Thursday 27th November

There's something about the upcoming festivities that means that money is suddenly tight everywhere. And if it wasn't already, then things are bound to happen that mean that money suddenly begins haemorrhaging out of your account.

Last week my laptop gave up the ghost and died. After a long battle with power leads that seemed incapable of being bent more than twelve times without internally snapping (kind of defeating the idea of a portable and, er, moveable contraption), we had finally bought a new lead instead of repairing the old one again. That was all too much and in some kind of strop or statement to the world, the mother board just keeled over and stopped working. Now, I'm not blaming her. I see her point exactly - in fact, I'm a little jealous myself - but you'd think that something of that value and capacity would last more than a measley two years. Two years! So I am currently undergoing a period of mourning and having to endure sharing (((shudder))) Richard's desktop to communicate with the outside world.

Then, on our lovely shiny nearly-new car with electric thingies all over the place, some idiot reversed it into a stop sign. I mean, it's got reversing sensors for goodness sake! How could I they have not missed it? Some people. Tch.

All of which was topped off by a much less expensive, but still very irritating incident when a chid who will remain lifeless nameless decided, during bath time, that it would be a good idea to take all the clean dry towels off the clean dry towel shelves and dump them in the wet dirty bath water then dump them back out again onto the bathroom floor. At the risk of becoming monotonous - why? WHY? That's more hours of work, wringing and drip-drying, and spinning and tumble drying on things that were already clean. Whyyyy?