mini heat wave

So we seemed to have a mini heat wave while I was taking my long weekend.

It was nice that it didn't rain on me, but the heat made it a bit unpleasant.  It was actually another case of my classic comment on British weather that it comes with exclamation points.  I mean the change was so sudden that it was quite a shock.

I have to say I found the whole weather extremely nostalgic.

It was, to coin a phrase, just like the weather we seemed to have when I was a kid.  Well, no, actually, not when I was a kid proper, but when I was a teenager.  My recollection of my teenage years (around the GCSE and A-level kind of time) was that the weather during the summer was constantly like how it was this last weekend - hot and cloudless during the day and not really properly easing off during the night.

I don't know if that's really an accurate reflection of how the weather actually was, but it's how I remember it.  I remember days of going around friends' houses and having barbecues and lazing about and then smoking pot and getting drunk in the evening.

This weather was so reminiscent of that period, particularly as the smell of barbecue was filling the air when I went out for my walks around the estate.

As for other stuff I did it was all pretty unexciting.

I gave the car a thorough clean, including giving it a polish.  Usually when I do these mega cleans I find them quite tiring because I do everything and so it take hours, but I also end up using muscles I don't normally use much so I then have several days of aches and pains.

This time I didn't find the doing as tiring, but the after-ache was really bad.

I also decided to do a load of backing up.  In the end I did my hard-drive based back-up routine, but didn't get the time to also burn the DVDs I usually do as well.  I like to be thoroughly backed-up having had several bad experiences of drives crapping out and taking everything with them.

I'll probably look at burning the DVDs this next bank holiday weekend, though I am currently anticipating I will actually have to work part of the weekend.  This isn't so much because I have too much to do it's more because the timing of things other people are doing mean it just won't be finished in time for me to do anything prior to the weekend.

I decided to do the back-up because I actually had a bit of a worrying moment the other week when I plug one of my drives in and it came up as if it was a new disk and asked me to format it.  In the end I got around it, though the drive ran incredibly slowly.  However, I think looking back on it it was because I used a USB3.0 slot that the motherboard has and I never installed the proper drivers for those slots because I don't have any USB 3.0 peripherals, so it ran at the default USB 1.0 speed.

At least I hope it was that - if not, I've backed it up anyway.