Gremlins...

Hi there!
I've never written a blog before (though I have kept journals on and off over the years) and despite my belief that pretty much everything even vaguely "technical" is allergic to me or vice versa, I thought it was about time I had a go to see what all the fuss was all about!

Now when I say I have issues with technology, I'm not just being falsely modest (thought I have been accused of that in the past) - I sometimes wonder whether I am going completely mad, or whether there really are indeed Gremlins in my house. I am currently stuck at home unable to go to work as I have an inner ear viral infection (sounds pretty gross, but will talk about that later on) which basically makes me feel as if I'm on a boat in varying degrees of bad weather all the time. A couple of days ago I decided that, as reading was giving me motion sickness, I would try to watch something on iPlayer instead - this was set up by my boyfriend to play through our Wii and go through the TV and stereo and has been working absolutely fine since we moved in. However, for some mysterious reason there seemed to be no sound coming out the TV. I checked that everything was plugged in as it should be, sound turned up on the stereo and the TV, and not accidentally set to mute, but still no sound.

One of my first thoughts was - irrational as this may sound and I have my mother's hypochondria to thank for this - am I going deaf? To be fair, I'd been scaring myself with the symptom checker on the NHS Direct website and one of the links took me to an article about how continued exposure to noise levels over a certain decibel level can seriously damage your hearing in the long term.

In the end, I gave up on the TV and reconciled myself to the fact that I probably needed a 'noise diet' (one of the recommendations of the article), so just tried to carry on reading IT. But later when I mentioned it to my boyfriend he checked the TV and there was nothing wrong!!

Similarly today, I was trying to go through the last of my outstanding work e-mails on my boyfriend's laptop (even though I'm supposed to avoid computers as it doesn't help the balance problem) and I couldn't play and of the voicemail winamp files. They were playing, I could see the little blue progress line crawling steadily along and the timer count the seconds left on the voicemail, but there was no sound. Again I checked the volume and the mute button was off, but I just can't figure it out. Bearing in mind that my sister and I listened to probably twenty voicemail files on winamp yesterday when she was helping me out doing work from home, there is absolutely no reason that I can imagine as to why this isn't working now. Cue return of completely irrational fears of having developed very specific selective deafness...

And just now, when I started up this bloomin' blog, I tried to complete the little About Me section, and having formulated what I believed was a sufficiently unpretentious summary of me (age, rough location, and range of interests) and pressed save, I got the all too familiar "Sorry, there's been a problem" message.  Half of me is wondering whether the same thing is going to happen if I click save now.... I will be seriously p***ed off if I have to write this all over again, I'm telling you. I might just copy and paste it to a Word Doc just in case....

If this works I'll be bloomin impressed with myself!
Ta ta for now!

Lettie B
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