A Spoonful of Robin

Cheeky (Mum’s Devon Rex) has been watching TV a lot – she tried to catch Mary Poppin’s singing robin by leaping up on the TV table and grabbing at it. Maybe she didn’t like it warbling “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.”

She stared unblinkingly at a nature series Mum had on, continuing to gaze intently when we left the birds, fish, rodents and kangaroos and turned to landscape shots, falling eucalyptus gums and rippling floods. I said to Mum she would love to move to Australia. New Zealand interested her too, but given the choice, she would go to Australia and outstare the crocodiles.

On Sunday we saw the second part of Stephen Fry in America… Cheeky watched it too. She watched the horses. She watched him talking to someone and drinking bourbon. She drank in the details as he drove around in his black taxi.

Mum threw last week’s copy of the Radio Times on the floor, ready to go in the bin. It had a photo of Stephen Fry on the cover. Cheeky went over and scuffed it energetically with her feet, then sat on it. That couldn’t be allowed, so I chased her off, but she came back and did the same thing again.

You can tell how she got her name.

Only in America

I enjoyed this blog post Stephen Fry in America by Stephen Fry, though it’s long! Before you settle down to read it, you need to fetch yourself a mug of tea, coffee, Barleycup or whatever your favourite morning drink is. And maybe a plate of waffles heaped with maple syrup.

I particularly enjoyed his remark on the phrase ‘Only in America’… it’s a different view of the idea that the British are more ‘self-deprecating’ and ironic than Americans.

It’s so nice to read something that’s not about how the bottom is falling out of our world. Why do you think I got up at 6 this morning and developed a twitching muscle under one corner of my mouth! Well it was there for two days… seems to have gone now.

I woke up and stared at two of my best bears, and they stared back. I wondered where they would be a few years from now, and suspected they were wondering the same about me.

They nearly got drenched… groping for the light switch, I knocked my mug flying. There was a great splash, and I thought “oh no, last night’s tea!” Fortunately I’d finished it and there was just a little in the bottom. I opened my bedroom door and Mum was poised outside like a sleepy old deer caught in headlights (or dear, whichever you prefer)… I think my mug of tea woke her up, though not the way it’s supposed to. She said “are you going in there?” and I said “no” (though I’d meant to) and closed my door again.

We all need good news (and honest human truth) in the morning.

Tempted by Stephen Fry

With his article …on pimping your browser, Stephen Fry will have prompted a spate of people to try out new ‘skins’ on their Firefox browsers – including me. I looked at the themes before, in fact only a few days ago, but what always put me off going for any of the Firefox add-ons is the message “unsigned… you should only install software from sources that you trust.”

My mother…? That rather limits my options!

This time I decided if those themes on the Firefox page were fine for Stephen Fry, they were fine for me… (cue all those techy guys to snort even more). If anything goes wrong, though, I won’t blame him – I’ll blame myself for finally giving way to temptation.

I downloaded a bundle of Firefox themes from the Mozilla site and went through them, one by one. Most of them were too grey. What is it about the colour grey?? I don’t mind silvery ones if they do have a bit of a shine to them, but flat grey or even pale grey mixed with white has always struck me as rather dreich.

But look who’s blogging – you only need to glance at (my past Blogigo) theme and my other one on the Blogspot to realize that grey doesn’t have a lot of place in my life. (I wish they would come up with some nicer-coloured Nav bars in Blogger – the other three are even worse).

It doesn’t stop with the web… I don’t use plain white pages in my general applications if I can avoid it. Ages ago I went into the Firefox preferences, clicked on the Content tab and changed the page colour to a soft violet blue. Sometimes it shows up behind web pages. I tinted my MS Word documents on the PC (I can’t remember how) but couldn’t figure out how to do it on the Mac. (There’s a ‘blue backgrounds, white text’ option, but that’s too far the other way!) All my Eudora emails arrive in a lovely shade of cornflower blue.

For me white is too bright, black is too dark, and grey is too… um… (trying to be polite as it’s just struck me that a lot of my favourite sites use white and grey.

My favourite Firefox ‘skin’ or theme so far is CloudGnome. But I’ve just spotted another theme that somehow I missed the first time round, so don’t assume that is my final choice..

Comments for this entry (during its previous life on Blogigo):

1. Pacian wrote at Dec 9, 2007 at 11:25: Have poked around with the skins for Opera, but am actually not that bothered. On the other hand, I’ve definitely toned down the garish default colours of Windows XP.

2. Diddums wrote at Dec 10, 2007 at 00:39: I wasn’t fond of those either – pretty plastic.