more of sunday

steve emailed me to say that i should talk to my coriander to make it grow. naturally i have been doing this all along, but it seems to no avail. my new plan is this. i have planted some new seeds in an old egg carton (with soil of course) as a kind of seeding tray - i seem to remember percy thrower doing this sort of thing on blue peter years ago and thought i'd give it a try. the reason that perhaps the coriander isn't doing well is that in the original tub it is too crowded, and in its new one, my transference of seedlings was slapdash to say the least, so i probably killed them all in the process (though some are still hanging in there, in a kind of vegetarian recreation of the somme, it must be admitted). anyway, some of the new seeds have sprouted, when they are strong enough, i will transfer them to a big tub - and the cunning bit is that i hopefully won't have to break their roots to do it as they are each growing in their little egg cup thing. alan titchmarsh eat your heart out. oh and i forgot to mention, i also have a coffee tree, which was left to me by a chap named dave coleman when he went back to australia earlier this year. this is sort of happy but,not having a lot of experience with coffee trees, it's hard to tell. and i have an olive tree, which was left to me by a chap named david mathias, another fantasy football punter who moved to thailand in september last year. the olive tree is going grat guns and has shot up this spring. in fact, such is its prodigous spurt that i am toying with the idea of pruning it - though mindful of the fact that i am killing more plants than i am growing right now, any olive tree pruning advice will be gratefully received.

in the last posting i alluded to working today. as no doubt everyone has experienced, today was a "my f**king computer" day. My first brush with microsoft mayhem came between 10 and 12, when i wrote a draft questionnaire for my mba. i had sketched out the sort of questions i wanted to ask, but this was to actually put thing into some sort of order (you may think it is easy to write a questionnaire - think again as it has its own rules of ethics, triangulation and other stuff i don't understand). so finished off, i go to print, without (har har snigger snigger) saving it first. i didn't even get the blue screen of death, just something about not enough memory (patently untrue), freeze and shut down. this annoyed me. so, thinking i would try something else, i attached the fdd and then set about writing a report that i and my colleagues have to give to the company on friday. saving every 5 minutes onto a fd would, i think have been enough. so, when this was finished at about 230, i saved again and, just to check, minimized the screen and checked it was on the fdd - and it was. until i closed word and went to the fdd just to check for a third time. well, it is still there but the computer won't open it, says it can't access it or something. it was at his point i was going to do to the computer what i did to the ps2 controller on friday night (but minako was rightly worried about the paper doors...). it is still on the disk and so i will take it into the office tomorrow to see if i can print it there (or even work out what is wrong as there is a computer in the office that has an english o/s - you think computers are hard to work out, try getting warning messages in japanese!) but i'm not holding out a lot of hope. so the best laid plans of me went astray thanks to a combination of bill gates and nec, who built this dastardly machine. i was exceptionally annoyed by the end of all this, but have now rediscovered my equilibrium through beer. marvellous stuff.