I wanna get some reviews done in the morning so what happens? Diaryland keeps seizing up. A lot. So I go grrr and go read the paper for a while. Then I think, hey, haven't updated my blog for a few days... only to find that pitas is suffering from the same thing as diaryland. So I go grrr some more.

I'm checking my account balance over the phone every hour starting 10am. I want to know ASAP when the money comes through so I can go up to K street and get a bank cheque to put in H's account. It gets to about 2pm and there's still nothing, so to save time I decide to go up to K street anyway and sit on a bench near my bank's branch and read my book, and keep checking the account...

H rings around 3pm. I tell him still nothing, but I'll keep checking. He panics some, saying his credit card payments come out of his account tomorrow, he's aleady about $400 overdrawn, and his bank's branch closes at 4pm. I start to panic, too, but I keep a lid on it for his sake.

Gets to 5pm and there's still nothing in my account (other than the piddling $6.72 that's keeping the account open) and I decide there's no point hanging around on K street any more, and it's getting cold, so I may as well go home.

'Bout 20 minutes later H rings again. I tell him I'm going to check the account first thing in the morning and if it's not in, ring the lenders and ask them what the hell is going on. He needs a favour - to use my puter to send some emails. This is not the slightest bit convenient for me but I don't say so because this is not a good time to let him down. He says he's at the far end of K street (the industrial end) and I say something like, "I guess it would suit you to hang a left into Emma St..." so we agree to meet on the corner of K and Emma.

I wait about ten minutes at the corner and don't see him, so I ring back. He says he's just turning into S street. So I say I'll meet him at the corner of S and Emma, which is a block further west.

I can see his van ahead. He's in the clearway with his hazard lights flashing. I'm walking as fast as I can.

I'm still half a block away when he takes off up Emma. I figure he's going around the block. I get to the corner of S and Emma and wait, but he doesn't reappear. Ring again.

So he finally turns up and I hop in and say it isn't his fault but I'm in an extraordinarily bad mood and apt to be snippy, so to please watch what he says.

We get here, I dash for the loo. I've muttered that he can't go in my room til I fix a few things up (meaning I have to close all the diaryland-related windows I had open, because I'm sorry to say I don't trust him not to stickybeak) so he sits in the lounge room.

Swearing muchly I close down my session, reboot, then delete the "recent" list of documents from the start menu. Reopen IE, dial in, help a little by preloading his webmail login screen.

So then he gets to work and I sit on the bed and do various little meaningless things like clip my toenails and sort through the crap in my wallet. Meantimes he's smashing away at my keyboard so after a while I ask him to be more gentle with it, reminding him it's 4 years old and I don't want to have to fork out for a replacement if I can avoid it.

Ninety minutes later he's finally finished.

He goes to the bathroom and I commandeer the last open window to load my home page so I can check something.

For a moment I think I've lost my mind because Alt+Home doesn't seem to be the right hotkey combo.

"Hey, mate!" I yell out, "Did you reset my home page?"

He yells back that he doesn't think so. I check the options and find, yes indeed, this ugly foreign page is now my new home page. I swear a lot and try to browse to my real home page (a local .htm document) so I can reset it as the default, except it no longer exists.

Sonofabitch.

So when he comes back I say that in future he's gonna have to tell me where he's going to go and I'm going to be putting my firewall on highest alert, coz one of the pages he went to deleted my local home page, and did lord knows what else... And in future he ain't gonna be going to any dodgy sites on my computer, tyvm.

Gave him a chocolate-marshmallow biscuit to sweeten the blow (I bought them specially for him) and said he was going to have to leave me in peace with my puter, coz I was stressed and pissed off over the money, just like him, and now my puter needed some serious antiviral maintenance to make sure it didn't have klez or any such shit.

So he left.

Fortunately my last full backup was on the 4th, so my local home page only needed a little editing to bring it back up to par.

Norton didn't find anything, but AdAware found no less than 11 nasties. Eleven!! Shit almighty.