Pollen allergy day

About once a year I get an attack of swollen glands in my neck.  Painful, and used to frighten me dreadfully.  Then I worked out that it’s some late spring pollen allergy.  Not sure which plant or tree causes it but I’m beginning to suspect the beautiful, slender silver birch.

That’d be a shame.  You can’t shun such a beautiful tree, not for the sake of a couple of uncomfortable days, and the swelling is quickly and easily put to rights with an aspirin pill.

Even so, I had a rotten night with it, waking at two-thirty and not getting a lot of sleep afterwards.

Colours your day yuck, does a painful sleepless night and, when it turns out to be a lovely, soft rainy day, perfectly suited to gazing out of the window and watching the raindrops run down the glass, the yuck is dispiriting.

So I watched a bit of catch-up TV on the computer, sipped coffee, and had a nap mid-morning.  After lunch I popped an aspirin and took myself off for my siesta.  I’ve woken all bright and bouncy but with almost all the day gone, and with my thoughts turning to dinner.

The upset to my computing occasioned by the upgrade to IE8 is just about over now, though I still growl at the thought of the way I can so easily be thrown off course by the promise of a great leap forward in the software arena.  Especially when that great leap forward is little more than a bit of gaudy bunting over a tired old construct.

You’d think that the bad user reception to Vista would make MS quiet and humble, wouldn’t you?  Or perhaps not.  Most people seem to be firmly set in their hatred of MS.  I do try to be balanced and I have to say that my experience with Vista has been almost all good.  With IE8, though, I think they’ve delivered yet another pail of soured milk.  Hey ho.

My experiments with Blogger continue and I’m coming to like the product immensely.  In several important ways it has the advantage of WordPress or, at least of WordPress.com;  the .org version, running in your own space, is a different beast.

I particularly like the Blogroll feature, which ties the RSS-type feed of other people’s blogs in to give a time/date and title of the last update.  That makes it very easy and quick to keep up to date with other folk’s work.

I’m just beginning to explore the freedom available under Blogger to tailor the appearance of the pages almost infinitely.  I do believe that this will give me a good way to restore my lost poetry and writing archives.

I’ve mixed feelings still on the advertising.  It looks fine when you see the cents mount up, and it seems that folks who simply can’t bear advertising either ignore it or use one of several methods of preventing it from appearing.  I shall reserve judgement on this and, in the meantime, let it stand as a little birthday present fund for my 70th.  If it gets to be burdensome I can turn it off at the click of a button, and clear all those old advertisements in one operation.

I’ve decided to let the journal archives sit where they are, spinning happily.  If a way of bringing them forward presents itself I’ll think again.  Until then, the task is simply too large for me.

So, there you go.  I have a nice bottle of well-chilled Bordeaux waiting in the fridge, Graham will be cooking spag. bog. for our dinner, and the telly calls.