17 June 2012
Father’s Day. A day set aside to celebrate the value of the father in the family. Although started in 1910 in America it did not really take root much before the Thirties and since then has been a source of commercial income mirroring Mother’s Day, which is taken more seriously.
Anyway, Miles and Chloe did not miss the opportunity of saying nice things about me. I had a lovely card from miles with heartfelt greetings which, themselves, mean a great deal to me. Chloe telephoned to wish me happy Father’s Day promising a card next week. I should have told her not to bother, the moment had passed and, in any event, I have no doubts about her love for me and do not need to have it reinforced through the exploitative channels of a printed card.
As if’ ‘my lovely’ did not have enough to do. She was roaming around the garden earlier this morning seeking small flowers and lavender to make up into little bouquets for the Garden Open Day Charity. These bouquets will be sold at Piercewebs -the William-Powlette’s home at the other end the village.
We only have two brave souls who will open their gardens to the public today, the W-P’s and Simon Cook at Deers. Both families put in an enormous amount of work into presenting these gardens in the best light and therefore as a village we should support them.
We have often been asked why we do not open our own garden. It is certainly large enough, pretty enough and has enough interest in it. The problem is that neither I nor ‘my lovely’ have ever been true gardeners. We both love the garden, provided someone else is doing the work. The nearest I got it was mowing the lawns for over 30 years (over one acre of grass in several different locations) and even that came to an abrupt halt when my mower, a monstrous 1939 Dennis. Became too much for me to control and, on this particular occasion, cut a swathe through one of our favourite, mainly roses, flower bed.
After that we got a strong lad to do it for us. This was the first time I had a brush with the law concerning discrimination. I innocently put a postcard on the village noticeboard offering employment for a ‘strong lad’ to mow our lawns. I was contacted shortly afterwards by the owner of the shop, displaying the card, saying that he had received complaints that it was discriminatory against females and as such was in contravention of the law. I was requested to change the word lad to ‘person’. I had no difficulty with this as I had no doubt at the end of the day, there was no young girl in village strong enough to control this very heavy old mower. Nevertheless, what a lot of nonsense. If I wanted a strong lad, and not a girl, why on earth was I not allowed to say so. I suppose that putting the words ‘strong’ in front of the word lad was discriminating against weaker lads, but, I knew from my own experience, when they machine took over and ran away with me, that anyone other than a strong lad would not be able to cope.
‘ My lovely’ spent her time assisting the W-P” s Open Garden. Her little poses, were very popular sold out very quickly. The weather was relatively kind and as a result the opening day was a great success.
While Alice was doing her bit for the Open Gardens I was lucky enough to have Paul’ the computer’ sitting with me. Where Paul is very good is heeding ‘my lovely’s’ instructions and is not allowing me to talk to me too much! In other words she is kindly saying that I should be resting. Paul happily tinkers away with the laptop while I doze. After checking out the last dozen or so media entries on my blog to ensure they were not in Tables, Paul started thinking about developing some macro commands for my music library. It was then time for Paul to leave whilst agreeing that we would work together on this music library tomorrow.
As I have mentioned in the past whilst the actual dictation in Dragon is superb with a very high degree of accuracy, despite the change in pitch in my voice, my problem arises over corrections. There may be very small, like the addition of an apostrophe, or a single letter. but instead of obeying my correction. it frequently typed out the correction words without actually making the correction. I can see this becoming a great problem when I no longer have any use in my splinted finger so I’m afraid I will need to go into battle once more with Dragon to try to improve this situation before I lose the alternative I have at present.