The whirligig of time is quick

You know how, every time you find a penny, you are obliged to lose a pound?

Sometimes it's really, really quick.

Yesterday, as you know, I was being obnoxiously bouncy over the sale to Nature. I had brought a duck home from the market, and meant to spend the evening deconstructing it: the legs for confit, the carcass for soup, the breasts to be flash-fried and eaten pink. Like that. But I hadn't even laid blade to skin before the phone rang, and that was Sean suggesting a drink. Well, I was still full of bounce; I set the duck aside and bounced down to the pub. Where much drinking occurred, etc.

And then went straight from the pub to the theatre (Cats, since you ask. I hadn't seen it. Now I have). And came out of the theatre with my own producer, the guy who directed "A Cold Coming". And we spoke.

The plan had always been that to follow the success of that last play, we would go to the Arts Council early this year - about now, as it were - to apply for funding for a new one. It was foolish of me, I know, because the Arts Council is unpredictable in its vagaries, but I was rather counting on the money, as well as being dead keen to write the play. Which I had been discussing with Sean in the pub, just a bare couple of hours before...

But. I have a love-rival; I have been displaced. Peter has another play: something that he saw in Edinburgh and has negotiated the rights for, and will be producing this year. In lieu, apparently, of mine. He speaks of 2009 now, for us. And I don't believe him.

More laptop neepery

I committed heresy overnight and this morning. I blame it of course on my general cast-downiness, but I did actually allow myself to wonder if the LHP were not entirely P after all - if, indeed, it might not have a flaw.

S'okay, though, I am rational again. It's not - of course! - a flaw.

What it was, in both Windows and Linux (but especially, dramatically in Linux) I was having things happen that I hadn't invited to happen, programs opening themselves out of menus and such. And what it is, is that I have never had a touchpad before so I actually don't know what they do, apart from shoving the cursor around. I didn't know they did anything, apart from shoving the cursor around. I had no idea that you could cause things to happen by tapping on the touchpad in lieu of clicking the button below.

Now I do know this, and it explains a lot. I still assert that the pad is ludicrously sensitive, esp in Linux; it interprets the lightest touch as a tap. I'm still not in control. So I went to reset it, but I don't have access to those controls; I'd have to go into the config files, apparently, and change stuff. Which - well, yes, I have been there and done that before. But it's scary.

So I shall learn to handle my hypersensitive touchpad, and that'll be fine. Also, I have a tiny wee USB mouse from an earlier iteration of the whole Vaio thing, and that works fine.

Also, my hands hurt. Again last night I was heretical and inclined to blame the LHP, but today I have remembered wrestling with a bottle of fizz, which is enough to make anyone's hands hurt. (Usually, opening fizz is one of my skillz. This one, nor I nor durham_rambler could shift it, until Roger applied principles of grip and leverage with an old-fashioned nutcracker.) Even so, it's a useful reminder that I do live on the edge of a precipice, that my hands are only ever one bad day short of hurting, and I should probably be careful.