Parakeets and wind again!

My father is bemoaning about the influx of Ring Necked Parakeets in South London right now. Apparently they are scaring away his birds on the feeding station in his garden. Certainly there is always going to be an environmental issue with any non indigenous species that invade our country.

This evening the wind is back up to its old tricks again. Logs are rolling around the roof of the boat as they get blown from side to side and the boat is rocking and banging again - most bizarre weather!! Saturday, I have to take a trip to Rose whatever the weather - looks like I'm going to get very wet, very cold and blown into every other boat on the way out and in; it's going to be an interesting trip! On my return I need to get some Christmas shopping done.Next week is our school Christmas lunch and the traditional 'Secret Santa', I have to go and get my gift and write some cards etc.

Tomorrow is a non uniform day at school and with Christmas just round the corner, keeping 35 over excited 11 yr olds off the ceiling is getting more of a challenge every day! Rehearsals for the Christmas show is going well at last and we are now at the stage of final technical rehearsals, costume fittings and fine tuning bits until the first dress rehearsal a week tomorrow. We now have packed audiences booked of 160+ each performance and the programmes have been printed and returned to us today.

An email from Photocal, (the people who are producing my personalised calendars,) has confirmed that they have received my order, everything is fine and they are due to be despatched next week. They truely are a professional, friendly, helpful and efficient company.

For some years now I've had a SmartDisc Flashtrax. A small 80GB device that acted as a photo backup for all my digital pictures. For some time, (and coinciding with the day it fell on the floor!) every time I tried to copy data onto it I recieved an I/O device error. This evening, it finally gave up the ghost and is now resting in the dustbin. Shame, as it served a good purpose not only as a storage backup solution but also enabling me to be able to review and view pictures as well as allowing instant transfer of images from camera to device via storage card slots. Missed but I can't see it being replaced in a hurry! There are now faster and more robust and reliable similar devices available that I will explore at some later stage. I still have a 500Gb external hard drive which acts as my main backup storage solution!

Plans are well under way for Christmas now with half of my time spent down in London and half away on the boat. This will be the first year I have ever gone away on the boat for Christmas and it should be interesting.