It's Saturday evening and I'm still in pain from Wednesday morning's fall. It actually hurts worse at times than when it happened. I can't lay down to sleep or the pain increases monumentally and I'm unable to breathe except very shallowly with great and concious effort. Not a good thing. So I stay up till I'm exhausted and then fall asleep sitting on the sofa with my legs propped up on the hassock. I'm taking a combination of super strength ibuprofin and a muscle relaxant every 6 hours. That basically takes the edge off the pain. You'd think after 4 days the pain would be easing. I'm hoping tomorrow is better.

On the other hand the weather is warm and sunny and beautiful. The herbs are growing well. I've had several really great phone calls with my friend Bo; always so enjoyable and gets me right out of the dumps and smiling again.

I made fricadeller with sauteed onions for lunch today. Haven't made that in years.Last night we were so hot and tired Asti suggested we have a breakfast food supper. So we made french toast topped with sliced bananas in butter, brown sugar, and rum sauce and a sprinkling of cinnamon. Divine!

Today is house cleaning - Asti has been scrubbing down the kitchen and running the washer/dryer. Later when it cooks off a bit, I'll vaccuum all the floors and then wash them. The parquet floors really need a thorough cleaning especially with the cats.

I miss being able to casually call Andrew and Adam on my cell phone whenever I liked. I'm going to have to find one of those cheap pre-paid phone cards like I used to use for the UK. I love you guys and miss you tremendously.

This morning it was finally warm and sunny. I decided it was time to move the herb seedlings out to the terrace. So with 3 planter of herbs in my arms, I went out to the terrace. Unfortunately, when I opened the door to slip out, the damn white cat slipped between my feet and escaped. I dumped the pots on the terrace wall and ran after the cat to recapture it. That wasn't too bad, but he was displeased and showing claws. So I wrapped him in my arms, pushed open the door to the living room and stepped down ( it's a 9" drop from the terrace to the parquet floor of the livingroom). The problem was, I was barefoot and the terrace was a bit wet and had some leaf bits left from the storm. So I stepped down and my wet heel hit the polished parquet floor and I slid, and slid and SMACK! I cracked my side onto the floor - which is really wicked because the parquet is laid on a cement foundation. I also sliced open the front of my leg on the metal sill of the terrace door.

Anyway, the wind was knocked out of me, I may have blacked out from the inmpact for a couple of seconds. I just lay there, waves of pain rushing over me. Not able to break, almost paralysed from the shock. After a few minutes I was able to breathe a bit better but couldn't control my body enough to get up. I wriggled to the sofa and pulled myself up.

The rest of the day has been one of intense pain. Even a strong dose of painkillers only takes of f the edge. Luckily no ribs broken but lots of deep tissue bruising along the whole side esp in the chest. My leg's pretty painful also. I just took a very hot shower and that helped ease the muscles a lot. But the pain is returning now so I'm off to bed for a while.

Herb planting update

I'm delighted to report that the basil and dill seeds have indeed sprouted. The 4 pots where they are planted are filled with tiny bright green seedlings. Yay! Now, fingers crossed, the peppermint will soon sprout.

Printers and Drivers and updates, oh my!

First let me say how very much I hate Installshield. I don't need this piece of crap bloatware bullshit for dummies application. I can install my drivers or whatever else needs installing all by myself, thank you very much!

I especially do not need that damned brain-dead Installshield to install a complete 130 MEG! set of drivers because you see, Installshield is a STUPID application and functions on the LOWEST level possible. The manufacturer of a piece of hardware supplies a vast array of drivers and other files so that EVERYTHING is available to find just the FEW files -YOUR- computer needs to run that device. But because Installshield is stupid, all it does is install ALL the drivers regardsless if your machine needs them. Lets talk about massive wasted hard drive space, shall we? And that isn't even getting into how picky Installshield is, so if everything about your computer's setup isn't precisely the way Installshield wants it, you are FUCKED. That's right boys and girls. Installshield demands you install every update to your system IT wants to see there regardless whether YOU need it! Regardless whether you have chosen NOT to install whatever it is it wants. And it wants whatever it wants for ITSELF, not for your device to work.

So to skip to the chase, Astrid bought a new Canon MP130 photo quality bubble jet printer/scanner/copier and asked me to install it while she was on holiday in Greece. So today I got this lovely item out of its box and prepared to install it. And btw THANK YOU CANON! This is a really gorgeous little printer. I truly like it and it truly produces the quality output you promised.

So I set up the printer, install the print head and the ink tanks, and then we are ready for installing the printer drivers. So I slip the supplied CD into my machine and click on install and voila, Installshield starts up, tells me it doesn't like something in how I have MS Office 2000 set up and shuts down. Now, you may ask yourself, like I did, what the hell does installshield have to do with MS Office 2000 and where does it come off demanding I update it? As it happens I can't update MS Office 2000 because it means I insert the original CDs. Yeah sure right, I'm going to have the original CDs 5 years down the road? No way, Jose. God alone knows where they are now, and even he probably hasn't a clue. Do they offer an alternative to Installshield? No.

I was determined to get this printer working tho, so I used Explorer to look at the CD itself and locate the drivers. Now, remember, Installshield told me that package was 130 megs! Well yes, indeed it is, because that includes ALL the drivers (remember I mentioned this previously), All the drivers for Windows XP, Windows 2000, and Windows 98. Well, SURPRISE! I don't run ALL those operating systems on my tired old laptop. I only run Windows 98. So I don't need all those drivers. Quel Surprise. So, I manually copied over the WIN98 driver folder to my PC. Then I plugged in the printer's USB connection cable. Yes, this is a USB printer, no more serial cables. My laptop's plug and play window came up and asked me if I'd like it to look for files to install the printer. I clicked ok, my laptop looked in the WIN98 drivers filder I copied over and picked out the 5 drivers it thought I needed and installed them. Ah ha! So Install shield doesn't even actually install the drivers. All it does is copy over the files from the CD to your hard drive, the rest is up to your machine's plug and play setup. How STUPID is that? Anyway, once the appropriate set of drivers was installed, I printed a test page, and voila, gorgeous! Then I deleted the WIN98 driver folder with all the excess drivers to clean things up. And I was finished and had a perfectly functional new printer.

So, you may be wondering how much of those 130 MEGS of drivers did my computer actually NEED? How does 24 Megs sound to you? Much better, eh?

I HATE INSTALLSHIELD.

Thus endeth the lesson. Go in peace.