I am completely unable to pay for anything when in the vicinity of my grandmother. This eighty-one year old kindly looking person uses some kind of interrogation practice probably outlawed by most countries to make you tell her how much anything cost that you bought, and then uses further evil techniques to make you take money from her.
A typical conversation goes like this:
I'll walk into her living room. "Hi gran."
She'll smile, and say "Hello. How much do I owe you."
"Nothing, I've not brought you anything." I'll respond. She'll use some kind of X-Ray vision at this point.
"What about the bird seed you hid in the other room?"
I'll shrug. "That wasn't a lot, forget about it."
"No! You need your money!"
"You need yours - you're on a pension." I'll attempt. This will be batted away with a waved hand.
"I haven't got anything to spend it on. How much was it?"
"Um, five pounds."
"Oh - I haven't got a fiver. Here's ten. Then you've got a little bit for going to the shop for me." she'll say, handing me a ten pound note.
"Oh... thank you gran." I'll say, trying to think of a reason to say no but failing. She'll then rake through her purse, thinking.
"I forgot! Here's five pounds for you to get a sandwich at work tomorrow." she'll then say, thrusting more money at me.
"Didn't you say that you didn't have a fiver?"
"Don't argue with your grandmother!"
Should she ever require the services of the emergency services and resuscitation is required, I shall merely call out from the doorway of the hospital "Gran I've paid for lunch okay, don't worry about it". Within the next four seconds she'll be up and demanding her purse to recompense me.
Today can I recommend checking out web series My Gimpy Life - its lead character is (and played by) Teal Sherer, a disabled actress in Hollywood. Teal played Venom in Series 2 of the Guild, but is overall much nicer a person in this show, which is well worth a watch. The episodes can also be viewed on YouTube here. They are looking for donations to let them make more episodes - visit the website to take part if you'd like to see more of the series.
The other thing I've been doing is getting more RAM installed in my PC. When new the PC came with 2Gb, which at the time was more than adequate, but since I've been getting involved in video editing this has been badly shown to be in need of upgrade - more than once I've shut Adobe After Effects down due to lack of RAM. And also more than once Windows seems to grind to a halt - I suspect my virus scanner for this though! At any rate a RAM upgrade is a cheap, simple and effective way to get some more speed out of a PC.
The Crucial website has a handy system scanner which will tell you what RAM you've got in your PC, and what is compatible, and if you buy the RAM from them they even guarantee its compatibility. You can of course use the scanner and then take its findings to another RAM seller, but Crucial prices are generally pretty competitive and for those that don't want to mess around opening the case up to check the motherboard it's a great time saver.
As it happens I had a couple of gift cards for PC World so I've just installed an additional 2Gb of RAM into my system, due to various reasons it says 4Gb installed (3.12Gb usable) which is annoying but at least the amount usable for actual problems is still a lot higher than it used to be, and the system is definitely more responsive. I'm looking forward to giving the system a good test with some gaming and video editing to see what happens.