Bad Sat Nav

My task for today was to fix my sat nav which is now wholly unusable and won't get past the splash screen - despite many, many resets. They say that desperate times call for desperate measures and so I have pinned the problem down to an error with the memory card. Switching the device on without the SD card seems to work fine - well, as fine as a sat nav can be without the maps and the software to tell it how to run. So I formatted the SD card.

I did have my thinking cap on though and I remembered to back it all up before attempting this form of murder. I wasn't entirely sure where this process would take me and so I thought it best not to ruin the expensive card reader (which is essentially all it was good for then). When I connected the sat nav again, the Tom Tom home software sprang into action and did the rest for me. It downloaded the software from the internet and installed it onto the card and went through the update process to bring it up to date. It took several sequences of download, install and restart before it finished everything and so I tested it out. It worked! I had no maps on the device so it showed only a floating arrow on the brown background but it had got past the splash screen without crashing. I had made a backup of my (now very outdated map) before wiping the card and so installed that back onto the card. It was just as well I did make this backup because I would have had to fork out £40 for a new map otherwise! I installed a voice after being prompted that no directions could be read out without it and set about adding my settings back.

I haven't tested it out on a long trip yet but I'm now confident that it will work - although the proof as they say is in the pudding. Speaking of which, that nicely brings me onto my next topic - apple crumble. This all came about after my parents returned back from a lunch visit to a work colleague and returned with bags of garden produce. Several bags of Bramley cooking apples, a large bag of damsons and two small bags of tomatoes. Presumably this isn't their entire crop and so given the amount we have received, they must have an enormous garden full of fruit trees plants and bushes.

I am unsure as to what to do with the damsons however, if they are still in their bag when I next make it home, I may steal them to make some jam or perhaps a damson crumble. I did try eating one without cooking in it and it is ridiculously tart and practically inedible without a lot of sugar.

The disappointing end to this post is that the crumble was eaten before I got the chance to take a picture of it. In a way that is a good thing, because it means that it was tasty and for one I didn't make a mess of cooking something. Still, if the only pictures that make it up here are of baking failures then that doesn't make me look very good really, does it?