Journal MonTemplar's Journal: The Spring Is Sprung (sort of) 7
Been covering for a holidaying colleague at work this week, so I've not had as much time to post here.
Spring has officially arrived over here, as the garden pond is now home to several frogs, doing what frogs do at this time of year - have a mass orgy! It's become an annual ritual now, the frogs come to the pond to mate in the spring, the tadpoles grow into young frogs during the summer, leave in the autumn, hibernate during the winter, then they're back in the pond the following spring.
Whilst I'm on the subject of nature, I should also mention that we get lots of birds visiting the garden during the year, thanks in part to the number of feeders, baths and nesting sites dotted around the garden. Everything from the smallest (blue tit, long-tailed tit) to the largest (magpie, crow, wood pigeon, collared dove). I've even seen a sparrowhawk, perched on the fence within a few yards of the kitchen window!
My financial spring-cleaning continues apace. Last night I cut up my old chequebook and debit card and stuffed them into a business envelope to send back to Barclays. Fingers crossed, all my direct debits should now be coming out of the new current account at Smile. One of the benefits of my new banking set-up is that I get a good rate of interest paid on my current account, as well as cashback when I use my credit card - small change, but every little helps. Next in line is my Maxi ISA fund - I'll have to stop payments into it this month, so I start the next tax year (starting April) with a clean slate. This makes it easier to transfer my existing investments into a Cash Mini ISA, as the rules say you can't open one if you've payed into a Maxi ISA in the same tax year. My parents have offered me £3000 to help with my investments, as I lost quite a bit in the last year due to the falls on the stock markets. I will probably start up a Shares ISA fund at some point, but this time I'll do more research!
Many thanks for your comments regarding the website. At the moment I've got a basic hosting package, which suits me just fine at the moment, as I've got enough on my plate learning HTML and CSS. I can upgrade to a 'professional' hosting package, for anothe £4 every month, which would allow me to use Perl, PHP and MySQL on my website. Mind you, I'd probably need to set up a test server on my home PC so that I could test stuff before FTPing it to my webspace. I'm looking into using Apache on my Windows 2000 box, so if anyone reading this has any experience in that area, I'd welcome your input.
I'll be doing more work on my website this weekend, hopefully it should be a bit more substantial by Monday.
PS. Maybe it was just me, but earlier today I get several 500 errors on trying to access the
webhost (Score:2)
Spring Haiku 1: Birds (Score:2)
We keep pet pidgeons,
They shit all over the place
And get ate by hawks.
Jolly, eh?
Spring Haiku #2: Trees (Score:2)
Seedling hawthorn tree,
After repotting, it buds!
It isn't dead yet.
I'm less confident for my Ugli-Fruit tree (yes, really, we got the seeds from the fruit, which look like a grapefruit that's been sat on), which after a year or so suddenly came over all funny and currently looks like it's done for.
Whoops!
Pah, silly Dillo, . . . . . . . [wearlab.de]
(Good little browser, not rude!)
Sometimes screws up forms.
(which is why I had to muck about to post this one just now).
-32 here (Score:2)
Re:-36 (-43 effective windchill) here (Score:1)
When I read MonTemplar's little story of his cute little pond and little cutesy frogs hopping and having orgies I realized I really should think of moving out of this cold place. But at least I'm not alone
Re:-36 (-43 effective windchill) here (Score:2)
-40 WC at the moment. sigh sigh.
ranas (Score:1)