Replacing old electronics

 Some changes to our electronics this week, partly prompted by our broadband bill increasing beyond the acceptable, and partly due to Prime Day. I have ended up under my desk more times than seems reasonable, crawling around trying to figure out just what the heck I was doing when I created the old-fashioned mess of wiring 10 years ago that connects my tower PC, accessories and telephone to each other and to various power points.  So many identical black cables -why didn't I label them??!  Snaking through various holes in my desk and its vertical shelving, most of them inaccessible behind books or filing cabinets.  And the telephone cable similarly snaking through bookshelves and various drilled access holes to join the mess of wiring behind the desk.  Then when the new stuff arrived, having to work out how to feed it all back through the holes to where it needed to connect.

On the plus side, I found an extra power point (plug socket) I had forgotten about, hidden behind my desk. And I found £61 in an envelope left over from when I was selling off machine knitting stuff a few years ago.  Anyway, after a visit from an engineer and an excruciating 20 hours without broadband on Wednesday, we now have:

• full fibre broadband, which does seem a bit faster than our old phone line broadband, and it's cheaper.
  
  
• new PC speakers, which sound so much better than my 10 year old previous speakers, and don't need a separate power supply so one less wire behind the desk.
  
  
• a new set of cordless phones to replace our ailing ancient handsets which were all refusing to hold a battery charge any longer even though I'd replaced the batteries a few times.  The fibre broadband has replaced our landline with 'digital voice' so we no longer have a landline which feels a bit strange.  So if there is a power cut then the cordless phones won't have a signal but I suppose that's what mobiles are for.

The new stuff is now all configured and installed so hopefully good for several more years.  The next big wiring and configuration headache will come when Microsoft withdraws support for Windows 10 next year, because my ancient tower PC is not suitable to upgrade to Windows 11.  So I'll either have to get a new PC, or pay for the extended security update subscription for a few years then get a new PC. 

After all the stress on Wednesday, it was nice to have a sewing day on Thursday while DH was away for the day.  I put the borders onto the envelope quilt and moved it up to the 'to be quilted' queue upstairs. It's a fun quilt and a great way to use up some FQs.

I also quilted the sumo cushion with some simple lines and turned it into a zippered cushion.  I'm quite pleased with how it turned out, and it brings back memories of stitching the embroidery while I was staying in Japan.

Last night I finished knitting the knitted cat, but haven't stuffed it yet.  The construction was the strangest affair, I am super impressed that anyone could come up with the pattern.  It was all held stitches, short rows, picking up stitches to knit in a new direction... so that the whole cat is in one piece of knitting apart from two rear paws that are sewn on later.  At the moment, it looks like a cat shed its skin like  a snake.

Last weekend we visited an open private garden in a nearby village, which the owners had opened under the National Open Garden Scheme for charity.  It was immaculate, which made us feel unhappy with the jungle behind our house.  So this week we have done some major hacking back of the bay tree (aspiring to reach 30 feet high and 20 feet wide), the bamboo grove (which surpassed its predicted height of 12 feet a few years ago) and various random limbs of other large shrubs.  This has considerably opened up the garden and we can now see the gazebo again from the kitchen window.  The gazebo itself had turned into a giant bug hotel, so DH bravely scrubbed down the spider colonised ceiling, and I scrubbed the walls and algaed floor then sprayed it all down with the hose.  It looks so much better now and we've actually sat out in the gazebo a few times this week.  I didn't dare go in there before in case some creepycrawly landed on me.

I bought the cancer patient a new cat tree from Amazon, which of course she is mostly ignoring although she is using the scratching post portion of it.  She did have one nap in the top portion but otherwise I haven't seen her using it at all.  The vet is happy with her condition and said she could live for years, or it could be months, impossible to say without a biopsy which it isn't worth putting her through.  But her stomach issues are likely permanent, which seems rough on her and us.  DH jokingly suggested that I knit another 'cat skin' which could be like an allover balaclava for the cat in the winter.