Losing faith

Okay, so the Virginperson has fifty minutes left in the allotted window, to come by and take their equipment away. If they don't come, I'm not waiting in any longer, or again.

If they don't come, I guess I get to stay online awhile. Swingses and roundaboutses.

In other news, I am putting documents into document boxes. If I had done this as I went along, as I created documents - well. I wouldn't have to be doing it now. (But I do love document boxes. I expect there will be US ones also, in US paper sizes. And I expect I will continue to print out first-draft stories, however dinosaur-like such behaviour may become. Of course I can edit onscreen, but I still like to look over a paper version at least once. You see different things.)

Snarl, viciousness

No, of course the Virginperson didn't come. And of course you can't email an ISP about a problem, you have to phone them. So I did that. And when I eventually got through the chain of menus to an actual person, the stupid little man wanted to faff around resetting my password when I'm leaving them in two days. I may have sworn at him at that point. I certainly shouted.

And they had the wrong date in their system, and can't possibly actually come to collect their old scratched-up set-top box and their outdated modem before Saturday, but it's really important that they do, so can I leave it all with a friend...?

*sobs*

It's not just file formats that become redundant

I just found a typescript - The Garden's first draft, since you ask - printed on foolscap paper.

Um, why...?

(It doesn't fit into my document boxes. Obviously.)

Work in (very slow) progress

I am working my way through the archive: boxing up manuscripts that were held in plastic bags, peering into folders, going "ooh!"

Like that.

So I have this long-term project to write a novel, an Aids-memoire, about the whole caring-for-Quin thing. It's taken me ten years so far not to finish it, after ten years not even starting it. As I have no work at the moment - well. Maybe.

But I just rediscovered the beginning. It's called Unplugged: or, The Physics of Forgetfulness.

What can I tell you, that you don't already know?

You've been in, you've been out. In and out of love, in and out of fashion, in and out of doors. In and out of hospital: in-patient, out of all patience. Intrigued, outraged; in deep, out of your depth. Infatuated, outspoken. In flagrante, outré.

I don't know what you don't know, except that you can't know this, what happened, how we went along. You weren't there, we weren't connected.

Have you ever been unplugged?


BEDROCK

The Bed that held him like a burnished cage burned on the marble -

- which I guess tells you more than you really need to know about Quin's taste in decoration, that he would have his bedroom floored with marble. Black Italian marble, to be precise, veined with red and silver. With a hypocaust beneath, because he said the British climate wasn't fair on such a rock. It needed to be kept warm, he said, we owed it that much. Like the legionaries on the Wall, he said, it had come too far and lost too much to be treated cavalier now.

That it kept his feet warm also as he padded barefoot around the flat was immaterial, beneath his notice. To have mentioned it would have been beneath contempt.

That he'd had small trouble in inveigling us into laying the floor for him, heaving slabs of marble like navvies and then crawling all across them with spirit-levels, getting it right, making it perfect - well, that perhaps tells you something that you really do need to know.

Whiplash aerial, racing trim*

Apparently the Westerner's romance with the car is faltering, both sides of the Atlantic. The number of young people with driving licences is dropping fast, as costs and social networking both factor in to their lives.

It's counteracted in the East, of course - but I shall think of myself as a trendsetter none the less.

In other news, if you shred a head of chicory and fold that raw into your fried rice-and-prawns-and-ham-and-mushrooms, then that makes it healthy, 'k? It's a salad. *nods*

Meantime, though, I face calamity. Tonight was the second night I needed to do brutal working 'til the dawn, as I'm out tomorrow night and Friday I need early bed, in order to be early up etc. Tragically, I am broken of body and headed for bed, absurdly early and the very opposite of late. Maybe I will rise betimes, and achieve phenomenal feats tomorrow...?


* As is traditional, you get extra points for knowing without googling where the subject line comes from.