Update

The butterfly is very small and light; this has the side-benefit of making the fonts on the behemoth look enormous. It's now well loaded with applications; I failed utterly to extricate the MSOffice CD from its case, so I used my own CD and the magic number off the new one. Meanwhile, it looks as though Behemoth is settling in well to its new life as a home desktop, though it might need a booster seat to get the screen to optimum viewing angle. I could hardly have timed the departure of the old desktop better if I'd tried; I'm not sure I could have coped with a four-computer household.

The plumber must have been in on Monday, because I discovered that the hot water in the bathroom sink had been shut off. The cold water under the kitchen sink is still leaking steadily; it's possible that the bathroom leak has been fixed, but I can still see daylight through the overflow pipe.

Tuesday

A maintenance guy turned up this morning while I was having breakfast in my bathrobe. (It was not by normal standards indecently early, but I keep funny hours.) He inspected the underneath of the bathroom sink, and I pointed out the daylight-passing feature. I shone a powerful flashlight at it, conceded that I needed a new one, talked to someone on his walkie-talkie, and disappeared, saying he'd be back. He hadn't come back by the time I left for work, and when I got back tonight there was no sign he ever did; the flashlight was still on the floor in front of the sink.

I've been shuffling files around from computer to computer and confusing myself thoroughly; things ended up all over the place after the disk crash in the summer, and I never bothered loading all the work files back onto the big laptop. The general idea, now I have an official work machine, is to keep the work stuff mainly on that and the fun stuff -- writing, photos, games -- on the big one. Of course, the little one is much nicer to use in the recliner. In any case, either one can now plug into the USB hub and use the printer, scanner, keyboard and mouse, and the big hard drive, and share the printer with the other one.