We're going to get coffee. You stay here, and if anything happens--to you--we'll be out getting coffee.

Fedward and I were supposed to have breakfast--and by "breakfast" I mean food eaten in the general neighborhood of noon--so I called him a couple of times around 11 and he kept not answering. I left messages, and he kept not calling back. So I left another message saying that if he was planning on calling back, he should call my cell; and I walked to the post office to mail a package.

Starving, I stopped on the way back to get some coffee and a muffin. Then I stopped to commission a ring from my friend S., the metalsmith. She and I chatted about her business and the plan she doesn't really have. By the time I got home, I'd killed a perfectly good hour. Still no Fedward.

We finally ended going to eat around 2, which means we went to Luna, because Luna serves breakfast all day. (Luna is also the place that serves the best tomato soup in the whole world. I will accept no argument on this point.) Today's soundtrack at Luna in Shirlington was what I called "Worst of the 80s." I'm not kidding. Every so often we'd stop talking to listen to the beginning of a new song, which I could identify within three seconds. This includes a lot of songs I hadn't thought about since their initial heydays. There were a couple of songs we both remembered, but couldn't identify the band. I said I'd do a web search on the lyrics, but... yeah, right.

We talked about pop culture for a while, and eventually we determined that we'd both be a lot smarter if we hadn't retained so much data on one-hit wonders and bands that MTV made successful. (Fedward has the additional problem of a nearly encyclopedic treasury of Simpsons quotes. I've missed a lot of Simpsons, so mine would just about fill a pamphlet.)

The main event of the day was installing a phone jack in my living room, which was all done by 5. After that, there was slack and teevee watching, and then I offered to make dinner. After much discussion of the possibilities and a thorough investigation of what was in the larder, I made a fritatta with ham, shallots, potatoes, grape tomatoes, portobello mushrooms and swiss cheese. That sounds like a lot of ingredients, but it was really quite tasty

I mention this because we ate it in the dining room, which gave Fedward the opportunity to mock me for the box that contains a computer that I never sent back to the manufacturer. I'd been using it as a plant stand. He decided that it would be a good idea to open the box, just to see if the thing would work.

A couple of hours later he finished installing Windows 2000 on the "dead" box. Who knows what the problem was before, it works now. We named it Lazarus, and now I have an extra computer on my hands. It will probably end up as a firewall/web server, but that might entail difficulties like wiring the house for ethernet.

I don't want to think about that right now, and I'd be willing to bet that you're tired of reading about my Saturday.

before - after