We have had a good week, in every respect. Until today, the weather has been lovely, warm and sunny, not hot and humid. I have been feeling tired but better with each passing day, and I am confident that I will be fit for surgery in the next few weeks. Attila is working very hard, and seems to be able to relax when he finds himself at home. The girls are all working; and seem happy enough in their pursuits. Ariel and her children are thriving. My friends are healthy. Life is good.

Recently I began to visit a local Nursing Home, book in hand. I have been reading Sherlock Holmes mysteries to an elderly woman who has lost her sight. She is such a wonderful person. During my visits, we chat about her life, her experiences, and our shared tastes in literature. I am not paid for my visits; they are voluntary. This has been just the thing to round out my life.

We are still busy decluttering our home. This past week I have made two trips to the local Women's Shelter, donating bags of well used, and much loved children's books. We donated a chest of drawers to a group of single men living in shared accommodations near here. I have made an excellent trade with one of my Windows computers, for three fresh organic chickens. A set of encyclopedias have been earmarked for Luna and Janus, and in a corner of the basement sits a box of assorted books and gadgets, set aside for Terra and Lares.

We have been spending a good deal of time in the garden. The new lawn is healthy, and working hard to overcome the even healthier crop of weeds that have taken root between the blades. The yard is quite dry after quite a few consecutive sunny days, but we are expecting a thunderstorm this afternoon. Rain will be most welcome, hail will not. We must wait and see what happens.

A flat of new basil plants arrived this afternoon, ready for planting. It is a bit late in the season I suppose, to be putting in new bedding plants, but now is when they are ready for transplanting. They look lovely and healthy, and in order to keep them that way I will wait until tomorrow to plant them; just in case we do get, hail this afternoon or this evening.

Because the weather has been warm but not hot, it has been safe to heat up the oven and bake bread. For the first time, I attempted to make Hamburger Buns. Using my regular seed bread recipe, I divided the dough into a dozen small balls, smushed them flat and put them on a cookie sheet to rise and bake. Once baked, they were a perfect size for a hamburger patty, and so delicious. As soon as the weather cools down, another batch will go in the oven.

This week has been busy on the computer. After experimenting with Apple's Mail program for some time, it became obvious it just did not have the needed feature set. So back to Eudora it was. However, moving email from one program to another is seldom a simple process, and this was no exception. The solution came from the Apple forum site. I had to use an IMAP account, moving all the mail to that account in Apple's Mail program. Once this was accomplished, an IMAP account was setup for Eudora, which cached the email on the hard drive. Then the mailboxes had to be saved, mail box by mailbox, from the cache to the email program. All this took approximately two days. Much of the time was dedicated to trial and error and starting again from scratch when things did not work out as planned. It is all done now though, all backed up.

Every time I stray from Eudora, I regret it. Perhaps it is just that I have come to rely on features such as "Stationary" and multiple signatures. In the world of computers, I think that familiarity does not breed contempt, quite the opposite.