We are each grappling with technology, in our separate ways. I'm booked to talk to a garden club next month about how to garden so as to be friendly to bees, and since I can't borrow plants from the plant centre, it will have to be with slides. I was originally going to do it with slides anyway, since I was due to go in February when most of the plants I wanted to talk about would have been unavailable or not doing anything, but they switched me to June so that they could have a talk on pruning in February. And at least with slides I'll know in advance what I'm talking about, instead of finding on the day that the plant centre has run out of some key plant I want to talk about.
It's a great deal easier giving a talk when you've written it yourself, and chosen visual aids that will help you remember what you are supposed to be talking about as each slide comes up. The internet is a marvellous resource for finding pictures of practically anything, honey bees on the comb, a close-up of one bee with a pollen load on her leg, a bumble bee nest, an aerial view of suburban gardens, you can find an illustration for practically anything, given a little lateral thinking. Finding a picture for Nectar proved quite hard, given that it is a practically colourless substance flowers exude in small quantities, which wouldn't be obvious from a picture of a whole flower, but a hummingbird hovering in front of an exotic flower did nicely, with a snappy title. I'm keeping the words to a minimum, just enough to act as cues for me, since this is meant to be an entertaining evening for the audience, not death by Powerpoint.
I'd kept notes from the last time I put a slide presentation together, and after checking with the Systems Administrator I'm fairly sure I'm doing the right thing. If, when I've finished and the SA transfers the whole thing to a memory stick for me in JPEG format, it doesn't run correctly then that will be a blow. Which is another good reason for getting on with it now and not leaving it until the week before the club meets.
Meanwhile the SA has invested in a bean-to-cup coffee machine. It grinds the beans up, makes coffee, and has a spout for heating and frothing milk, a multitude of dials, and a little electronic display that tells you what it is doing or what it wants you to do. I am still slightly terrified of it, but there again I haven't invested any time in reading the booklet, being busy with the presentation. I bought three different packets of coffee beans in readiness for its arrival, in the mild state of panic of someone who normally lives on instant, or tea, and knows that they know nothing about coffee beyond ordering a latte in Pret or a filter coffee after a meal, and the French roast we have tried so far is ferociously strong. I am actually more excited by the prospect of infinite supplies of hot frothy milk, and by extension proper drinking chocolate and Horlicks.
It will have to be absolutely the last gadget, though, because we are running out of space on the kitchen worktops. I suggested banishing the toaster, since the Aga makes very good toast (provided you watch it), but that didn't get us any further forward, since the coffee machine can't go where the toaster is because it is too tall to fit under the cupboard on the wall. The ice cream machine can't budge over to where the toaster is either because it needs clear space on either side for the air to circulate when it's running. At the moment the only place we can see for it to go is on the one worktop that doesn't currently have any equipment living on it. If I had to lose one piece of kit it would be the microwave, which we use once in a blue moon, but that's in a corner without headroom enough for the coffee maker.
It is a very First World problem.
No comments:
Post a Comment