Sunday 17 April 2011

Doing Battle

If my brain was like a computer I would be able to erase old files and junk to free up memory space. Instead I find myself struggling to remember what I went to the shop for but still able to remember useless chunks of information from years ago. On Thursday evening I found myself sitting in a parking space at the local Tesco which is attached to a filling station. As I waited for Robbie I glanced up at the signs above the fuel pumps Esso, and suddenly an advertising jingle replayed itself in my head. "The Esso sign means happy motoring, the esso sign means happy motoring, so call on the Esso sign", I dread to think how long that little gem has been lurking in a dusty corner of my brain. I looked it up when I came got home and YouTube alleged that it was from the 1950s, I will admit to being a child of 1960s but I wasn't even a twinkle in the 1950s!

Anyway by the time we got home I had skipped nimbly over the stepping stones of memory and recited a sizeable chunk of a Robert Browning poem to Robbie. I have probably mentioned before that Robbie is a man of varied and surprising tastes, but I may not have  revealed that he likes me to recite poetry to him. For some reason my maternal grandmother cropped up in conversation and I told him that The Pied Piper by Robert Browning was her party piece - she could empty a room with it! For those who are not familiar with it, it is a lovely poem but it is very, very long. She knew the whole poem by heart and as a young child I thought it was the coolest thing to get her to recite it for me, it fees as if I have known that poem for ever. Reciting it brings back many happy memories, but it is no practical use. 


Anyway, back to computers, I have been doing battle with my computer for some time, or to be more accurate, doing battle with the Blogger template I use for the blog. I have tamed most of the gremlins in the system or at least found ways to work around them, but when I wanted to change the layout slightly it started acting the fool. It left my text looking as if it was hanging in mid air, all I wanted to was to have a distinct dark coloured background with light text in my chosen font. It seemed like a fairly simple thing to do, but Blogger wasn't having it. I wasted hours trying every way I could think of to get it to do what I wanted without success. I don't like to be beaten and in the end I found a rather clunky solution, I created what I wanted elsewhere then turned it into a PDF file and imported it. It worked! There should have been a much better way of doing it but at least it is done. 


So now I have my next battle, trying to the make the 'contact me' button work. So far it has led me a merry dance, but if I am capable of keeping Robbie more or less on the straight and narrow, I am certainly not going to be defeated by a contact button!!
 

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