12th Night's Been and Gone

Well, that's it all over for another year! Saturday was a very busy day taking down all the Christmas decorations and packing everything back into the loft. Believe me, it did take all day.
All the external decorations came down first and were packed off to my sister-in-law's house - she has spare space to store them for us.

Then, this little lot all had to be dismantled, the baubles dusted off and packed carefully away until the end of November when we do it all again! Whoopee, I can't wait - but I'm not wishing the year away. I'll just look forward to it and plan an early start and hope beyond hope, that this time I might come close to being ready on time and have the luxury of being able to sit and enjoy all the hard work.

My brother Clive came home for the festivities this year, he lives in West Sussex and works for an airline. So it's not often that we have the luxury of all being together at such a special time. He is an absolute whiz with computers, if ever anything goes wrong with mine, he's my 'help' at the end of the phone and he always sorts it out for me. This year, we decided that our parents needed to be dragged into the techie world and together Clive, Stuart and I bought them everything they needed to get started. Clive was an absolute brick! Apart from Christmas day he spent the whole time getting Dad's system up and running and giving him the guidance and knowledge he needed to be able to carry on once he returned to West Sussex. In between, Clive helped me to changed over my system to a much faster dual core processor, got my internet connection re-established and took out the old hard drive from my previous tower. He worked so hard and I have got to say, it's fantastic.

This is Clive with all his Pressies!

Much more stable than before and so fast it's untrue.

One of my pressies from Stuart er, I mean Santa, was a brilliant Epson R1800 printer. It prints up to A3 size and is capable of doing 12"x12" edge to edge scrapbook papers. Wowwee! It's brill. I've installed it and have it running along side my HP Officejet printer which does a pretty good job. But the new one has a firewire connection and it sure can go some. I'm getting some great results and I'm really looking forward to doing some scrapbooking projects this year.

I still have a lot of software that I need to install on my system after the change-over. I keep looking for fonts and programmes I had added over the years and can't find them. Then I remember....... I also had a lot of web-sites saved to my 'favorites' file which I forgot to save to the external hard drive before changing over and I lost them.

Well, this week I have got to get into my little studio and do some work. I have a TV show next Sunday to prepare for. The studio looks like World War III started and ended in there. It was a dumping ground over the holidays and I've been in there most of today putting it back into some semblance of order so that I can work in it. So, I may be quiet this week but in the words of Arnie - 'I'll be back' soon and I'll have some arty pics next time.

Is it really the second week of the New Year?