WAYLAID

"Friends, I have lost a day." ("Amici, diem perdidi")
Titus Vesperianus AD 41-81 from "Suetonius, Titus" sec 8

There are two big time-wasters in my apartment. One culprit is the T.V., the other is the computer. Actually the T.V. is exempt from this particular situation because I rarely watch it except for the late night news and whatever follows after. Before I went away I had the channels cut down to the minumum and now my favorite programs aren't available to me so I don't often spend time glued to the tube. Besides, yesterday I screwed up the colour and sound and as I am technologically challenged -- and the TV is an oldie -- I had to waste time trying to figure out how to fix it. As well, I do waste a lot of time on the computer when I could be doing other things (like writing!). And today was another one of those days when the computer was not going to co-operate with me.

Last week I spent three days trying to figure out why the darn thing kept crashing and was operating slow as a turtle. The new Norton Virus Scan I'd installed before leaving for my holidays was not working, my FAX isn't set up right and I'd lost a whole lot of music I'd saved on my Real Player. I eventually did a free on-line scan and found out there were a lot of infected files and likely one of them is the culprit that is blocking Norton from operating properly. So today my friend MJ and her husband, who is a computer techie, came over to try and fix the problem. Thank god for friends like him, because he spent hours on my computer although he was unable to get to the source of the trouble and will have to come back again to work on it some more. Meanwhile of course I wasn't able to do any writing today.

Earlier in the morning, I went for lunch with my grad class ladies, our monthly get-together. Then I spent the afternoon having a very pleasant visit with MJ (she's the friend who lives part time in London who I visited when I was there) while B. worked on the errant machine. We walked up the Drive together to look at the shops, stopped for an iced coffee, walked home again. When we got back some time later, Mr. Techie was still trying to sort out the damn computer. He has endless patience with such things. He worked on it for almost 7 hours!

After they left I just frittered away the rest of the evening until I eventually decided I better look at my notes for the novel because I have to start a new chapter and had no idea where to begin. That done, I proceeded to do cross-words (another of my procrastination activities), watched the late news (always a downer) and here I am, it's after one a.m. and it's bedtime.
I've told myself that I will not be allowed to go to the beach tomorrow unless I get some writing done first. So that means getting up at a respectable time and gluing myself to the keyboard. Hopefully this delinquent machine will co-operate.

"What is pleasanter than the tie of host and guest?" Aeschylus 525-456 BC