[bemused] Tarantulas, as far as I can ascertain from Rosa's threat posture/running away every time I manage to splatter her when I spray her tank (to increase the humidity), are not fond of getting wet. So I can only assume that she was standing in her half-full waterbowl in order to try to cool down a little yesterday. Yes, it was hot. And humid. Bit like a steam sauna, actually.
Today is very pleasantly cool and damp - and still, so at least my brolly won't blow inside out when I go to collect Kai (must remember not to buy such a cheap one next time...)
Sprog took home-grown strawberries for his break today. They are wonderful, so sweet even I don't need sugar on them - and they hull properly and neatly, unlike shop bought where I always have to use a knife. But two planters isn't going to be nearly enough: next year I need at least twice as many, and preferably more if I can work out where to put them!


Much much later... [growl] Last night I started having connectivity problems - as in everything was taking forever to load, timing out or bringing up an 'interrupted' error page. There were no reported broadband problems in our area, so I rang BlueYonder technical support to ask if they could help.
After a little playing around with the [run] cmd application, the person I spoke to told me I had spyware on my system and to run anti-spyware software to get rid of it. (He based this on the fact that requests for the netstats for my machine brought up 40+ lines of TCP/UDP code, instead of the 10-15 he said should be there). I wasn't convinced, but since it's been a while since I did a complete scan, I accepted the explanation.
Ad-aware and Spybot S&D only showed a total of 6 tracking cookies (I almost typed cooking trackies, there), which is pretty much what I'd anticipate, but Ewido threw up the backdoor.theef.111 RAT Trojan hidden away in an Adobe plugin - and told me it would have to get rid of the whole plugin to remove it. Since I didn't know what the plugin did - I have so many I wouldn't recognise a fake one if it bit me - I checked I didn't have any of the processes it affects running, then opted to leave it where it was until I could get more advice (from my guru GoodTwin).
By the time I got back to work, the delay with my internet access had vanished and I was back to normal.
This morning, after GoodTwin's email (it seems fairly certain, with all the security I run, that the Trojan hadn't been operating), I took the opportunity to do a major housekeep, backing up and archiving nearly a gig's worth of old files, then ran Ewido again and let the software remove the Trojan, which it did without any problems. And all continued well. Until I got back from collecting Kai, to find Ken trying to get into Yahoo to check mail and nothing happening.
Now, I'm sure there are more awkward times for me to lose connectivity, but this came close: it's Kai's 'Meet the Tutor' evening tomorrow and I had to look up bus times to try to work out the schedule. Except that the pages took 10 minutes to load, and even then not fully.
I ran all the scans again. The system came up clean. I rang tech support.
And spoke to someone I could barely understand, who was either not interested or not trained to do anything as useful as actually help. He insisted that I must still have spyware on the system, it couldn't possibly be anything else. He gave me the (premium rate, of course) number to ring for PC support. I put the phone down, closed down all my internet connections (including ICQ) and tried netstat again. Finally we unplugged the surfboard, and tried looking at netstat again - to find it still showed over 20 TCP/UDP connections!
So I rang back and got through to an extremely helpful young Scotsman, who ran the same tests as Chris a couple of weeks ago, came to the conclusion (which I confess had occurred to me) that it looked like a hardware problem and arranged to send out a technician to check our ancient surfboard (the broadband modem).
But the earliest they can do it is Saturday...
[sigh] Dial-up til Saturday? I have sites to maintain, research to do!
He apologised - and of course it isn't his fault, he did everything he could to solve the problem - and suggested I try ringing through the week to see if I can have an earlier appointment slotted into a cancellation. Like I needed something else to do this week.
It's an intermittent problem as well. I was without internet access from 4.30 'til 11.15 pm, and for a couple of hours couldn't even send emails, though I could receive them. For the moment everything seems back to normal, though how long it will last is anyone's guess...
So if I'm not here over the next few days, you'll know why.