The world's gone mad

I think summer fever has set in - there are some weird things going on.

One not so weird is me not blogging for a few weeks. I have an excellent excuse this time, and no, Tiggy didn't eat my keyboard. The whole ruddy computer crashed. Can you Adam and Eve it? I was trying to fix the stupid thing at the time because its been on the cards for a while what with the sinister blue screen appearing every time Pickle boots up a game of Littlest Pet Shop online. A sensible person would have forked out a hundred quid for a portable hard drive and backed up their data first. But not me. I bought some cheap quick-fix software instead that resulted in a quite emphatic 'Computer Says No.'

Thankfully we managed to locate a Hungarian Rent-a-Geek (actually we cheated and bribed the IT department at Nobby's work with a months supply of chocolate biscuits...) and they managed to get the thing back on its feet with all the files intact. It's now running with the aid of a Zimmer frame but hey, it could have been a lot worse. And then I went out and spent a hundred quid on a portable hard drive and backed up all my data.

Meanwhile strange things are afoot in Budapest. Some massive bloke rang my doorbell the other morning - when I was barely awake given that SCHOOL'S OUT FOR SUMMER!!!! and I had been enjoying the first of many lie-ins - and after my standard greeting of 'please stop what you're saying, I don't speak Hungarian' he managed to get across 'water...off'. We've been here almost a year now so I knew this was my cue to race through the shower, fill the kettle, switch off the washing machine and stick a large bucket of water by each loo because sure enough the water supply was off for the rest of the day. When we drove out later to visit some sweeter smelling friends than ourselves, we saw the source of the trauma, yet another burst watermain gushing torrents of water down the hill. I shan't tell you the extortionate rate we are paying for the water here but I'm not convinced we're getting our money's worth.

Anyway, we returned home this afternoon to find that the lovely electric gates into the drive refused to open. I so wish we'd had these things in France instead of dicing with death each day double parking while I ran round to close the things by hand but too late now. It turned out that today's challenge is that the power is out. There I was with 2 hungry children, a bag of potatoes and couple of courgettes and no way to cook it all. I could have used the gas barbecue I suppose... if the gas bottle delivery man hadn't mangled the connector the other day and had to take the whole thing away for repair, calling 'see you in a couple of weeks' over his shoulder.

Hmm. Well, Nobby's just walked in with a bottle of wine and two glasses so I am going to save the story of Rose and the newborn kitten, christened Claude (clawed!) and nickname Poo-fest, for another day.
Bye for now.