Ominous Clunking

I haven't had time to blog recently. A lot of last week was spent under my quilt sweating out the flu.(Do people still call them continental quilts?) Apparently the epidemic is now eleven weeks old and most epidemics run for twelve weeks. I got the tail end and so did the kids but we're all out of our sick beds now. I went straight from bed to translation booth for a conference on fish which was mildly interesting. Unfortunately my voice sounded as if I had scales on the inside of my throat. Then home to catch up on some work that had been accumulating on the computer. Some weeks ago one of my angelic children inserted something metallic into the CD-drive of my i-mac. This has happened before and just means I can't use the CD-drive until said object is removed. However, this weekend the computer started making some extremely ominous clunking, grinding, gnashing sounds and slooooowed down considerably. So I rushed it in to work this morning where the kind technician performed the extraction (a 20 cent coin). Greatly relieved I brought it home this evening. Ah, yes, home. Home had in the space of a day and a surprise visit from the builders become a pathetic shell. Two walls pulled down, all the furniture stuffed away in unlikely places, no telly, dust everywhere and wet plaster on the walls. It's going to be like this for at least six weeks. The children wandered around the "site" asking "where are the sofas, where can we sit down?" Oh well, I thought, we may not have a living room but at least there'll be no distractions and I'll be able to get on top of that backlog of work this evening. So I turned my precious i-mac on and clunk, click, grind, glink. It looks as if, just like the builders, the noise is here for the foreseeable future. Category: life