Pretty pictures: Alcea NOID

I had an entirely different post planned for today, but technical difficulties prevent me from sharing it. Specifically, Firefox has been intermittently freaking out because my version of Adobe Flash Player is out of date and (paraphrasing:) going to make my computer catch fire and explode, so it sends me to a site to download the new version of Adobe Flash Player. Which I then dutifully download, giving my approval and permission where necessary.

And then AFP eats up all the memory in my computer for half an hour, does nothing, and eventually tells me that the file fails an integrity test or something, and then continues to hold all the computer's memory hostage for a few more minutes just to piss me off. After an hour in which I've been unable to do anything at all with the computer but also unable to go anywhere else, to do anything else, because who knows when AFP might let go and let me have the computer again, AFP finally relinquishes control and I can use my computer more or less normally again, except that I'm now an hour behind where I wanted to be, and in my hurry to catch back up, I do stupid things like accidentally double-clicking on something, opening 27 windows of Irfanview, and then slow myself down even more.

Since all of the prior AFP download attempts have failed (there have been about five or six, at random intervals over the last few weeks, and they all go like this), what this means is that at some point a few days or weeks from now, Firefox is going to be all like ZOMG YOUR GOING TO DIE UNLESS U DOWNLOAD THE LATEST VERSION OF ADOBE FLASH PLAYER!!!!1!11!11!!, and then we'll go through this whole thing again, and nothing will happen.

There should be more hollyhock pictures than just these two, but there was some problem I no longer remember with the other ones. (These are a few weeks old, from before it got too hot to walk with Sheba.) So: you'll look at the hollyhock pictures, and you'll like them.