The Big Hill

Canigou, our local Pyrenee dominates every view around here. Well, except when it's behind clouds which is most days just now after 10am. There's been snow up there for about a month now, but it's steadily building now. The snow usually stays until June or so, melting slowly into the river that flows past our house, keeping it bracingly cold right through the summer.

Not much going on here today. There was a lot of school, including Conor reading two whole books. It seems to give him a whole different sense of achievement than just reading words here and there - so I will continue with that approach. I just hope coming up with the books can keep ahead of his reading speed!

The rest of my day, and a good portion of last night, was spent fighting the forces of Windows Vista. I have been trying for ages to safeguard my snaps by copying folders onto my external hard drive. With it taking all night to transfer just one folder, I have lost patience with that. After a bit of nagging from a computer literate friend, I looked into getting some software to deal with full back-ups for me, and bought the most highly recommended one. After 4.5 days of constant backing up (on turbo speed...) it had backed up 25% of my files. The 'helpdesk' at the back up software place was anything but helpful, so I have given up. I am now presuming something is wrong with the hard-drive. Sigh. With a faster internet connection I would back up over the internet... but no possibility of that with the snail pace connection we have.

Anyway, that's all very dull. Mr B's doing curry for later. The kids are enjoying 'school' and it was a sunny day. So not all bad. And without the hateful computer, I wouldn't have blip (which I'm thinking wouldn't work so well by post).