When we come down to breakfast every morning, looking straight ahead from the staircase we can glance out our front door, which is surrounded by window space on two levels. Many years ago my husband decided he would make windows of his own to place over these large windows, and he designed stained glass landscapes, worked on them and eventually put them in place.

No birds can look straight through, to entice them to think there is nothing there and fly directly at the windows. What they will see is the coloured glass. Still, this morning when we came down for breakfast and glanced out the front door, there was a bird, still, all fluffed up, sitting quietly on the porch. It seemed clear that the little thing, sparrow-sized, had suffered a physical trauma and we felt it had, despite those stained glass inserts, flown into the window.

My husband thought he would place it in a box and put it directly in the sun which hadn't yet hit the porch, but then we recalled reading that it's best to allow a bird to recover its resources, and it would eventually fly off. After we'd gone back upstairs to shower before breakfast and had come down again the bird was no longer there. And so we hope that it had indeed recovered and flown off to resume its normal life.

Unhappy things happen. Yesterday after I'd initially gone on line and then allowed my computer to 'go to sleep', it went into such a deep sleep that nothing I could do served to reawaken it, not shutting it down, not checking that everything was as it should be; plugged in, etc., nothing. The mouse wasn't able to awaken the monitor, though the computer itself was on and presumably working. Years ago this computer decided it didn't like collaborating with mice. A succession of mice later, it still persists in making mice go wobbly and all over the place; sometimes more so, sometimes less, requiring patience to even use the mouse for its assigned purposes. And occasionally it decides to go off line entirely, and I've got to troubleshoot. Sometimes the troubleshooting function puts me back on line, sometimes to achieve that we've got to go through a routine of temporarily shutting off the modem. It's a nuisance. But yesterday, it seemed impossible to persuade the computer to pay attention to the mouse and wake up.

We went out for our usual ravine walk along the forest trails. I was so calm about it all I surprised even myself. And we discussed the issue, deciding perhaps it's time to look at new computers. When we got back from our ramble in the woods, my husband gave the CPU a few hard knocks. Suddenly it decided that the mouse had its best interests in mind after all. So I was back in business. Wobbly mouse commands and all. Of course I also went off line and had to resort to the usual usual.

During today's ramble in the woods we decided we'd drop by one of the Best Buy shops a few minutes' drive from the house. And there we looked and discussed and listened as a computer tech gave us the rundown on what's available. Something utilitarian, and affordable. Ugh! I'm not looking forward to setting up a new computer. And I'll have to transfer all of my precious photographs....