Not the best day

Hail storm approaching, originally uploaded by CharlesFred.

Here we are back in an internet cafe. My home computer decided to stop working last night and is now in the hands of Computerloods, a social workplace for people in Amsterdam Oost. They were very friendly and helpful last year when my computer gave up, due to some problem with a tattoo on the hard disk. This was an HP problem which they eventually fixed for free, only after all the data had been taken off my computer by a local company and meant I was without a computer for a month, lost all my e-mail addresses and quite a lot of the work I had done on the family tree.

It just so happens that I signed up for another free two weeks on www.ancestry.com and what should happen but the computer breaks down again. Hmmmm... well having gone around Amsterdam looking ot see if I could find anyone to help, I decided to return to Computerloods and the money they want to charge for repairing the problem (ANOTHER typical HP problem, I am told) is less than others were asking just to spend 3-10 days looking at what the problem might be. (Basically, I cannot switch it on). So, hopefully by Tuesday, I will be patting myself on the back for having made the right decision.

Back to yesterday, I mentioned that I was going to see Adrian Sherwood in concert in Paradiso and indeed, I went off very much looking forward to it, so imagine my disappointment when I arrived there to find out that the concert had taken place on Wednesday. Hmmm.... well, the man in the shop who sold me the ticket told me twice that the concert was on Thursday and although I looked at the ticket to check the time it started, I did not bother to look at the date. A pity. Anyway, I went back to the shop this morning to explain what happened and he was quite unsure about how to respond. I helped him by suggesting that he said sorry, which he duly did. Sorry, to sound like a grumpy old man, but one finds it very difficult to hear anyone saying sorry these days. So, I bought the album and when I go back home and have a nice hot bath, I will play it very loudly!

Here we have a photo of a hailstorm which we had on Wednesday. Yesterday, the country was prepared for snow and sure enough it came, all three or four centimetres of it! In the meantime, the NS, Dutch Rail, had decided to cancel many of the trains running already the night before, some of Fred's colleagues decided they would not ' risk' the journey to school, many schools were closed at midday and ceratin friends of ours were also sent home after half a day's work! My goodness, a light covering of snow and so much trouble, maybe global warming isn't such a bad thing after all.

As it happens, by the time I went outside to take some photos of the snow, it had already stopped and was turning to frozen rain. Anyway, in the main, I think the best photos of snow are under a blue sky with the sun shining upon it, although we never get this in Holland, any snow which has fallen having melted away long before we see the sun again.....

So, my excuses for a moany old blog, but surely this is allowed every now and then?