New Year comes

It rained most of New Year's eve, but Jasmine was happily confined indoors most of the time, playing with Clare's god-child Anwen. The mums and grannies even managed to get the kids out into the park to play on the swings and roundabouts for an hour during a brief respite. I went to the office to take the newly set up 17" laptop to its new abode. Getting it to work with the office router turned out to be a time consuming nightmare, nothing to do with this machine, but with a desktop machine which was both hard wired to the router and had its wireless card switched on. I had it on in order to set it up to synchronise with Windows Sky Drive. 

It wasn't obvious at all but I suspected something was amiss when I first spotted a 'wireless available' icon flash up as well as the wired network icon at boot time. The BT router isn't the newest piece of kit, and this model has given us many hours of confusion and tribulation in the past for no apparent reason. Now and then it needs a reboot to get every device back on line, but it didn't fix the issue this time around. Eventually I concentrated attention on the desktop PC, established the wireless card was running and competing with the wired connection for the router's attention. Once I'd switched off the desktop PC wireless off the router stopped misbehaving and accepted the new workstation's wireless login. At least I learned something but it slowed me down prevented other jobs from getting finished and delayed my departure, so that I had to walk home as the normal evening bus service had be this time simply withered away - so I was late for supper again.

Once Jasmine had gone to bed, Rachel went into town to see the New Year in with some dancing. Clare and I snuggled up on the sofa in front of the S4C review of the year programme, which saw us through to midnight. We then went up to the attic bedroom and watched the fireworks erupting into a clear black sky from the heart of the Millennium Stadium just over a mile away. Quite a good spot from which to contemplate the festivities, rather than exhaust ourselves joining in. I found myself thinking a lot about the joys of last New Year's Eve festivities en famille in Taormina. I confess that dark cold rainy Sicily was a much more cheerful place to be than dark cold rainy Cardiff.