Gosh! A week-end update!

Well, the experiment of letting the cat out all night to deal with the feline intruder, who, uh, 'scent marked' our backyard with solid matter seems to have been a success given that I was woken at 3am by the screaming & howling of cats. Since then Lyra has been looking much more smug & there's been no sign of the other cat, which has spent the last few days sitting just outside our window, taunting her. Score for the home team, I guess.

The computer has been marginally repaired in that I´ve managed to get the old hard drive in & connected to the new computer - but it doesn´t want to recognise it as a drive, for some reason. I can see it there as ´Disk 0´, but it wont read it, or give it a proper name - like Drive G, or some other snappy title. Also, I´ve had several blue-screens of death today, at seemingly random intervals. 

Truly I have angered the tech-gods. Some of my friends have suggested that I make some tec-equivalent of a blood-sacrifice, perhaps ritually slaughtering motherboards - but I'm determined to see this through with the power of SCIENCE(TM). As such, I think I need to psychoanalyse my PC , to see if it feels neglected & abandoned by its parents and get down to the underlying cause of its twitchy behaviour.  Either that, or exorcism.

Aside from that, I've just had 2 unexpected phone calls. Firstly I've been asked to come to an intake interview for an intensive Dutch course next Thursday, which is good. I've decided that I'm going to go spend some holidays & money on a week-long course to really hammer away at the language, followed by some longer-term conversational courses, but there's quite a waiting list for them, so the fact that they're talking to me is a good sign. 

Also - and vastly more importantly - I've had a call from Alex, whose all alone in Amsterdam, his wife having gone to the UK for the last few days. As he was bored, he phoned me up to see if I wanted to do something this weekened. Oddly, as my wife is ALSO away in the UK, it seems as though alcohol, board-games & possibly either Dr Who and./or the EuroVision song-contest might be in the near future...!

S