Definitely spring!!

Spring Cup (Hungarian style) on the sand dunes, amidst lots of ups and downs, vague vegetation boundaries, some juniper and generally good courses. As most people are building up to the extra long championships at the moment, all events have rather long courses. The oldest women's course was W50, so I was out for quite a while. As you can see, apart from the stupidity of the first control (mostly caused by the map being quite old), I did it quite well. Without that mistake I would have been 3rd, but even 4th is not bad considering that the first 3 were somewhere between 10-12 years younger than me and I was only 2 and half minutes from 3rd. The day otherwise was really lovely. The temperature was in the 20's, almost too warm to run around. We forgot the camping chairs so we had to lie around on the ground sunning ourselves.

Indoors in BP time was yet again spent getting extremely frustrated with computers. The one that expired is still dead, but now the one we brought in to replace it is also playing silly buggers. It has always been a very unstable machine, which I wrote down to the fact that it was an early Vista before the bugs (at least some of them) have been ironed out. I keep doing system restore on it, but it doesn't like updates, takes serious exception to a variety of peripherals and is useless on drivers. Either all the ones it has are corrupted or it cannot access them on the net. Who knows? Upshot of all this is that we can't use Skype on it for it will not accept either the Skype phone or the microphone we bought, neither can we use FreeCall for the same reason. It refuses to work with the existing printer and when we tried to download the driver the whole operating system went unstable. Aaaahhhhhhhhh!! May Microsoft and all its employees (especially the programmers) burn in eternal hellfire AMEN!!!!

Tomorrow's target is to get all the roses pruned. Something really peculiar happened to them this year. I know it was a cold winter, but we must have been very unlucky with icy winds or they were especially exposed, because a lot of them have gone completely dead and black. I hope I can cut them back to living parts, especially that I put big mounds of peat round their bases to protect them. We'll see!