Service Interrution

Goddamn. What a weekend. Busy busy busy. Some good busy, some tiring busy, some downright cranky busy.

The yard sale was a smashing success. Michael was there for a quite a while and kept Jennifer and I highly entertained. The Wren and F. and Hawkeye got there early, and cleaned us out of the best stuff. F. got the clothes I was hoping she would. We got to meet our two-doors down neighbours, Paul and someone who's name I sadly can't remember. Grace and Ruby and Fiona rolled up in the red wagon to kill us with a little cute. Eric wandered by, joined us for a coffee, and then wouldn't let me charge him less than a dollar for a tiny bluegreen owl. Mae came by, stayed for a nice chat, and thankfully just took the old window I pulled out of the garbage three years ago. The only unwelcome guest was the sun. Nice to have her there at first, but after an hour or so, really, I felt, she'd made her presence known and could have at least stepped back a few feet.

Doesn't help that my sunscreen application was artistic rather than efficient, and now I am the proud owner of a straight thick red line across the top of my chest gouged by a tidy pocket of white.

It was a weekend full of people. Saturday afternoon I ran into Michael again, and we talked about the new loves in our lives - our houses. Picked Grace up to go to see David Sedaris read, where we ran into Ian Roy and got to know him a bit better.

And I nearly passed out. Fuck me, it was hot in there. I'm happy for Collected Works that they got such a big name to come to Ottawa (apparently, they just asked enough times that it happened), but the hot damp heat of one hundred bodies in a small space on a muggy July night is no fun. Sedaris was fucking brilliant though, and Grace told a pirate joke on our way out the door that made him laugh.

The last thing I had on my plate that night was a skype date with CT. Except for the fact that trying to figure out how to work a webcam in the presence of a techie makes me feel like a doddering technophobe,* it was lovely to see him again. Email is nice, phone is okay, but I'm a bigger fan of words and image and sound altogether when it comes to people. We both did a lot of smiling. After one of us got it up to click END,** I most definitely did pass the fuck out.

Sunday? It finished up quite nicely. I ended up going for a walk along the river with Ivan Coyote and her very adorable dog, who then sat in my lap all the way to the airport and back where we missed picking Shelley up by about 5 minutes. But then I got home, and then Shelley got home, and then we snuck a couple beers down to the sidewalk outside bluesfest and listened to some disco and talked about Donna Summers' hair and the possibly gay possible dads smoking up beside their possible daughters, all of whom had teenage-crazy outfits on and made me think of me when I was 16 and wanted to be different.

That afternoon, however, was completely frustrating. My computer broke. I'd been having the blue screen of death off and on for a little while, but it always fixed itself. And then the p stopped working. Or when it was working, worked too much. I couldn't find a virus with either of my anit-virus softwares, but who knows. I'd cleverly set aside the most humid day of the week to move boxes into my lean-to, clean my bathroom, vaccum the floors and use some stinky foamy stuff to clean the cat barf off the hall carpet. So while I waited for the virus scans to scan, I sprayed noxious substances on the tiles in my bathroom and up and down my very warm hallway.*** I coughed and sneezed and sweated.

The Stales guy is going to call me today to let me know how long it's going to take until my comuter is fixed. Till then, my only access is at work, so the osts may be fewer and further between than normal. Pppppppppppppppplease to bear with me.

*How was I smart enough to mute the skype volume but not smart enough to remember I'd done it?
**Okay, skype people, could you maybe make that process a little less unfriendly? A big red downturned phone with the word END underneath it is not a nice way to finish off an otherwise lovely conversation.
***Just so you know, usually I use various combinations of Borax, baking soda, vinegar, rubbing alcohol and elbow grease to clean my house. You know what's a shitty choice? Throwing out the noxious cleaning chemicals you bought for some unknown reason, since that shit has always made you cough and sneeze, or using them up so as not to be wasteful. After yesterday's experiment, I would recommend just throwing them out.