This was me for the last couple of days…

… see what I mean about Vista being a bugger?

But… GO FASTER STRIPES!

Happy Birthday To Me!
I am thirty three!
But I only have one candle…
I’m asthmatic, you see!

(I wouldn’t have the puff for a full set of candles… geddit? Never mind…)

Technically, this should have been posted yesterday. On my actual birthday. Except for the slight technical difficulty that I was currently between computers.

Yes, Pewari’s Prattle is now brought to you by a brand new and shiny computer with a graphics card that has go faster stripes (yay, can play Oblivion at last!) and with Vista as its operating system.

The technical difficulty? Vista is a right bugger to install things on. I managed to cock up the installation of at least 8 programs, all of them vital – partly because I didn’t realise about running as an administrator, partly because several of them weren’t properly Vista compatible and partly because – hey it’s Microsoft, you expect things to go smoothly?

It was particularly fraught and rushed, because Akra needed my old laptop for work today (his laptop has had a broken screen for a long while now, so the situation was desperate), but we got there in the end – with quite a lot of fudging, hacking and dubious voodoo practices to get the damn programs to run and give me back my data. All in all, a nice stress-free and calm birthday!

But hey – go faster stripes!

I know, I know – it’s not very old. In fact, when I bought it, I blogged about it – THAT’S how not very old this AEG washer dryer is. So much for buying a better brand so that it would last longer.

I knew it was sickening for something a few weeks ago – I’ve previously mentioned the squeeky drum-slipping noise it’s been making randomly of late. Then the day before yesterday it decided not to fill with water properly, then skip a few cycles along the way – but that fault sorted itself out and disappeared as quickly as it came.

Today though, it got switched on and tripped out all our electrics. Not a good start to the day. Akra had a good look at it and tripped out the electrics some more. Six times more, to be precise.

So, we’ve booked a repair for Tuesday morning. I just hope the washing mountains don’t take over the house by then and that it doesn’t break the bank.

My apologies. I have been somewhat distracted over the last couple of days, hence the lack of blog posts.

The reason for the distraction? The discovery and working through the archives of the web comic: The Order of the Stick.

If you’ve ever played any Dungeons & Dragons games, you’ll find these hilariously funny (be warned, you could spend a good few hours of your life working your way through the archives). If you haven’t, you’ll look at me strangely and seriously wonder about the state of my sense of humour.

So no change there then.