It's taken about a week for the house to get back to normal. It hasn't fully, because someone walked into a glass door and we haven't replaced the glass yet, but all the other tidying up and putting the furniture back where it should be and so on (and cleaning the incredibly sticky stuff off the floor -- white wine, I think (hope)) happened very slowly. In fact, now that I think about it, we've really only done the minimum to restore the normal workings of the house. There's still a lot of the party light up and some furniture has stayed put. Hmm. Inertia is proving a more potent force than I expected.

One of the reasons that the play room hasn't been re-filled with all the toys and such, is that it looks so big and clean now that it's empty. This is the room that's supposed to be a kitchen one day, and I can see Sally thinking that now that the room is empty, why not get the builders in. It's not a completely mad idea, but I am nervous about spending the money and all the guff and blather that will accompany the project.

However, we must keep moving forward...

We had tree surgeons in. There was one huge pine tree that had split into three trunks about twenty five feet up and one of them had already come down, so we wanted to pre-empt the others. That and three others had to go -- two for safety and two to open out the garden a bit. Paddy was very excited and interested and they obviously didn't mind as they made him a little chair out of one of the stumps. I'm looking forward to some wood chopping and am only a little sad about the birch tree; it's bark is so pretty.

I was transferring over my latest CD purchases to my MP3 player and I spent a good fifteen or twenty minutes trying to work out why it wasn't working. I tried unplugging, resetting, removing conflicting applications -- all sorts of things. Turns out it was full! Idiot. I removed some large audio books and some classical music that came on the player that I would never have listened to anyway. 7050 tracks. 26.5GB. Who'd've thunk it.

And staying on the audio theme, I had managed to fry my computer speakers by plugging something into the wrong something else. A bit of a pity really, but there you go. However, a couple of weeks I'd dithered over buying new speakers in the local computer shop, but I'd been too mean frugal to fork over 140 euro for them. However! Last Saturday they were reduced to 70! Yay! And they're great! Worth every exclamation mark!

I also purchased recently a DVD of Stop Making Sense and watching it with the new speakers cranked up to eleven, was just great.

Technology can make you happy.