Blackberry's journal

This evening I noticed that I didn't get so breathless coming upstairs, so later on I tried it again - same effect. Can this mean that I'm getting better?

Can that tiny little beta-blocker, hardly bigger than a pin's head really have made a difference? Already??

I'm not going to put out the flags yet, but I do feel much brighter today. I was going to go the Lit & Phil, but I still have an excruciatingly painful knee, and while their chairs are normally OK, if not exactly luxuriously comfortable, I know from previous experience that if I go there with knee or hip pain I shall come home much worse.

In any case, I was glad that I'd stayed home, because a dear friend I haven't spoken to for a long time telephoned me and we had a very long conversation with lots of laughter and silliness.

Charles says that he feels very much better in this his third day without eating bread, cake, biscuits or any form of cereal, but I don't really know whether to think that he's correct about having an allergy, or whether it would have made such a lot of difference so quickly.  I think we'll wait and see.  We'll also have to wait and see whether he can hold out without cake!!  I can see it's going to cost me a fortune in bananas and apples!  He appears to have eaten 2 small bunches of bananas in as many days!

Anyway, I've told him I will bring him back a jumbo tub of peanuts from Costco tomorrow to make up for the loss of croissants and Danish pastries. I shall have to look for some Rice Krispies as well. I don't know who's going to eat the crunchy-honey-nut-cornflake-alikes I got from Lidl, either. He tells me that corn does have gluten, maybe he's right. It is, after all, like a giant grass seed, I suppose.

Today I received one of the most stylish compliments slips I've ever seen. It came from the office of Sir Richard Branson in response to my letter asking him if his company couldn't pick up the pieces of theJazz. It says the relevant department will be contacting me soon.

But get this! It came from his private island in the Virgin Islands; there's even a little colour photo of the island. All the printing is in silver. It is just sooo kewl!

Well, maybe it didn't actually come all the way from the Virgin Islands, I didn't check the envelope and it's lost now, but my goodness, it's a lot better than a scruffy photocopied compliments slip such as one might get from one's local authority!

I'm tempted to frame it, but some oaf has managed to get a tiny spot of coffee on it!

I've still not managed to make the MyClassicFM player work properly. I did get a return e-mail saying that it would work with Firefox if I downloaded the Firefox IE emulator, but when I tried to do so it was only available for Firefox 3.mumble-beta. So I downloaded version 3.mumble-beta which still won't allow it to be used as an add-on.

So far I have spent about 5 hours downloading and installing patches and SP2 for XP Home, a further hour or two downloading and installing IE7, followed by a further download and installation of an updated Windows Media Player. This does actually work, about 3 times out of 10, but only for a couple of hours.

I've now also spent 2 or 3 hours downloading and installing Firefox 3.mumble-beta and downloading and trying to install the IE emulator add-on, which it won't allow to work with it. Hardly any of my add-ons work with the beta version, either.

Fortunately, it didn't install itself over my existing stable Firefox 2.0.0.12, but installed into a different directory, so I'm still able to use my original Firefox. I would use the new one, but for some reason it displays with enormous icons and huge text and page sizes, so it's too difficult to use and I can't find anywhere among the settings to make the pages smaller. So I've put it into my "Useful things" folder, where I keep things I don't use very often.

I've just remembered that my Amazon 3CDs for £10 came yesterday and so far I've only listened to the Peggy Lee disc. I still have John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters to listen to. Hurrah!

Oh well! Time for bed and my book!