The clear-out of our house proceeds. On Wednesday two guys from the YMCA and their transit van arrived to remove surplus standalone shelves, computer seats and a clothes stacker. They wouldn't take our two tables (actually the main reason we had contacted them) on the grounds they were too old and decrepit (the tables).
In the afternoon we disassembled them and dropped the tables off at the dump.
Today a pleasant chap called Steve responded to our small-ad in The Andover Advertiser and brought his van around. By 9.30 a.m. we had seen the last of our American Basketball Hoop and Stand, which we had in fact never assembled. We have been lugging it around since we bought it in Vienna, Virginia in 2002.
The post brought an update from our solicitor. Negotiations have started to acquire our new property in the Cathedral city of Wells, but we have still not managed to exchange contracts on our current property: delays in the chain to be sorted hopefully any day now.
A small achievement: Clare has moved her laptop upstairs where she is working on her OU course - currently an essay on Cleopatra since you ask. I ordered a WiFi USB dongle from Amazon at the low price of £6.50. It arrived this morning and installation was just as trouble-free as the Amazon comments had suggested. Brilliant! Clare is now networked.
The said machine, a Toshiba laptop, was bought on a budget after we returned from the States in 2003: having left Cable & Wireless Global in its slide into bankrupcy, I need to restart my Interweave Consulting business. It still just about works six years later although it has a disk capacity of only 18 GB and its real memory can't cope with the latest XP load without spending half its life paging. The letter "L" on the keyboard is also broken.
Normally I would put it out of its misery, but this WiFi dongle has given the Toshiba a new untethered mode and as it continues to do the job - just! - it will be permitted to live a while longer yet.
