Soledad's Journal

Originally, I wanted to do as many of the identical trees in the songbook as possible. But my fingers rebelled. They didn't want to stitch through multiple layers of hard felt and double-sided tape - or Velcro, for that matter - two days in a row. So I made the front cover of the songbook instead, and I must say I'm very content with the results. Pic coming up as soon as I have the right illumination for the iPad mini.

Which leads directly to my next topic. The mini is about 7 or 8 years old, and has served me faithfully during all this time. But its browser is outdated, it refuses to connect to the internet from time to time, and its memory or whatever it is called is almost full. Mum has been nagging me to think of something I'd like for my upcoming birthday (upcoming as in early October), and I'm beginning to consider purchasing a new tablet PC. Another iPad mini, if possible, as similar to the old one as I can get. I'm terrible with technology and the mere thought of getting used a new one makes me panic. Which is why I still work - well, read - on my geriatric laptop, too. Even though it's as slow as molasses after a decade and a half of service. I just hate changes so much!

... because yesterday was so very exhausting. I slept in - got up at 8.15 in the morning, which is late for my current schedule. We did our morning routine, then I pureed the bananas for the banana bread I'm planning to bake on Friday and put it into the freezer.

Afterwards, I cut out the cupcake bases for the next quiet book page (all 12 of them, all of the size of my thumbprint). Then we watched some telly - Richterin Barbara Salesch, for the Germans among us - and I cooked lunch: cauliflower with roasted bread crumbs and chopped ham and just a little sour cream... yummy! (Yes, noadvertising, I know it's not for you, which is why we ate the whole thing. *g*)

I spoke to IT neighbour on the phone and I might actually get back the iPad in a few days' time! I'll still need to buy a new one, sooner rather than later, because the poor thing is already 7 or 8 years old, I'm not exactly sure, with an outdated browser and slightly wacky inner "organs", but will hopefully hold out until the replacement arrives. I'm sad to let it go, but some things are just inevitable.

Other than that, not much happened. It's been a blissfully quiet day so far, and I hope it will go on that way.

In the morning I grated 13 apples for tomorrow's apple pie... 13 because that was how many fit into the required 2 kilos, stop thinking of evil, witch-y things, even if it's Friday! Then I made Gefüllte Hähnchenkeulen for lunch, to go with the salad I forgot to serve the day before yesterday. Since it had only tomatoes and cucumbers, it was still very good.

My friend Evie dropped by after lunch, to bring us some more apples (school gets them for free due to some health programme or another, but the kiddies never eat the whole amount, so the grown-ups can take the rest home). We talked a bit, I showed off my latest craft projects, and Evie, loyal soul as she is, was properly impressed.

My iPad mini is still AWOL. I called my neighbour, the IT guy today, to ask if it's still salvageable, but he didn't have the time to take a look yet. Okay, I know he labours for three, but I feel lost without my tablet. Now the only way to go online is to switch on the desktop PC, as my geriatric laptop takes an ungodly long time to boot up and even longer to connect to the internet. It's still the only one on which certain solitaire games run, though, so I keep it. It runs on XP, so you can imagine that half the websites refuse to let it connect. I'm reluctant to get rid of old things I'm used to, as long as they still work... more or less, which is why I still have a 13-year-old phone with actual buttons. It isn't internet-capable, though (and I wouldn't know how to connect it, even if it were), so the desktop PC is currently my only connection to the outside world. *sigh*

At least in our house. Starting with the fact that on Sundays I have to get up almost an hour earlier because Mum attends to Mass via telly and needs to be made pretty in time.
( Boring domestic stuff behind the cut )
Having done all this, I've now relocated to my desktop PC for more fanfic and games before Mary Berry's Country House Secrets starts on TV Paprika. I do love that programme so much! And then, around midnight, I'm going to watch Britain's Best Home Cook. Yes, my tastes are a bit one-sided, I know. *g*

So, Kaspersky has run out, IT guy still hasn't show up, which means I'm living a dangerous cyberlife right now. It's like going to the shops at Covid times. But I can't just cut my main line to the outside world because I'm afraid of computer viruses. I've made a compromise: I'll spend much less time online until the antivirus problem is solved, and I won't visit any unknown websites, hoping that the three fanfic archives, Pinterest, LJ and DW won't send me any evil bugs.

Gmail problem still hasn't been solved; I tried to log in from one of the school computers, but it wouldn't let me - it did send me a security warning, though, that someone (that was me) tried to log in with my password. I hope we can solve the whole thing before IE goes out of commission. Creating a new Gmail account and changing the frigging address in all the official forums would be a real pain in the backside.

In more delightful news, I went to choir practice again - has it been a week already? Sometimes I wonder how time goes by so quickly. It was great fun as always... we were 9 people, plus the conductor and the piano player, in a large classroom, with the windows open. Fingers crossed that it means we had the proper precautions, but one can't live in fear all the time.

Tomorrow my friend Ilonka will drop by to fetch The Thing of Beauty for her pregnant daughter. Mum is happy to see her, she's such a nice person, and we haven't met for, oh, I think, two years or so. I hope they'll like the baby book.

I also made some progress on the quiet book project. One of the outline recognition pages is almost done, all Velcro patches are firmly applied - this won't need more than another day of work... perhaps two. Or so I hope.

And tomorrow my Kaspersky licence runs off. *sigh*

At least I had a lovely, long phone chat with my young friend Alex, and now I'm up to date with all the school gossip. Knowing things is good.

I've worked a bit on the outline recognition page. The geometric shapes are now all sewn together, and I started stitching the outlines on the page bases. Not as much as I planned to, due to the above mentioned gossip sharing, but small progress is also progress.

It was a somewhat hectic day altogether. I've managed to forget that the shops would be closed on May 1st and failed to do the shopping yesterday. Therefore we've run out of bread and milk, almost completely, and I had to bake four little plaited breads - fortunately, I've got a quick and easy recipe for them. It is a yeast dough, enriched with butter, milk and eggs. I even made it with my school kids in the past.

Well; that's for today, I guess. In the next few days I might be short-ish, as posting on the iPad mini isn't an easy thing, plus tomorrow we'll have the big cleaning frenzy again.

The back covers of the twin quiet books, also known as the Eeyore pages, are now finished.

This is Ábel's:



This is Beni's:



And the two pages side by side, just for the fun of it:



In other news, the IT guy didn't call last evening. I'm getting a bit anxious about the whole thing. Hopefully, I'll be able to catch him during the weekend - not being able to log into my Google account via Firefox is bothersome. At least my outdated IE can deal with Gmail (although with nothing else), but IE will stop existing in the not too far future, so I'd like to get things righted before that happens. *sigh*

I've got a new knitted waistcoat. Which was high time, as the old one (that I inherited from Grandma who'd died back in 1996) had more holes in it than actual waistcoat. It was a loose pattern to begin with, and the yarn literally ate itself during the decades.

I bought new yarn last summer and asked my friend Erna (our art teacher) to help me refresh my (barely existent) knowledge about knitting. I was never good at it and have long forgotten what little I'd ever known, but I though what the heck, let's give it a try! My friend looked at me in sympathy and said she'd knit the thing for me - it would be faster that way.

Well... it wasn't, at least not likely. She repeatedly apologized during the recent months - first school intervened, then family, then health problems, life can be complicated sometimes - as things progressed really slowly. But yesterday she finally came, and now I'm the proud owner of a nice, cosy tobacco-coloured knitted waistcoat. Yay!

Other than that, not much happened. I made a food run (in the gently falling rain), took a day-long break from crafting, and we ate leftover soup for lunch. Now I'm waiting for a call from my neighbour, the IT guy, since my antivirus programme is about to run out, and I need a new one. Within the next 10 days. It will be... interesting.

My life has been so full of excitement lately. Does the stupid PC have to freeze at least every other day? And when it does, I can't even restart it properly. I have to shut it down manually and restart the same way. Grrrrrrr!

I don't know if it's the renewed antivirus programme or if Outlook is acting up on its own, and I don't care. Whichever it is, it should stop, dammit!

I really don't demand a lot from life. But is it really too much to expect my main computer to work smoothly? *growl*

Otherwise not much happened today, as usual. I made a food run, we had a visit from the physiotherapist, we ate leftovers and watched re-runs of the GBBO. Alas. TLC took Cake Boss off their programme, at least temporarily.

On the plus side, I had two nice, long phone calls with my colleagues, which always brightens my day.

I had a weird night. For some reason, I woke up every other hour from some really odd dream that I couldn't remember. Fortunately, I was able to fall asleep again, but I was fairly beaten in the morning nonetheless.

I worked some on my shabby chic journal; finished two pages with which I'm quite happy. No pics, since my iPad is in the neighbourhood, waiting for the healing touch. I could dig out my camera, take photos, upload them to my geriatric laptop (where the program is that accepts pics from the camera), then copy everything onto a data stick, transfer them to the main PC, but frankly, it's too much hassle right now. Should the iPad be away longer than expected, I might do that, but not just yet.

At least I can download my mail on aforementioned geriatric laptop, even if it takes a bit longer. That means I can check any possible messages in the morning or early afternoon, too. Save for gmail, that is, because the laptop still runs on Windows XP (since some programs just won't load on Windows 7 or even more recent operations systems), and Windows XP is no longer supported, therefore it declares everything connected to Google as unsafe and refuses to open gmail. *sigh*

OTOH, I can connect to AO3 without problems with it, while I can't do that on my iPad, for some mysterious reason, only the insecure ao3 version. Cyberlife is weird.