I think it's Bertie Wooster who remarks that when things are going swimmingly, there's always some blighter with a piece of lead pipe hiding round the next corner.
Yesterday morning I struggled downstairs after the late night corrections, made tea and went over to the computer to check the BBC news, a very normal thing to do . For some reason - I suppose I must have had one at the time - I decided to see if I could change the short name of my home file on the mac from "Ed" to "Home".
There didn't seem an obvious way to do this, so I opened "Get Info" and typed the new name in after erasing the old one. This must have taken all of ten seconds.
Immediately the computer began to disintegrate - at least as far as the applications on the desktop were concerned. In a few moments the screen looked as though it had just come out of the box, and was breathing Saltspring air for the first time.
J. left for school amid a cloud of gloom and doom, (but I do love it when I do something cretinously stupid and she doesn't even breath a word of recrimination. You know it's serious when this happens), and ten minutes later she phoned from the bottom of Ganges Hill to say that the car had quit and she was abandoning it and proceeding on foot.
The car is still at Wolfgang's, sulking, but at least our lovely iMac is back from allthingsmac expert Brian Smallshaw's dining table after two and a half long hours of patiently transferring all my files back from some real but totally inaccessible account called "Home" to the original account "Ed".
Sometime in the middle of the afternoon a dozen international students from GISS arrived in a school bus to visit a typical Saltspring craftsman and quiz him about his life. I'd forgotten that they were coming, and I've no idea what this pleasant assortment of Japanese, plus students from Colombia, Turkey, Korea (I think) France and Germany, made of the aged gent in the apron rabbiting (or do woodworkers "rabbet"?) on about lying presses and sewing frames and signatures. Let alone the state of the shop after a busy few days, which must have looked like I'd been running the dust extractor in reverse.
I did apologise for the powerful lacquer smell, but some of them seemed to quite like it, and inhaled appreciatively.
Several of them asked questions, some were difficult to answer. "What did I want to do with the rest of my life?", for instance. Or "Why did you come to Saltspring?" They didn't ask nice easy things like "Why did you use a mortice and tenon joint rather than a biscuit?" or "What is that machine for?"
Well, there's one more day before we have to load up the Toyota with bookbinding stuff and haul it off to Vancouver for the Wayzgoose on Saturday (at the Vancouver Public Library, lower level, 10-4. Admission free). What is a Wayzgoose? More on this tomorrow.