Don't ask me why, but I spent an age downloading Quicktime, then a trailer, then rebooting my machine after the crash, then downloading the trailer again. Just to see Bennifer in a stupid romantic comedy. Why, oh lord, why?

In fact it was an evening of computer misery. Five times I endeavoured to make a CD, and lo, five times I failed. It's very frustrating and I have given up. I hope that the intended recipient will forgive me.

It's getting to me now. After three (four?) years of trekking through the Glen of the Downs road improvement scheme, watching the yellow waistcoated gentlemen and ladies beavering away, working together for a brighter tomorrow, I am feeling the swelling of frustration in my chest. It's. So. Close. It's all so nearly finished! Every day I look and say things like If they just clear that pile of mud away and lay those pipes, they'll be done! But no. Finished they are not. Complete your training you must.

There are of course other massive roadworks on my route to and from work, but they seem to be moving much quicker. But then those ones are mostly new bits of road, not enhanced existing routes.

Our handyman came back with the fixed pump. It appears that the tank feeding the pump ran dry and there was an airlock in the pump and therefore it couldn't automatically cut off and hence the smoke and the burning and the panic. Sort of my fault and sort of not. The pump is now on a timer which should stop it from draining it's tank and I have been shown how to bleed it should the airlock situation arise again. Fifty Euro please.

Which is very cheap, don't get me wrong. Just avoidable -- you know?

Tomorrow I am meeting some of my online acquaintances. Some I have met before, some I haven't. It's kind of an arbitrary thing this internet association. We post to the same forum/bulletin board. So when we are in real life proximity, we get together. Why this feels more artificial than say, working together, or having mutual friends, I don't know. But it does. This won't stop me from having dinner with these people and entering into a frank exchange of views (after a couple of drinks that is).

And then on to Connemara. Where the wild things are.

We're going to stay on an island owned by friends of friends. It used to belong to some noteworthy person (Synge? St. John Gogarty?) and oddly enough I was there in 1982. It was just after I'd left school and I went with my sister and her family and some of their friends. I remember it being nice, but I was a surly teenager then, angst ridden and wondering what the future held, so I probably didn't appreciate it. It has electricity now. Luxury.

I had to come home early as I had an interview for college. Electrical engineering. So I went from total rural living to physics questions in the space of twenty-four hours. I hadn't a hope of getting a place anyway (crap grades), but the juxtaposition of the two made it ridiculous in my mind so I didn't even try.

Slacker.