063, the one required is 16299, which is apparently a PC (as in desktop?) version. But again, there's no real information about how to get that build version, what it relates to. The link just takes you through to Windows 10, as if the choice between their Home, Pro, Education etc. editions is all there is. I have a lot of my music in iTunes format and some credit in the store. I've found a link to download build 16299 but nothing that helps me to know if it's safe to do so.

Returning to the Microsoft help and support, I put in the code from the Groove Music error message to find a thread dating back to Windows 7 in 2012 with exactly the same problem, basically that the audio playback stops working due to an unknown error. Again, with non-answers about codecs and third party software not working with Windows, until an addition from someone last year on Windows 10 with the same problem and an observation that YouTube playback is also affected. Sure enough, YouTube has stopped working again.

Oh dear, this post has turned into a rant. All this is making my brain hurt and the hours I'm spending just trying to get things to work have resulted in a literal pain in the arse from sitting for too long. After a week's ownership, I'm still struggling to get back up and running effectively and hoping I haven't made an expensive mistake.

Heatwave!

Blazing June really lived up to the name this year. Instead of the usual change at midsummer into a pattern of wet westerlies, the rain has been noticeably absent for over a month, until yesterday morning, when, for a few hours, it varied between drizzle and downpour.

It was fine but still chilly at the end of May, the Lilac and the Ladies Smock a fortnight late. At the start of June, good weather was forecast and there was the usual rubbish reporting of temperatures in the high twenties, as if that were everywhere and not just the home counties. At the end of the first week of June, the warmth had begun to break through and it suddenly seemed as though we'd caught up after the late spring.

I don't remember any rain until the morning of 17 June, when there had already been a little shower when I went to empty the moth trap, and I finished that just in time before another light shower.  I have a snapshot of Xena sprawled on a bit of old wood in the back garden, surrounded by damp soil, taken on 20 June. I think that might have been the morning I found about 2mm of water in a bucket. I found this website quite useful as an aide-memoire, but it only shows humidity, rather than rainfall. Then no rain, it just got hotter and hotter until we had days and days of weather in the mid-twenties, too hot to work in the garden for long. This was cool compared to what the home counties had to endure. The poor cats spent all their time trying to find patches of cool shade to sprawl in, often in the long grass, under the hedge, in a shady spot on the patio, or flopped onto the tiles in the utility room.

On 29 June I was fed up with feeling as though I was melting and declared a beach afternoon. A friend and I went to Broadhaven, where we set up the UV shelter, covered ourselves in factor 50 and had a picnic and a swim as the tide came in over the hot sand. The water felt a bit chilly - reported on the lifeguards' board as 14 degrees. I'd found my pocket kite and took it along, but there was scarcely any wind, so it would not stay up.

Eventually, on Sunday 1 July, there was a yellow weather warning for thunderstorms. I watched the lightning maps for a while as the storm played south of Exeter and then made its way up to Somerset to give a Chard a bit of a show before it fizzled out. Anyone on holiday in Brittany and Normandy would have had to shelter from tremendous thunderstorms, the maps thick with yellow and red dots from lightning strikes! The weather warning here came to nothing. Another one for last Friday was cancelled too. Some showery rain was forecast, and I leaned on my fork in the front garden, sweaty face turned to the sky as the first drops fell ... and then stopped.

It feels as though I've spent weeks with sweat dripping down my back and into my eyes. Yesterday evening, a cool 14 degrees tempted me to put on a jumper. The forecast is still reasonably fine, cloudy with sunny spells and several degrees cooler, with another light shower due later.

There was a time during the winter/early spring, when the ground was completely waterlogged. I remember sploshing my way down the garden, with water pooling on the surface in places. Now, any dampness is locked in the baked clay soil. Worms have tied themselves in knots to aestivate deeper in the soil. Plants without tap roots and which like damp soils, like Primroses and Lady's Smock, have struggled and in some cases died. I'm not sure whether my new, expensive roses will make it, either, despite my best efforts to keep the pots watered. On the other hand, the brambles have loved it, sending up new shoots from their deep roots.

The Big Butterfly Count starts this Friday and schools break up for summer holidays next week. I wonder if decent summer weather will continue, or will the westerlies bring rain? We could do with a downpour to clear the air.

Early June moth trapping

Compared to the 23-24 May, there were many more moths in the trap when I looked at it early on 5th June. I had so much quiet fun, and had forgotten how addictive going through the trap contents can be. You just never really know what you're going to get. But, deary me, my identification skills are so rusty, I'm still trying to sort everything out a month later!

A benefit of setting up the trap on my patio is that I can sit on the swing seat while I empty it and record the contents (and the swing seat canopy shades the light from shining directly into my next-door neighbour's back bedroom. The light doesn't bother me, but it would be unfair to disrupt other people's sleep!)
Another benefit is that, if it's warm enough, I can deal with the contents while I'm still in my pyjamas and then go back to sleep for a couple of hours.
I sat in the early light, with just my cats, the moths and various birds for company. Well before the builders in the field behind me started work with their noisy machinery, I could hear a skylark singing. The jackdaws in the chimney were talking, the young making sleepy chackling noises. Sparrows cheeped and twittered and the Blackbirds took turns in and out of the privet. It was bliss.

As it was already light, some of the moths in the box were impatient to go and a few escaped before I could record them. Remembering my training and tips from the former Carmarthenshire county moth recorder, Jon Baker, (if you're slow on ID, photograph everything as you empty the trap), I grabbed my camera and managed to snap the next escapee as it settled briefly on the paving. So pretty! What are you?

I'd caught an unusual angle, but I recognised the white markings; a Gold Spot, Plusia festucae. I've only had one before, several years ago, when I found a pupa loosely attached to a broken flag iris stem by the farm pond. I mused over the white markings I could see through the case ...

and kept it safe for a week or so until it hatched into a fresh and beautiful adult, which I then released back near the pond.

With the moths in the box fairly secure, I looked around for those which hadn't settled in the trap. A strikingly-marked moth was sitting on the side of the growhouse. Yet another which is common but new to me: a Treble-bar, Aplocera plagiata ssp plagiata. It occurred to me that I should start a new list of the moths I've had since I moved to Pembrokeshire.

As I worked my way back to the box and then through the box contents, the number of different species began to mount up. I found another 'Ooo, what are you?' and new one for me on the frame of the swing-seat: a Figure of Eighty, Tethea ocularis.

Look, it says '80' on the wings!

My digital camera isn't the best for close-up shots, but it's proving an essential aid. This cute, tiny thing is responsible for at least some of the leaf-mines on the lilac. Like so many micromoths, it only has a Latin name: Gracillaria syringella. There are English names around for most of the common micromoths, but few have been formally accepted. It would make things easier - the multi-syllable Latin names can be cumbersome. I saw this was informally called a Common Slender, although I would have thought Lilac Leaf-miner would be more accurate. Although you could argue that it's neither lilac-coloured, nor exclusive to lilac (it likes privet, too, and it's welcome to it!).

Gracillaria syringella

Reviewing the photos, I realised that some snapshots weren't as helpful as I'd hoped. Many of the smaller micros are shown in the books in side view and I'd taken a dorsal (top/back view). Then there are some moths which are highly variable. Thank goodness for online sites and help from other local moth recorders!

There were loads of Common Marbled Carpets, which needed to be checked in case they were in fact Dark Marbled Carpets. Dark Spectacles, checked in case they were just The Spectacles. I tussled over the difference between two very similar, but subtly different moths, one of which was a Poplar Grey. The other was a Knot Grass, and I remembered I'd seen a Knot Grass caterpillar sometime previously. A third, plainer grey moth turned out to be another new one for me, the Miller. Were the Small Square Spots really SSS or Ingrailed Clays? (Working from forewing base to tip, is the colour pattern of the outer crossline dark-pale-dark (=Ingrailed Clay) or just pale-dark (=Small Square Spot).) I even managed, with much cross-referencing to other online photos, to identify the two pugs (Grey and Common).
It's like a game of spot the difference (and spot the moth, in the case of a Poplar Hawk-moth which had settled on the pebble-dashed wall) where you also need to take into account the likelihood of the species' occurrence, based on flight season, distribution and status (abundance, or not) for where you are in the UK.

Did I say something about a lack of moths here when I emptied the late May catch? Silly girl, be careful what you wish for! I ended up with 121 moths of 48 species (and that's of course not including the ones which got away!). I'm not going to list them all here, the photos above pretty much cover the wow factor! Highest numbers were Elephant Hawk-moth (13) and Common Marbled Carpet (11). No wonder it's taken me a long time to sort them all out. Hopefully, surely, I'll get quicker as I get back into practice!