It’s been a mixture of a good and a frustrating day.

I woke early. Lack of sleep but given I’m in work at silly o’clock tomorrow morning it made sense to get up and tackle the day. Started it with some oatbran thing in a packet which long since had passed it’s sell by date.

But given it was free, does a sell-by date actually count?

Either way, it was a bit like eating hot, wet powdered cardboard. I can’t recommend it.

I went out and hacked a few more leaves off my hedge. I filled the bin and then, based on a poor weather forecast, and the knowledge that a new toy was to arrive, I went back inside and baked some bread.

Toy arrived! Woohoo – a new monitor for the computer and heck has the technology moved on. It’s much bigger than the old TFT it replaced and just looks amazing. Likewise, the new computer *looks* great. I’d love to talk about performance, however there was no video cable  attached to it. So although I can play with the monitor with the old computer as it has an old socket on it, I’m now awaiting a cable which will allow me to see what I’m doing with the new box. I rang Novatech and they agreed to send me one without any quibble at all.

All good customer service although perhaps they ought to have ‘recommended’ the cable at the time they recommended the monitor to go with the computer. Minor point I’m sure! I’ve never even heard of mini-HDMI…….

So having realised that the day wasn’t going to involve installing Linux goodliness onto a brand new box of tricks and that the weather wasn’t as bad as they’d suggested, I became a man empowered with a fork and branch clippers and waged war on the hedge. At least I did until it went dark and my fork snapped in half. Someone somewhere telling me it was time to give up….

So now I have a broken fork, a full garden bin, and most of my hedge in bits on the lawn. If only ‘dead hedge’ could become a commodity, a bit like scrap metal. Someone might run off with it then. More realistically I foresee about 48 car journeys to the recycle plant………

Got in and made a battalion-scale chilli-con-carne. That should get me through a few more days at work! That is assuming I can move tomorrow after my hedge-hacking antics!