Varnishvarnishvarnishvarnish. Paintpaintpaintpaintpaint. Sandsandsandsandsandsand. All to the sound of next door's kitchen being reconstructed using a massive bandsaw/drill of some kind. At least I've finished the bathroom cupboard and can fill it with my vast collection of shampoos, conditioners, moisturising lotion, hair removal products, bubble bath, soap, cotton wool, makeup, bathroom cleaning products and beauty implements. Not forgetting the plunger. At present it's all piled up on the bedroom floor, a very exciting trip hazard.

Still haven't started on the downstairs. I'll save that for Sunday. Argh, it's almost Friday, how did that happen? Not to mention it's almost March. And still I haven't got the final installment of the insurance money so I can't get Dougie booked in to do the floor.

Spring! Don't you just love it!

Interesting bulbs are springing up in the front garden, but there's no sign in the back of any of the daffodils I seem to remember planting there. Maybe the birds and hedgehogs ate them.

Something weird: I've always intended this site as a private one -- it's just for family and friends, to quench their curiosity about where I live etc. So I haven't sent the address to be included on any search engines or anything (I did that with Pinky's website by the way -- if you type "Pinky Agnew" in to a search site like www.google.com her site comes up first). I like to keep track of who's looking though, so on the first page there's a little coloured graphic in the bottom left-hand corner that links to a tracking service. It can tell me what time zone people are in, what operating system their computer uses (someone's looked at my site on a Windows 16-bit system, bless them!), all kinds of useless information. Also it has a referral section that tells you how they got there -- mostly it's "unknown" or "bookmark" but there was one caught my eye:

http://www.google.com/search?q=hockadilly

So I went to google and did a search, and voila, there were a few hits. Some were things I'd written on a discussion forum thing giving a hockadilly.co.uk email address, but one was from a journal I've got listed in my links page. The guy who does this journal -- a great writer -- had listed all the referrals for his site, and one of them was mine. I don't know why I found this unsettling -- he had hundreds of sites listed -- but I did. And then I clicked on and discovered that whoever had done a search on Hockadilly did it from this office on 7 February just after midnight and was on my site for four minutes and 1 second. I was paranoid for five seconds then I realised ... duh, it was ME.

So ... the moral of the story is, even when you try to keep your site private, it's not any more than your house is. It's right out there on the street, anyone can look in the windows. And if you've pasted your diary on the windows ... well they're going to read it. But I'm enjoying writing this and I know a few people are enjoying reading it so I'll carry on till I get sick of it.

More geek news: Mum and John are learning to use a computer because Janos is giving them his old one when he upgrades. They'll be wired! They'll be surfing! Run! Hide!