The Seagulls Have Landed

One of the sure signs of spring around here: The seagulls have arrived! A gang of them always come up the river from the coast in spring, to spend the summer here.

More signs of spring:

 Flowers are being planted in the parks and graveyards.

 Trees and bushes are slowly turning green.

 I bought some daffodils for my balcony. (In Swedish we call them "påskliljor" = Easter Lilies)

My strawberry plants have survived another winter. (In the late autumn, I wrap the box in newspapers, put it under a bench on the balcony, cover the bench with a tarpaulin - and hope for the best...)

There is still some life left in the clematis, too - at least in one of my two plants. One may have died, but the branches are all so entangled with each other on the trellis that it is very hard to tell which belong to which pot... I shall have to wait for flowers before I decide what to do! (I seem to remember that those are slightly different in colour between the two plants.)

We had a lovely sunny weekend with some warmer winds at last (although back to colder again now!) - but where did my feet (and the bus) take me? Not out into the countryside; but to the big shopping district across town...

 Photos taken from a glass-covered footbridge across the main road, connecting two main parts of the shopping district.

 All for a good cause though (well, in my opinion anyway)...

A new tablet, to serve as companion to the laptop (which serves as "desktop" in my study) and the mobile phone, whose memory is beginning to struggle to keep up with all the app updates. 

I gave it some thought, and arrived at the conclusion that a good tablet might allow me to free up some memory on the phone, and make it possible to keep that for bit longer instead.

I would probably have bought a new tablet even earlier, if not for the fact that it's such a struggle to decide which one to buy... 

I've had another kind of tablet before, but it was never a very good buy to start with; and by now it's very outdated, so more trouble than help, really. (Because it's not very good, I don't use it much, which in turn means that when I do want to use it, for one thing I have to charge it, and then it also wants to do a million updates before it allows me to do anything else... By which time I've usually lost patience with it and turned to either the phone or the laptop instead...)

So I've been spending quite a bit of time searching and comparing etc online to find the "right" kind of tablet. But there are so many things to think of, and always so much additional tech information that is just 'mumbo jumbo' to me as I don't know what it means...

But with the arrival of Spring to inspire me, I decided on Saturday to go out to one of the big media stores - the same one where I bought my laptop, and also my camera. And again I felt I got good help there, to check my "thoughts" about what I wanted, with a sales person who seemed to know what he (as well as I) was talking about. It resulted in the purchase of a Lenovo TAB4 10 Plus. 

So far, I think we (Len & I) may be able to get along well... Even if it always takes a bit of time to get properly acquainted! 

One area where I do think the tablet will be helpful is when it comes to reading and commenting on blogs. (I often read blogs on my phone, but find it difficult to comment from there.)

Writing blog posts will probably still usually be a job for the laptop, though, as that is where I collect my photos!