Greek Helen must leave this afternoon. She'll be much missed. And she has accomplished a good deal in the way of smoothing the path ahead for her aged parents. On the other hand, we have beans coming out of our ears and have promised ourselves a sanguineous few days to make up. We'll have a beanless smoked haddock chowder for lunch (she'll eat fish).

Computer problems

Janette, I think you've cracked it! I finally got around yesterday to applying your remedy to my maddening pop-ups. Fingers crossed, I think they're gone. Many thanks.

Southern Gal, yes, there is a free download of Quicken. It didn't work for me – that is, I downloaded and installed and gave it my back-up files. It made an enthusiastic start, numbers flashing past as on an overheated speedometer, then it stopped and said it couldn't read European files, although I am sure I downloaded the UK version.

I have two Quicken disks (plus a third, on its way from eBay). The one Intuit sent me, simply won't load on the new laptop. On the old desktop, it says it will, if I alter the config.sys file. I'm not terribly keen on that.

The other looks as if it might have come off the front of a magazine, perhaps at the time when Intuit left the UK and offered the free download instead. On the laptop, that produces the same result as the download – seems to work, and then refuses to load the backup files because they're European. At the moment, I am trying to install it on the old computer. It might work.

[It did! I'm back in business. Old Slowcoach has lumbered to the rescue. I must spend some time updating my accounts today.]

I've downloaded Microsoft Money successfully (they pulled out from the UK at the same time as Intuit, and they, too, left a free download behind) but it can't read my backup files. I think they should have been exported from Quicken in a special export format. [Now that I've got my files again – there are about 90,000 items, Quicken said – I'll try doing that today, too. A free disk from a magazine could evaporate at any moment.]

Knitting

I'm well advanced with the 16^th repeat of the centre of the Unst Bridal Shawl – 18 ½ are required. The end of this phase really is in sight!

Pictures

Greek Helen rightly says that it is they which make a blog sing, instancing Kate Davies. I'll never be that good, not remotely. But I promise a Bridal Shawl pic for tomorrow, and a Helen-in-the-Milano one. For now, here are my sister and her husband and their grandson Ted, taken yesterday in DC.

He's the baby for whom Rams & Yowes is intended, of course. It should be ready for him to take to college, at this rate.