Roundup of the Week So Far

Not really that much to go on with this week. I spent most of it stuck indoors, waiting for either the painter to come and fix the bathroom or for the gas boiler chap to come along and check the boiler for another year.

The painters did not turn up, but the boiler chap did, bright and early, as scheduled. He even checked the smoke alarms - not that he needed to because they did get a good workout recently. Thank you, contract plumbers.

I have a lot of reading to catch up on, before a week today - August 14th, the date of the next Chester readers' meeting. Some Edgar Rice Burroughs to go through, and some Iain M Banks. I have also managed to get in a goodly chunk of Philip K Dick's VALIS and Jeter's sequel to the Blade Runner movie, "The Edge of Human." So I would say that I'll have a choice of material to cover next Saturday.

I have done a lot of backing up this week. I think I could do with getting my hands on one of those 500 Gb flash drives, though - the kind one can slip into one's pocket, rather than an external 500 Gb hard drive. I'd also like to see what else exists on the market in the way of cheap electronic book readers. Particularly ones which support PDF documents, text and some read-only Open Source Writer docs, if possible, but they must have the capacity for expansion - e.g. a SD card, maybe some sort of connection to a flash drive.

I have done a lot of playing with my SuperPoke Pets, too. Maybe too much. A friend of mine was right: it is beginning to feel like a second bloody job maintaining the little buggers all the time.

I'll have to get back onto YM tomorrow, get back to my friends there for a chat. I have missed those chats. I think I may come to depend on those chats in the future, because all of my points of regular contact with local friends have come and gone. I bumped into an ex whom I last saw back in school, 31 years ago. She and I were the same age, in the same year at school. I ... didn't have as many wrinkles. Am I supposed to look that old at this age?

The virgins' blood still works, then ...

I need to do something new. And in this town, that may take a great effort to get people up off their arses and trying something that doesn't involve either working just for money, looking for work, football, fighting or fucking.

Actually assembling a group of people around me may well be one of the hardest things I will ever have to do. At least, in this town. Somebody please tell me of a town where all I have to do is just turn up, say "Hi," and all of a sudden I have a cult of followers. I'd relocate there like a shot. Me with my funny little British accent and all.

And now, to round up tonight's post, some failage.

Relationships

Someone on my f'list, whom I had not heard from for a time, asked what a good relationship looks like.

Naming no names, but I replied in a comment that the key to a relationship was trust.

I'll add something here. It's a line from a movie I'm watching. One character turns to the other and says "You can tell me everything."

And therein lies the key. If you cannot trust your loved one enough to let him or her know all your secrets, nor you know theirs, you won't know what a good relationship feels like.