Summer at Last!

It's felt like midwinter since our return to California more than a month ago. Except for one sunny July weekend, temperatures have been around the mid fifties at 11 in the morning, maybe reaching 60F on a good day. We've clothed ourselves in many layers - protection from the gloomy fog that some days never lifted.

Two days ago the fog gave way to blue sky around 9am and we had our first glorious day. The last two mornings we've woken to sunshine - hooray!! Today, as I made tea at 6:30am the temperature outside was nearly 70F - it feels like summer at last!

In the meantime we've been keeping busy weeding and clearing the immediate garden around, down below and up above the house. Forget-me-nots, thistles, blackberries and other nameless undesirables grew like crazy in our absence.

After searching the internet for the best part of a month for a replacement computer for my stolen Sony, I ended up ordering the latest 14" VAIO. It arrived last week. While working on Tim's old Mac I twice tried to make a photobook of his mum's 90th Birthday party. Twice My Publisher crashed losing all the pages I'd created, the first time 22 pages, the second 45 pages. Not to be daunted, I downloaded My Publisher the day after my computer arrived, immersed myself in photos and organization and by the end of the day uploaded Lucy's book.

Next I got smitten by the Ancestry.com bug - mmmm - in the haze of foggy days I became fixated on recreating my family tree (that was on my stolen computer). First I ordered the latest edition of Family Tree Maker software because my 2005 version wasn't Mac compatible. In my enthusiasm I failed to notice that I pre-ordered a new version that would only be released and mailed at the end of August. So I spent another $30 for a month's subscription to Ancestry.com. Omigosh, Ancestry sucks you into an utterly addictive family member pursuit. Each time you add a person to your family tree, Ancestry searches its database for matches and sends "hints" in the form of census or other records that could belong to your ancestor, or a link to where Ancestry finds your ancestor on someone else's family tree. Quite a remarkable program!

But it's time to drag myself out of my mid 18th century ramblings from East Yorkshire to Lincolnshire to South Africa and over to the USA because the sun is out and it's hard to see the computer screen in such bright light and it's time for our three mile walk around our hill in the sunshine!