it isn't white no more, oh yes it is!

On Thursday i said to a friend this is the longest we've been without the white stuff on the ground, when low and behold a few hours later the damn stuff is back. The snow is brilliant for the security cams, lightening the image nicely.
I did catch a glimpse of all the bulbs beginning to show, although they are obviously a week or so behind this year.
The pond is looking crystal clear now all the ice has melted, and the fish are quietly waking up, and i eagerly await the first sign of frog activity. The fish must be 16 or 17 years old now and i think the spinal thing which i mentioned in an earlier post has definitely spread, as i can see a slight kink in all of them.
You are supposed to kill them but i cannot bring myself to do it so when they all pop off i shall remove the net and have a wildlife pond and allow the heron as well as the fox and hedgehog to take a drink as there will be no beakfast for them. Also i think a net keeps the dragon flies at bay so that's another thing to look forward to.

Computer problem solved

I had a problem with my Dell vostro 400 desktop machine, in that my frame rate was way down when in gaming, & also a strange occurence at start-up.
I would switch on, the blue light appeared, the fan came on at full speed as normal, but as the fan slowed down the light went out & the computer was dead, then it immediately started up again, then died down, & on the 3rd time the bios bleeped & it stayed on. This was driving me mad, i trawled everywhere on the net & all seemed to point to faulty power supply, others said faulty motherboard, but i wasn't fussed on installing new power supply as it was about £80 for this model. Incidentally the graphics card was a nvidia geforce 8600gts.
I finally took up a friends suggestion of a gainwood 9500gt 1gb DDR2 graphics card which only cost around £50, & it is absolutely brilliant. My fps went way up & the machine starts first time.
On the start-up issue, this new card takes power only from the pci express slot, not from a flying lead, so whether that was part of the problem, i don't know. The card has no fan so i thought it may get hot as on the vostro midi tower it is upside down, & also takes up 2 slots, but it has been fine.
So if anyone has had similar problems as i had, i hope this has helped.

pond life

Well all the snow has nearly gone but the pond has still quite a bit of ice on it, got a shot of one of the golden orfe through the ice free surface as shown in the photos. The waterfall is kept running 24/7 all year round so there is always a part of the pond surface ice free, although this year only a tiny fraction.
But the fish are very hardy, about 16 years old, but i have had four with a spinal thing, which spreads, probably even more as they have spawned for the last few years.
I did one year get two which survived to about one and a half inches then disapeared,
whether they were eaten or they just died i don't know. If anyone needs advice on building & running a pond feel free to ask, i used to have a website with a pond-life section which was very popular but as i hosted it on geocities it went down when they stopped free hosting.
As i mentioned in the previous post we have foxes in our grounds, well one night last summer one of the fish was on the patio dead, & i knew the net covering the pond had frayed at one end, so as i have 24/7 video recording i saw a cat so we thought we had the culprit. but when i found time to run the tape on i found one of the foxes walking round the pond. I just wish it had hooked one of the "Bent" fish out instead of one of the good ones.

Snow trails

With all the snow we have had in the last few weeks, it's been very interesting seeing all the different tracks in the snow of birds & animals.
we have a foxes den in our grounds & i thought they had moved on as we hadn't seen or heard them for a while, & the entrance to the den had not been used. But all is well as there has been fresh tracks every day leading back to near the original den, so they must have opened up a new entrance. The foot prints were in a near straight line but where the snow was deeper it was a continuous channel as the bushy tail had joined the foot prints up.
We also have a blackbird, a thrush, a robin & magpies drinking at the frozen pond, which has been frozen since christmas, apart from the waterfallwhich i leave running all year round just to keep a tiny bit of ice free surface for the gasses to escape.

Good morning world!!

Well we're just into a new year, i wonder what this year has in store, if only i had crystal balls, what! There's already this earthquake in Haiti, terrible, it's so frustrating when all the aid is at the airport but 3 days have past & they are still trapped under the rubble, although there was one piece of good news when that aid worker got burried, phoned her husband who jumped in his car, drove 100 miles & found her with just her hand showing, what a mirracle escape.