Sky & Tree, Naas, Co. Kildare

A serious side-effect of yesterday's hard drive failure is that I've lost access to some software I use for work. Chief among these is Adobe Illustrator. To keep me going, I downloaded and installed a trial of the latest CS4 version yesterday, and spent a while last night going through some tutorial videos at the Adobe web site to familiarise myself with the many changes since my ancient Illustrator 10. I must say, the videos are excellent, and I ended up majorly impressed with what the latest version has to offer. It's a shame that there is no upgrade route available from Illustrator 10 to CS3, and the full package really is a bit expensive.

While I may eventually have no alternative but to fork out lots of euro, the print intermediary I deal with for my notorious quarterly magazine design job made me an offer to pass on his copy of Illustrator and save me the hassle of going through all the installation and upgrade stuff I'd have to do to get Illy up and running on my newer iMac. (And, of course, there's also the bugbear that whatever was my original full Illustrator purchase won't even install on an Intel machine.) Anyway, we arranged that I'd drive down to his place in Naas today to arrange all this.

It was a perfect day for a bit of a drive (it isn't far to Naas, but, sad as it seems, it's still quite an adventure for me to venture even this far afield), and I actually thoroughly enjoyed my M1-M50-N7 journey. Growing up in Carlow in the Irish midlands, Naas was a natural place to stop on the journey 'up to Dublin', so I'm familiar with the place from those long-distant days. Despite the directions I'd been given, I still managed to go astray and ended up driving right through the town and had to phone to be met and led to the house. I still haven't actually tried a software install from the discs I was given, but the journey itself rang a good few bells of reminiscence.

The weather was glorious, as I mentioned. This shot is of a tree right outside the house we met in. There should have been lots more to choose from for Blip, but the camera battery was running low and I'd forgotten to bring the spare.