After we’d finished our Saturday morning chores, R and I went into Stratford so I could pick up a new 5TB hard drive for my raw files. Then we had lunch at BTP, where I’ve become mildly addicted to their cauliflower shawarma bowl – though, because my body isn’t yet a temple (you’re running out of time, body – sort yourself out!) I generally add a couple of hash browns on the side. R, who eats normal things like smoked salmon and scrambled eggs, tends to avert his eyes from this concoction.
Back at home I started the process of setting up my new drive, which will take some time as I have around 2TB of data to transfer onto it. On R’s suggestion I’ve also bought a 4-port USB hub, which means that all my external drives can be plugged into the Mac at once, without the need to swap them in and out and potentially stress the connections, which I think is what caused the old drive to fail. When I’ve completely run out of things to do and I’m getting bored with all the inactivity, I’ll drop it into the computer repairers in Stratford and ask for their opinion – though even if the drive is fixable it’s unlikely to be cost-effective to have it repaired. Still, it would be good to get an expert’s opinion on how to treat an EHD, to try to avoid it packing up and taking several year’s worth of files with it. In this instance I’m just relieved that I had everything saved in at least two places.
What with one thing and the other, I didn’t get much time in the garden, but it wasn’t a very nice day anyway, so there weren’t many insects around. Most pleasing to me of the few photos I took was this female Plumpie, busily feeding from the patch of Cerinthe major ‘Purpurascens’ growing in the gravel of the yard where we park the cars. I was given a couple of these cerinthe plants by our next-door neighbour several years ago, and though they didn’t survive the following winter they’ve been self-seeding around the yard ever since. I’d actually prefer it if they moved back into one of the flower beds, but thirty years of battling the vicious alkaline clay of Worcestershire has taught me to take my wins however I can get them. The common name of this unusual and attractive plant is honeywort, though I think our American cousins also call it the blue shrimp plant.
R: L2, C7, D16.
