Yesterday and the day before were a bit scary as I lost my internet connection and didn't know what had gone wrong.  I lost connection when I uninstalled a program and didn't know whether that had caused it or whether there had been a coincidental hardware failure.  I was surprisingly calm and set about trying to find the router installation disc.  I knew roughly where it was but it was under a lot of other things.  While I was looking for it I tidied up.  When you get into a tidying frame of mind you've got to go with the mood haven't you?  ;)  I had a partly full recycling bag which I filled and then filled a second one.  I also filled a black sack.  I hope to do more later in the week.  I found the disc and spent an hour fruitlessly trying to get the router to work.  Nothing I tried cured the problem.  I'd had enough by then and had a quiet internet-less evening.

The following day I finished melting through the ice on the large plastic pot the goldfish are in.  I used an old whistling kettle - the kind that doesn't plug in but sits on a ring on the stove.  I put it full of boiling water on the ice and after doing that several times melted a hole in the ice.  The ice was a couple of inches (5 cm) thick.  The fish didn't look too good so I guddled them (caught them by hand) out of the pond into a bucket of water.  Ohhhhhhh that water was icy!  The things I do for my fish!  lol  I next carefully took a hammer to the ice and cleared it.  I came in for a break and brought the fish in with me.  It then occurred to me that I intended to clear two large items out of the kitchen so why not put the old washing boiler outside and bring the pond in?  With Dad's help I was able to lift the boiler out of the kitchen door and then I took it down the path and out of the garden.  The dustmen came today and someone took the boiler.  :-D

A while later I brought in the almost empty pot pond and put it where the boiler had been.  It wasn't till I'd filled the pond and put the fish back in that I realised the pond would be in the way.  I moved a chair and dragged the pond carefully to where the chair had been then put the chair where the boiler had been.  There now seems to be a lot more room in the kitchen and a cupboard and the fridge are easier to access.

I phoned the helpline of my internet service provider and the first operator had me turn the router off for 20 seconds then back on again.  He asked me which lights were lit and then said he needed to pass me over to a technical advisor.  He gave me another number to phone for the tech guy.  While I'd been waiting on hold for the first man I'd been singing along to the song they were playing about a 'neon rainbow'.  I rather hoped I'd get it if I was put on hold for the tech guy but I didn't.  The tech guy was marvelous.  We established that the problem was with my computer not the connection.  The router was working fine and I should  be able to get online.  He then very patiently talked me through a lot of commands I needed to type in to unblock my computer.   Because the phone isn't next to the PC he had called me back on my mobile.  It must have taken about an hour to sort it and he was wonderful throughout.  At the end of it I thanked him profusely and said how much I'd enjoyed the song that played when I was on hold.  He said "Now I know you're lying!"  We both laughed like mad at that and we were still laughing when I hung up.  I reflected that the experience had been so much better than I imagined it would be.  You don't expect phoning the tech people to be hilarious do you?

Every time I looked in on the fish last night they were swimming round the top of the pond.  I think they were trying to work out where the ice had gone, what the new 'sky' (ceiling) was and why it wasn't bitterly cold any more

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