Friday 23 January 2015

big tidy

My beekeepers' accounts were duly approved and adopted at the AGM.  I'd heard back earlier in the week from the person scrutinising them that they were OK, so at one level I'd have been surprised if they were rejected.  It's not as though anyone else had put their name forward to be Treasurer.  But you never know with meetings.  We had way too much food, as most members who came seemed not to have taken the committee literally when we said a light buffet would be provided and ate beforehand, so I'm quite relieved I ended up providing sweet things.  Left over half buckets of Waitrose cookies are more useful afterwards if you end up taking them home with you than surplus sandwiches.  The previous show secretary, who is a highly accomplished cook, was also suffering from a cold and had resorted to Sainsbury's sausage rolls, so I was not the only one copping out.

This morning I started on the dreary task of sorting out my desk.  It would not be so dismal, of course, if I did my filing oftener, but filing is like those folk tales about people who go away for a week with the fairies and when they come back discover that seven years have passed on earth. You put important pieces of paper in the plastic tray on your desk to deal with later, and before you know where you are you haven't touched them again for twelve months and a day.  Probably not since the last time you had to do your tax return.

I'd thought that while I was at it I could finish downloading the final oddments of data from my last computer but one, then with the Systems Administrator's help destroy the hard disc and take box and screen to the dump.  I guess that hitting the drive several times with a lump hammer and putting the bits in different bin bags would do it, though there is nothing very exciting on there even if hackers bothered to look.  However, it is good practice not to jettison your old hard drive intact, except that I am not at all sure what it looks like or which bit it would be, assuming I knew how to open the box, which I don't.  But as I excavated down through the alluvial layers of beekeeping and gardening magazines, old shopping lists, notifications of changes to our electricity tariff, instructions for the electric rat zapper, out of date Boden catalogues, caches of birthday cards that I'd taken down from the mantelpiece after my birthday and not had the heart to throw away at once, snipped-out recipes, and guides to long-closed exhibitions and gardens we visited two years ago, it began to dawn on me that the keyboard had gone.

I'll have to ask the SA, and hope we have a spare one somewhere.  I don't remember throwing it away, but the SA has been having a big clear-out, and did say something about taking some old IT equipment to the dump and giving a keyboard to a member of staff who mentioned that one of the keys on his existing one wasn't working.  Failing that I could decide that if I haven't needed anything off the desktop for the past six or seven years then I don't need it at all, and junk it anyway.  There are probably some old photographs of the garden on there, but all they'd really tell me is that things have grown, and that the planting was rather thin and the spaces weedy in the early years.  Certainly there are no Bitcoins.

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