Tuesday 21 March 2000

Pic of the day: Just thought you might want to see me again. Boy do I have a long neck. (And it doesn't come from long time necking either.)

There is an old Norse myth about how a giant had stolen Thor's hammer, Mjolnir. (These giants, the Jotnir, were personified chaos forces and worthy opponents of the gods. Well, more or less.) To get the hammer back, the gods would have to give him Freya, the goddess of love. This did not go down well with Freya, of course. So Loki, the trickster god, convinced Thor to dress up as Freya and go to Utgard (the world outside the world, where the giants lived). By means of more smooth talking, Loki managed to fool the giants until in the end, the hammer was brought in. "Then laughed the heart in Thor's chest, when he felt his hammer." You can probably guess what became of the giants. But that is not my story today.

IT IS BACK! The slow-moving retail chain has finally managed to fix my Toshiba portable. As I would have done, much faster, and cheaper, if I had been aware that boot disks must be made on the same and not on a competing brand. Ack. Sloppiness doesn't pay. Anyway, it is back, and my heart is laughing to once again wield my weapon of choice. Once again the full force of my creativity is unleashed upon an unsuspecting world! MUAHAHA! Ahem. Anyway, thought you would want to know. I intend to reply to the mails I never got on my job machine, but I may still need some sleep first.

Seeing as it was an idiotic thing in the first place, the repairman continued to treat me like an idiot. He begged me to clean out the entire machine and reinstall from the restore disk, which isn't all that bad an idea. Then he went into great detail about how to reinstall e-mail on the machine afterwards, as if I had not already added two ISPs to the machine before he even saw it. When he wanted my username and password so he could do it for me, I politely put my foot down. Just because I do one stupid thing (not keep a separate boot disk for every machine) does not mean that I am through and through stupid and utterly clueless in all things that has anything to do with computers. Then again, this is no doubt the same image that I project to my coworkers. Then again, they are clueless... Or so they say.

The rest of the day - and evening - and some of the night - was quite a bit better, as the wonderful SuperWoman treated me to a dinner and a movie. The dinner was spaghetti with a good thick sauce and creme fresh, or whatever it is spelled. Creme fraiche? Anyway, it was good. She certainly knows by now that I love pasta. Then again, she also knows that I love her, and would have eaten chickens for her sake if necessary. Not without grumbling, mind you, but I would have done it. Luckily, it did not go that far.

After some relaxing and after-dinner snack-eating, we were off to see The Insider. The movie, that is. This went on to half an hour before midnight, after which she drove me home. (Yeah, so we reversed all gender roles, so what? Those are only immutable if you try to put body parts in places only to find that neither the body parts nor the places are there, and we did most definitely not.) Of course, being up and about after midnight is not quite the same now that I wake up at 6 in the morning. Ack.

The Insider is a typical SuperWoman film. So imagine my surprise when the intro credits were rolling across the screen and she whispered to me urgently: "Get up! It's the wrong film!" "Huh?" I replied. "Then what film is this?" "Let's just get out!" I was reluctant to move and looked strangely at her, but she started to push at me and so we went to the door, silently. She explained the guy who guarded the door, "we've come in the wrong theater. We should see The Insider." Now there was a compact majority of strange looks. "This is The Insider" he said. "Oh." And we went back to our seats.

"Why didn't you tell me that it was the right film?" she asked as we were driving home. "Well, it said so on the screen. THE INSIDER. And the names of the guy you had already mentioned." -the one who had fattened himself 20 kg. I can't say I would have known him anyway. Turns out my quasi date had been distracted just as the film began, and when she saw at the intro credits, she saw unfamiliar names and a scene from the Middle East, and decided it was the wrong film. She laughed so hard I was afraid she would not be able to stay on the road.

Well, an evening with SuperWoman is always interesting. But we already knew that. If I could spend every day with her, this diary would be far more interesting. If it was written at all, which I seriously doubt.