Comic Cuts — 5 April 2024

Um... where do I start? I had planned to take a couple of days off — just relaxing — because it has been a rough couple of weeks, thanks to the stress of preparing for the Book Fair and then going down with Covid and still having to work through that. Don't get me wrong... I've enjoyed most of what has been going on (the Book Fair especially), but it has been a full-on couple of weeks.

The plan was to wind down after writing last week's column, although that turned into an epic two-parter and we were still working on the Vernor Vinge piece that went live at 5.40 on Friday afternoon. Between shopping, hair cuts and games, I didn't manage to get my feet up on Saturday and I had promised to read someone's book, with an eye to seeing how it could be published, which took up most of Sunday, making a few additions and working out possible prices.

So I thought I'd take Monday off, and I was pottering around when I got a phone call from our landlady saying she wanted to come over on Wednesday. So that meant doing a lot of box shifting that I had promised to do but hadn't quite got around to. I'm now out of the old office and have parked myself up the far end of the living room. It's a sweet spot, right in front of the French windows. I moved in one of my shelves from the office so I have a lot of reference books behind me, and the scanner is still next to me, sitting on a little chest of drawers to my left; I moved a small shelf into the gap between the desk and curtains to the right, just to extend the desk top for various bits and bobs — a tape dispenser, calculator, pair of scissors, a box of rolls of sticky labels, a tiny fluffy lion, a mammoth and a squirrel with a busted ear.

Thanks to the rain (and, frankly not having enough time) we couldn't do any of the gardening, so that will be the next job when I have a chance. Meanwhile, I was thinking that Thursday would be a great opportunity to take a rest day, let my muscles relax and just generally chill.

I have been playing around with a programme called Gimp as an alternative to Photoshop. It's pretty good, and it'll be useful for little jobs that need doing on the laptop — like joining together pages for the column header on this very blog, which is beyond abilities of anything that comes with Microsoft (Photo and Paint are OK for pictures that just require a crop and resize, but nothing more). My first effort was the column header for Wednesday's Misty 2024 Special news.

However, I still need the old PC, so I set that up on Thursday morning and plugged it in and... nothing. There was none of the usual whir and clatter of the hard drive and fan coming to life and I feared the worst. My laptop was still working, but... hang on, the internet was down. I checked the phone, and that, too, was dead. I checked the fuse box and ran around the house with a hair dryer, the easiest thing I could think of to plug into a socket and see if it worked.

At the end of this little experiment I found that the lights downstairs and in my old office worked, the lights upstairs didn't; none of the plug sockets in the whole house worked, except in the old office, which is a converted garage, so it's on a different circuit. At nine I was thankfully able to get through to an electrician and he was able to rearrange his schedule. My laptop had stayed on thanks to the battery, but I wouldn't be able to run it all day, so I relocated to the old office, moving in a chair and using a box as a table.

Some years ago, I had bought some copies of Boy's Cinema from a friend, so I used my sudden free time to index them. Inadvertently, I was taking a day off and doing something I wouldn't normally have time for!

The electrician was here just after mid-day and left six and a half hours later, having worked his way around every plug socket in the house, switching everything off — just when you thought everything was off, there was still something connected, like the microwave, or the extractor hood above the cooker — and checking every one, then switching bits on and trying isolate the problem. We found out where the problem was at around five when he was getting some weird readings from one of the sockets and sending some power through it made it go bang. "Well, that was proper scary," he said in what I thought was quite a calm way.

Cutting to the chase, we got a new plug socket installed and fired up the electrickery (there's one for Catweazle fans) and was able to plug in my PC and fire it up once again, rattle and all. So this (Friday) morning I was able to get out a few orders and catch up with some mail. Overall it hasn't been a bad day — maybe I should count this as my day off?