Good Friday

Good Friday is good because it's Friday, naturally, but actually it's giving me enough pleasant surprises that I feel the need to construct an Anti-Rant List. Pollyanna, that's me.

• My Cherished Institution randomly, and without warning or fanfare, doubled its bandwidth this week. My vague sense of "gosh, things are faster, all the students must be bunking" resolved itself this morning when I found the cheery "oh, by the way, we doubled our bandwidth" email in my inbox. This is unlikely enough that it may actually herald the apocalypse (and I have to say, finally acquiring home ADSL was probably at least the Second Horseman), but fundamentally I don't care.
• Book Club last night was, as usual, pleasantly drunken and magpie-chattery, but my usual complete insecurity about my book choice resolved itself, after a spirited wrangle involving some definitive flag-planting, into a group decision to acquire 8 out of my 9 choices, the 9th being rejected because someone owned it already. I feel validated. Also, totally zombified on too much wine and lack of sleep.
• Also, the book club loves the Hobbit, who was a total affection-slut all evening, and I had to shake everyone down when they left to make sure no-one had stashed him in a book bag. In even better news, neither the SPCA nor Gumtree has any evidence of someone mourning his loss. Maybe I will get to keep him.
• Book club has also left me with the prospect of the new Lee Child, the new Margaret Atwood sf (even if she refuses to call it sf), Lev Grossman's The Magicians, which is apparently the gritty postmodern take on the HP/Narnia utopianness, a frothy Alexander McCall Smith romp about linguistics professors, and Tuesdays with Morrie, which about five separate people have recommended to me as a particularly good exploration of someone suffering from ALS, the disease my dad has. My shelf of unread books is already about two metres long without that lot, but it's all good.
• I discovered this morning, after bumbling out the house in my usual daze without remembering to blow-dry my hair, that in fact this cut looks better if I don't blow-dry it. The cut was one of those annoying miscommunications with the hairdresser, who seems to have broken 5 years of careful training in order to ignore my dictates about non-layering. Mostly, though, this demonstrates that my blow-drying skills go way beyond "incompetent" into "catastrophic fumbling." I'm OK with this. Life's too short to blow-dry your hair.
• I'm not doing anything this evening! Well, taking the lone rejected book back to the bookshop, paying for them, and visiting my dad. But then I get to veg out in front of the Middleman, and go to bed early in preparation for the weekend's mad socialising (Thai food with jo&stv tomorrow, lunch in Stellenbosch on Sunday for Salty Cracker). Life can hold no more.
• Today's XKCD made me snerkle like a loon, particularly the mouse-over text. Yes, "snerkle like a loon" is my new phrase.