To go for the gold, or suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous digital misfortune�

With Diaryland offline for the last two days, I felt incredibly disconnected from my cyberworld. Interestingly enough, the chatroom was still working, but that is not the same. It was full of Diarylanders bemoaning their loss, wandering around aimlessly, displaying all the classic symptoms of withdrawal. Actually, I thought Andrew�s updates were very funny: �Everything should be up and running in an hour.� �Oops, sorry folks, we�ve crashed again!� Ah well, it�s all over until the next time.

There are eight compost buckets sitting on my back deck, waiting to be emptied into the composter, and none on my kitchen counter. The kitchen waste has been going directly into the garbage for the past few days, and I now appreciate how much hefting we save the garbageman because of our ecological practice. I also now know why my neighbours have bags and bags of garbage on the curb every Wednesday morning, and we have one. I cannot urge my readers enough to get into the habit of composting their kitchen waste. As for myself, I promise that today I will empty those buckets on my deck so that I can go back to composting my own.

You will all be pleased to know that Little Princess has a new boyfriend, the guitarist in her band, a very nice young man with whom she has been friends for quite a while now, even though he is a business student at Bushop�s. He sings in the choir (and actually has a rather nice voice) and has been here several times this week for supper. In his own blog he has expressed a distaste for vegetarian food, but then in the same breath said he would eat Little Princess� mom�s cooking any day. How�s that for an endorsement?

She�s been going through some angst with the ex-boyfriend though. He suddenly realized that he gave up an attractive and desirable commodity when she started dating this other guy so soon after their breakup, and has sent her hurtful emails and instant messages to that effect. Here is where I roll my eyes. He broke up with her, remember? Oy.

Hubby and I went to a harpsichord concert last night, one of our colleagues playing a programme of diverse music for that instrument. He has a brand-new harpsichord, made by a well-known instrument maker in Montreal, equipped with a jeu de boeuf, which is a special stop made from leather. It gives the harpsichord a warmer sound, fuller in fact, and appeared when the forte-piano started becoming popular in the 1700s and musicians were turning away from the plucked strings for the hammered ones. This innovation obviously wasn�t enough to keep keyboardists playing the harpsichord, since the forte-piano more or less took over as the instrument du jour, but the stop does produce an interesting sound. Jean-Yves used it in one piece last night, and I thought it was lovely. It really does make the harpsichord sound fuller, instead of that skinny, tinkling sound we are so used to.

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