I had problems getting on to this blog yesterday evening. I could get to the profile page, but when I clicked on the blog, it sat there for a while and then everything disappeared into a black hole. At first I assumed it was our router, and restarted it.
Tried again, and the same thing happened. I went to Melinda, and that was fine. Then I tried HorC again, and the same thing happened. I tried Google, and that was OK, so I assumed the problem must lie with BCUK. But I could get onto other people’s blogs, and my other blogs, without any problems. I started to worry that this blog had gone into the ether, and I worried, because I would hate to lose it. I’ve still got the content of my original posts on my hard drive, in my ‘Journal’ folder, but I wouldn’t be able to get back to anybody’s comments, or my reactions to them. Anyway, I gave up and went to bed.
When I woke up at 4, and was lying in bed listening to the birds, I remembered hearing on the Today programme about Dawn Chorus day. They were asking people to set their alarms for 4:30 or 5 today, and get up, either open the windows or go out in the garden, and listen to the birds. As I was awake anyway, I thought I might as well, though it’s not that big a deal for me because I hear it most days, however I don’t usually go out and consciously listen to it. After a few minutes, I came back in and got my camera. I made a video, obviously you can’t really see anything because it’s dark, but you can hear the birds (and various extraneous noises, like my feet on the gravel, me opening and closing the gate, sometimes my breathing, and the fountain splashing when I went past the fish pond.) There was a howling cat too, somewhere, at the start (not one of mine, they were both in the house), but I don’t think it picked that up.
Anyway, I came back up here when the memory stick was full, uploaded it to the computer and then to Youtube. The Youtube upload was taking a while, so I came onto BCUK, which I don’t usually do at that time of the morning (actually, I don’t usually come on the computer at all), and found I could get onto HorC after all.
In the end, I got tired of waiting for the upload to finish, and went back to bed. This was about 5:20. I switched the alarm off – that’s not something I usually do either, but having been awake from 4, and awake from 4:20 yesterday, I wanted to at least try and get some more sleep, especially as I am going to have to work today. I don’t know how long I was lying awake, but I woke again at 7 and got up. Being so late, I skipped meditation for once.
When I came back up and checked, I found that the Youtube upload hadn’t finished, and the connection had dropped. So I’ve started it again. I checked the file, they say there is a limit of 10 minutes and 1024meg, I don’t know how long it is, but the file is only 123 Meg, so it should be OK. It hasn’t crashed yet, but it hasn’t finished either, in the 20 minutes it took me to write this.