Okay, it's not technically the last thing I needed, but...

Also, I don't suppose anyone ever actually wakes up in the morning, finds their telephone dead and cries "Oh, that is just so exactly what I needed!" (Actually, come to think, there have been one or two occasions...)

Nevertheless: I really did not need this. 'Specially when the cable that brings the phone line in has been dug up by workmen and is lying exposed in front of my house...

So I asked them if they'd disconnected it at all, meaning have you buggered my cable?, and they denied everything; so I went into town to phone the supplier from the Lit & Phil (because of course if there's a fault on the telephone line, the only way to report it is on the bloody telephone; I get my broadband from them also, but you can't e-mail them, oh no), and arranged for an engineer to come this afternoon.

And came home to find happy workmen, who had found a fault in the exposed cable "where it must've worn away on the stonework", meaning we buggered your cable, mate, and had patched it; and yes indeed, the phone is working again.

I haven't cancelled the engineer, because I think he should probably inspect their patch - at the very least - before the cable's buried again; but now I am dreading his arrival. If he says "it's the workmen's fault, not ours; there will be a charge" and the workmen say "not us, mate", then I am going to get crushed between a multinational company and the local council. And I'm the one whose bank details they have, for purpose of extracting charges...

Heh

One of the obligations, of course, of being Me is that I worry myself into a state over stuff that doesn't matter to anyone else and things that won't actually happen at all, or else won't happen in a bad way...

The phone guy arrived at just exactly the same time as the concrete truck for the workmen, so there was practically a collision of large vehicles and urgencies-of-errand. Which the phone guy won, all down the line: he parked just where the truck had to be, and made the workmen wait.

Also, he was young and cute. Yay phone guy.

So we agreed between us that of course the workmen hadn't damaged the cable (clearly, he gets this all the time), and he fixed it in the two minutes that he'd promised, and that was that.

And now the concrete truck is pouring concrete into the foundation-trenches where my front wall used to be, and the boys are fascinated: sharing a window, even, as they stare, as the thick gloopy concrete gushes down.

Lament (after the Ancient Egyptians)

The internets are empty.

Everything I have to do is downstairs.

And there is a crocodile on the sandbank cat in my lap.

Unpredictable cat is unpredictable

Heh. I've been shifting stuff around in the office here, the way you do when you can't think of anything more useful (barring, obviously, stuff that you really actively don't want to do, like tax paperwork), and Mac jumped into an empty document box, the way cats do.

So I dropped the lid on the box, the way mean humans do when they expect their cats to fight their way out in outrage 0.01 of a second later...

Nah. Young Sir has settled down very happily in there. Stick your finger through the grip-hole and he will chew on it; scritch the outside and out his paw will come, probing; every now and then he chirrups in a contented fashion. Settled in till tea-time, basically.