In a moment of weakness I agreed to do a talk to my beekeeping group about plants for bees at only three weeks notice, one of which will be taken up by our holiday. This would have been fine if I'd had a digital presentation prepared, but I hadn't. Normally I borrow plants from work to illustrate the talk, but there won't be much in flower by late September, and I couldn't face lugging them into an upstairs meeting room in the new venue we're trying out, in an effort to escape from the noise of Zumba at our previous hall.
I thought I'd be able to find some images on the net that I could lift and use, as long as the Systems Administrator gave me some guidelines about image size. The SA did not initially embrace the project with the enthusiasm I'd hoped for, saying discouragingly that the pictures on the web would mostly lack enough pixels to look OK blown up on to a screen, or be protected in some way. I thought that in the age of Wikipedia some people must be putting up photos with the intention of sharing them freely, and if the image quality was a bit mixed that was tough, given that I was doing this as a favour at short notice. However, the SA's attitude softened after spending some time poking around the resources of the web.
The RHS protects all its photos, so if you try to copy them into a Powerpoint format they come up with a big Protected notice across them, which seems mean when it is a charity with an educational remit. Some pictures in Google Images and Flickr are likewise restricted, but there are enough that aren't to let you put a show together, as long as you aren't looking for Gardens Illustrated standards of glamour, or anything that would win a photography competition. The SA fairly quickly had half a dozen images saved, resized to what looked like the right size, and was quite cheerful about having learnt something in the process about changing image size in Powerpoint. I'd said all along that I was expecting to do the donkey work of picture hunting, if I could just have some help working out the technical guidelines to what I was looking for.
This morning, as an interlude from cleaning, I got the digital projector out of its box and fired it up to test the six images we had before spending time collecting more, just to check that we were on the right track, and the internet pictures weren't coming out impossibly large, or small, or fuzzy. I found the projector had broken. It powered up, but there was no light beam, and a small red light had come on for the first time ever against the word 'lamp'. We looked at the instructions and decided that the bulb had gone. The lamp of a digital projector turns out to be an elaborate piece of kit, not just a little halogen plug-in, and new ones cost £150 on the internet.
I contacted the person at the woodland charity responsible for volunteer speakers, and asked if she could send a new lamp as soon as possible. It transpired that they don't keep them in stock, as they are expensive and the warranty starts ticking away from when they buy them, irrespective of when someone starts using them. She promised to get a new bulb, or temporary second projector, to me by the date of my next scheduled woodland talk, which unfortunately was two weeks after the beekeeping talk, so I had to confess that I'd been hoping to borrow it for another conservation charity, and hoped that would be OK. Obviously if I broke it that would be my problem, but otherwise given I didn't even charge for petrol I hoped they wouldn't grudge me the use of it for an hour. She said that would be fine, and it sounds as though I'll have either bulb or projector by the time I get back from holiday. Which doesn't solve the question of whether our borrowed internet photos will work as slides. The SA is hopeful, having looked at the size and quality of the photos the woodland charity provides for their presentation.
Sometimes I wonder why I agree to do these things, and the answer is that I am too good natured by half.
And that is it until the weekend after next. Tomorrow I reach what is coyly called a Milestone Birthday, and we're going out for the day, and on Saturday we're driving to Alnwick. We have a long list of things to do in Northumberland, including catching a train to Edinburgh to visit the Botanical Gardens and the Scottish Portrait Gallery. Around Alnwick there are gardens, the coastline and castles to look at. On Sunday we'll go to the Beamish industrial museum, and I have long wanted to see the Northumberland bagpipe museum. We are planning to eat in the tree house restaurant at Alnwick gardens, and the teashop in Alnwick's old railway station, which also houses a giant second hand bookshop. The Camra north-east pub of the year 2012 is just round the corner from the flat we're renting.
Writing is essentially a solitary and selfish activity, and although the Systems Administrator is very good about my sitting down and tapping away at the laptop for some time at some point each day, I am not going to commit myself to doing it on my holiday. Besides, I have a strict rule about never pressing Publish or Send on any kind of internet enabled device after having drunk any alcohol at all. So like the Matt cartoon or Alex, cardunculus will be on holiday until Saturday week. Have fun until then.
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