Hitting the wall

Lots to see in Glossa today; a lawnmower left in the centre of a field, now overgrown; bright cheerful flowers growing in a wall which looked as though they thought it was midsummer; an orange on a spike; and this artisan dry laid wall. I took several shots of this, perhaps it was a premonition.

Our first ever visit to this island was a two week summer holiday when we fell in love with it. Our second visit was a fact-finding mission for two months in mid winter; would we still love it here in the winter? What was the actual cost of living? Could we find a property that we liked well enough and could afford? Well you know the answers to the first and last of those.

To answer the second question we made a note of every single purchase, what it was and what it cost. Every year I check our expenditure against our income to ensure that we are living within our means and where there is scope for economy when required.

Today I lost our 2017 expenditure document, it had only nine days left until it was complete. And then I overwrote the good copy I had saved on 1st December with the corrupted copy which had saved itself today because I thought it was the program at fault and not the file. I have stepped into the world of geeks and they have told me to download a program called Recuva and to run it before shutting the machine down. It tells me that the scan will take several days, during which time we will not be able to watch films.

If the file cannot be recovered in any form, I could still calculate our overall expenditure by checking bank statements, but that will not tell us as much detail as we would like. It'll be a help but it will lose us a lot of valuable detail normally very easily retrievable.