Wow, five days late. No matter, here I am again on a fine but blustery day, blue skies at the moment but threatening rain and possibly hail later.

__________________________________________

Aaarrrgh, damned Windows. I spent at least half an hour working on a document in MS Word, saving frequently, with no indication that anything was wrong, but when I went to exit and close it down, it asked me if I wanted to Save. Of course I did. Then when I went to close it again, I got the same message. So I exited without saving, confident that I’d saved frequently.

You guessed it, when I opened the document again, none of my new work was there. It hadn’t saved a damned thing.

I started looking for permission problems and noticed that my entire My Documents folder was set to Read Only. Whaaat? How did that happen? I didn’t do it, obviously. So I unchecked the Read Only box and waited until it had done its thing, going through all the sub folders, so it told me. Then I tried the document again. Still wouldn’t save! Same problem, can’t close Word without the prompt to Save, which doesn’t work, or Don’t Save, which allows the program to close but you lose your work.

What craziness is this? Therefore at the moment, I can’t use Word. Luckily I usually use Lotus Word Pro which is working fine. This is a 20 year old word processor but it’s still my first choice. It just keeps working and I rarely have any problems.

In fact, for my TVW History project, which uses lots of images with the text wrapped around, I’m using Word Pro to lay it out. Easy as pie and reliable. Microsoft, get lost.

_______________________________________

I’ve been thinking just last night, and in recent days, that I haven’t had any Wish deliveries for a long time, at least six weeks or so. There was a knock on the door just now and there it was, a bag of items, seven in all, from Wish. Looks like my Wish came true.

A postal delivery on a Saturday afternoon? What’s the world coming to?

_______________________________________

I give up. I’ve had two bathroom problems this week and I just can’t fix them myself. I’ll have to call a plumber.

The first is that the right hand basin drain was constantly slow draining and finally blocked up. I’ve had this before and fixed it myself by removing the U-bend, but this time, although I’ve got it off and cleared it, I cannot get it to seal again. No matter how many times I try, water spills out into the cabinet underneath.

The problem is I can’t see what I’m doing. I’m having to do things by feel. It’s worked in the past but it’s got me this time. I give up (for now, anyway).

The other problem is that the toilet is blocked solid. No matter how I try, with wire auger, plastic “snake”, two sizes of plunger, caustic fluid, even my hand encased in a plastic bag (ugh), nothing will clear it! It’s driving me mad.

I think this will be the time to completely replace the whole pan and cistern, something I’ve been thinking about for some years. I’d like to have the Toto toilets they have in Bali hotels, and I’ve found a shop that sells them in Perth, but they are more than $1,000. Hmmm. Thinking about it.

____________________________________________

I meant to mention – I spoke previously of the release of the new version of Microsoft Flight Simulator, the first new version in more than a decade. Well it was finally released on 18 August. That’s the good news.

The bad news is:
(1) you can’t buy it on a DVD in the shops. It’s download only, at about $250 for the full version;
(2) the download is around 90GB of data which would take around two hours and chew up a big chunk of my data allowance;
(3) to download it, you need to join a Microsoft Game club, or a gaming site called Steam, neither of which I want to do;
(4) it seems to require significant video card specs.

All these seem to be obstacles to me. I did actually attempt to buy it when it became available and paid for it on-line, but when I saw the obstacles, I quickly asked Microsoft for a refund which, to their credit, they did immediately.

Therefore, at the moment, I am Flight Simulator deficient. I’m hoping they’ll release it on DVDs or something.

_______________________________________________

I’ve finally finished the revision of my Croft History Vol. 2 1950 – 54, 2nd Edition using all the enhanced and coloured photos. I am very pleased with it. Samples:

And so-on. There are 40 pages. I’m open for orders. I’m afraid the cost is $29.90 + $12.95 postage to me, total $42.85, plus the postage to you, at a guess another $12.95, total $55.80. I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do to reduce the cost. This is cost price.

There is another way – the images shown above are page proofs generated by the Photobook program. But Photobook are not stupid, they won’t let me print the pages directly and these page proofs are fairly low resolution. I’ve put them into a PDF file, but the resolution is lost. The pages are not sharp. The physical paper book is the best way.

Anyway, as I said, I’m open for orders – pcroft810@gmail.com. I’ll email all my cousins to let them know.

________________________________________________

I made a start on changing the throttle position sensor in the Honda MDX yesterday and guess what, stymied at the first hurdle. The first bolt I tried is locked solid and I’m in danger of burring the edges trying to undo it. It needs a “rattle gun” but I have an impact driver which should substitute. Provided I can adapt it to hold the 10mm socket. I gotta get on with this job.

_____________________________________________

Speaking of murderers and torturers, the above satellite image shows the Chinese fishing fleet massed on the Galapagos Islands Marine Reserve boundary while they plunder ALL the fish and marine life in the sea in that location. They take everything that moves, denuding the sea floor.

This is what the Chinese are doing all over the world, plundering the land and seas for their own markets. The Chinese are the ones responsible for almost all the losses of animal species in Africa so that Chinese men can have ground up rhino horn to give themselves bigger dicks (Chinese men have notoriously small dicks, of course.)

I think we are going to have a very big problem with China in the years to come. I think it will come to a shooting war and it will probably end in nuclear weapons use. It’ll probably be after I’ve dropped off but if you have kids, I’m sorry for you. The coming war with China is going to be very, very bad.

China is responsible for most of the world’s problems:
* It’s the world’s second worst polluter
* It has no respect for the law, either internally or International law
* It has no respect for human rights, employing detention without trial, ruthless capital punishment, kidnapping and “disappearances”, torture, brainwashing, concentration camps, any wrong you can think of.
* It lies, cheats and steals. It is a nation of thieves and liars.
* China caused the COVID-19 virus that has devastated the world.
* China is annexing territory in the South China Sea and is defying the International Court.

The list goes on. Most individual Chinese are fine, but as a country it is a Communist military dictatorship which can never be trusted. They are going to cause the deaths of millions in the future. They must be stopped, now.