Coming home from work the other evening, we spotted these two kangaroos on the football oval as we came through the middle of town. There’s a narrow park between the sporting complex and High Street. Seeing them reminded us how we hardly see them gathered on the oval these days. During the drought some years back, this oval would’ve had mobs of kangaroos feeding, some even stayed while the footballers were training. These kangaroos are surrounded by ducks. Wood ducks, I think. (For larger images, just click on them.)And I have a bee , of course … just an ordinary one, and I have no idea if it is a native or a European Honey Bee. I still have my ‘exotic’ big bees about.I’ve got my computer problems fixed now, so I’ll be about more often. I’m pretty pleased with myself since I haven’t fiddled under the bonnet of my PC before.  Of course, it wouldn’t have been necessary if I hadn’t been careless while trying to install Linux alongside Windows XP. Somehow I corrupted the loading of XP next time it started … well, I say somehow, but I suspect it is because I pulled out the live USB stick when Linux told me it was unable to install – oops. I guess I didn’t have enough spare memory for the installation this time, because I did install Linux as a dual boot last year for a trial run. I knew I would need to do something about XP eventually, but being XP Pro, I was still getting updates.

So, here I was with a badly wounded PC, with a lot of photos and some files not backed up. Some stuff is backed up thrice over, but other stuff isn’t at all. I watched a video on YouTube on how to get at things in my computer  model (Dell Optiplex GX520).

I took out the hard drive and plugged it into an external casing (ebay, around $30), and now I can read the drive on my ‘old old’ PC (Compaq Evo with XP pro) and the Toshiba laptop (with Linux) so I’m happy.  I picked up a 80GB second-hand hard drive from ebay for $9.99 and put that into my wounded PC, loaded in the free Linux Mint Cinnamon operating system and bingo. All solved. It’s like having a brand new PC, having so many GBs free. Now, I must not clutter this one up. And if you read this far, you deserve a medal for perseverance.  ❤