Now we're cooking with gas!

I'd booked the day off work today because my gas supplier was sending an engineer out to fit me a new meter - credit rather than pre-pay - 'sometime between 8am and 8pm', and my mother had arranged for the damp people to pay the flat a visit at 8am.

The damp guy was nice and prompt... unfortunately it hadn't occurred to me that, to fit the vent to the kitchen, he'd have to make a new hole in the wall... using very loud tools... at eight in the morning.

Did I mention the tools were loud? My neighbours probably hate me already.

Once made, the hole was quickly filled with a vent, and the gaps around the edges were filled in to make it nice and snug. All in all, the process took about two hours. And while he was doing that, I was marking out the lounge with masking tape, to see where I could put display cabinets, TV, etc.

I then started to settle in to wait for the gas engineer, half expecting him to turn up at 8pm. As it happens, though, he arrived not that long after the damp guy left. I'd basically had time to determine that my laptop was working better at the flat than it tends to at home (how long will it take for me to refer to the flat as "home" and my parents' place as "my parents' place"?), and I'm thinking it's because I had less plugged in.

More specifically, no USB hub running a couple of other peripherals.

So it looks like it's a power drain issue. See, for whatever reason, I've got this USB hub with its own power supply... which I never plug in. Silly really. Letting a laptop power a whole bunch of USB peripherals is a sure fire way to put too much load on the laptop and thereby reduce and eventually ruin its performance.

Anyway... The engineer came, fitted the new meter (pointing out that there was just under £15 on the meter, which should be credited to me - not the story I got from the gas people when I phoned asking for a new meter!), then checked that the boiler was properly up and running (which took a few attempts). That done, he hurried on to the next job.

I headed out for lunch (KFC, just down the road, as I wasn't in the mood for anything fancy), then did a bit of extra shopping - now the power is on and the fridge is running, I might as well have it refridgerating things - before deciding what to do with the rest of my day off.

I started out on Plan A: Writing... but that didn't work out (my brain wouldn't settle), so then I switched to Plan B: Taking a Bus Trip to Toys'R'Us Watford. In brief (because I'm tired, and want to go to bed now), the trip out there was simple enough, the store was disappointingly short of anything new (Brent Cross seems to have a better selection), and the trip back was complicated by the revelation that I needed to take a different bus for the second part of the journey.