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Yesteday evening turned into an early morning, and after the Chinese, the video and driving Trevor and Jon back home I didn’t get to bed until half two. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, but I was due at mum’s by half nine for breakfast.

I woke up to a cold wet morning and drove through the pouring rain to Galleywood where croissants and coffee were waiting. The cat was sulking in the lounge. She’d been left in on her own all day yesterday and doesn’t want to go out in the wind and rain. The lawn is waterlogged.

Mum’s new computer arrived on Thursday, so when we’d finished breakfast and made fresh tea we went upstairs to unpack it. It’s ages since I’ve reviewed a new PC, so it’s a long time since I last unboxed one, and I’d forgotten how many wires and other bits there are. It was like putting together a big box of Lego, and by the time we’d finished, and moved the old computer down into the study, the floor was just a knot of wires.

It’s a very nice machine. I am quite envious. Fortunately we had a Zip drive to move all the data across or we’d have been there hours, but as it was it took us a few hours to load all the software back onto it so it looked more or less like the old one (albeit faster and with a better screen).

The rain paused as we finished, so I went to the car to collect 40 back issues of PCW to put up into the loft. When I got up there, though, I was surprised at how little space there was left. Almost everything up there is mine, and it’s amazing the kind of things I thought I needed to keep. Old dot matrix printers, software that has been superceeded so many times it’s now obsolete, an old teasmaid, cans of camping gas, my old school blazer. Trash, most of it, and a lot of it got thrown straight back down through the loft hatch where Andrew and mum gathered them up and took them to the garage. By the time I’d finished there was a neat little walkway behind a big wall of boxes so you could actually get from one end of the loft to the other, and then back again by two different routes.

I brought home a few of my old bits of junk, including a tasteless metal replica of the royal carriage being pulled by horses from the coronation that will sit very nicely beside my equally tacky silver jubilee mugs. It’s supposed to be ironic, but I think some visitors think they’re on display because I like them. There was also a dead (and rather dessicated) seahorse in a box.

I also found the plates and screws from my arm in the little jar they’d given me at the hospital when they took them out. They’re still very shiny and apart from the scrapes where they chipped away the the bone to get them out again they look brand new. I’ve put them on the bookshelf.

We stashed the mags in the loft and rewarded ourselves with tea and cake, and then I came home to fight with Windows XP. It’s not too keen on some of my hardware, refusing to speak to my camera and refusing to even boot half the time when my card reader is plugged in. I guess this means I’ll have trouble getting at my pictures until Canon comes up with the updated camera drivers. Either that or I’ll have to sacrifice my Linux box to reinstall Windows Me just for the camera. I wonder if it can be partitioned…

FilmFour showed Laurence of Arabia this evening. I’ve never seen it before, so watched the first two hours over dinner. Very slow and pretty - perfect Sunday evening viewing. The last hour and a half is on video, perhaps waiting for next weekend.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 21st, 2001 at 6:23 pm and is filed under Journal, Picture story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.