A DAY IN THE LIFE... libraries, printers and fishtanks

Thank you to everyone who has been so kind to me over the past week or so. Your messages of support mean a lot to me. I am out of bed and doing stuff today. In fact this is the first day that I have not gone back to bed during the day for about three weeks. I am not cured, and indeed if I am going to be honest about it, I never will be. But these are diseases I will die with, not necessarily die of, and I have no intention of doing either just yet.

The people from the printer company came and took away the colour printer today. We have agreed to extend our lease period to pay off what we owe them, and to take another, smaller machine in the interim. However when the two geezers (and believe me they were geezers) turned up this morning at the unholy hour of half past ten, they tried to deliver another unholy monstrosity which was just as big (bulkwise) as the bloody thing we have been trying to get rid of. We told them to take it away, and - amidst a little bit of confusion which threatened to border on aggro at one point - they did.

It was not their fault. These were the "hewers of wood and drawers of water" who's job is to do or die rather than reason why. But we persuaded them that we wouldn't accept the bloody thing, and eventually they took it away.

I have no regrets about the CFZ renouncing the printer. We couldn't afford it and we probably shouldn't have had it in the first place. It cost a bloody fortune and I never wanted to run a print shop anyway. The printer has been replaced by the rack of two 48in tanks which we acquired on freecycle the other day, and as they are only about 1/3 as wide as the monstrous printer (which never worked properly and cost a bomb) and my study is now considerably more spacious.

You will notice that I refer to it as `my study` when for the last four years it has been the CFZ Office. Well since Mark left in September 2007 I have been planning vaguely to reclaim the space for myself. Corinna either works in the Dining Room or on her own PC in the corner of our bedroom, and Graham and Oll work in their rooms, so the only person who uses the other PC in here is Richard, and as we lived together for nearly ten years, I am quite happy to share my study with him when he is here.

Until a few days ago, the majority of the CFZ Library was crammed onto the shelves here, instead of being - um - in the CFZ library up in the museum. I have just done a radical pruning of the books in here to make room for my breeding tanks, and am trying to keep only the books that I use - if not daily - on a month to month basis, like the bound copies of Fortean Times, ther Collins field guides, Heuvelmans, and my books on fish, invertebrates and ecology. The books on dragons, bigfoot, and other esoteric subjects, which visiting researchers will need to consult, are up in the museum, awaiting a visit by Comrade Muirhead, the CFZ Librarian, who will try and make some semblance of sense of the whole goddamn mess.

Finally, if you have not done so already, check out spotify (http://www.spotify.com/) - it will change the way that you listen to music forever. I have just discovered that Lon and Derrek Van Eaton who made one album for Apple Records in about 1970 and another one for A&M a few years later before disappearing in a cloud of indifference, reformed and made another album about ten years ago, and I am presently lifetening to it - PERFECTLY LEGALLY - for free. I think that my days of illegal downloading are long gone...