Today I've bought lots of things. Nothing exciting, mind you, although I have high hopes that I'll win two Jeff Buckley CD's on eBay before the evening's out!

I had to buy a new hoover, you see. My Mum said I should try to mend the hoover that was lurking in the cupboard, so we bought some drivebelts and I fitted one. And when we turned the hoover on it started smoking...! So we went out and I bought a Goblin hoover. It's small and blue. And it only cost £34.95. What more could you want from a hoover? I mean, it sucks up dirt too. Hooray!

Ali was being pedantic and told me I couldn't call it a hoover. But I can't call it a Goblin, that sounds silly. And no-one calls them "vacuum cleaners". I'm calling it a hoover, and that's the end of the matter. :)

I bought other things too. Painkillers, a cheap clip frame to put my signed Teal'c print in, lined paper, a folder with lots of pockets to file things in... Nothing interesting.

What I really need is a new modem lead. The one that's connecting me to the phone socket at the moment is crummy, to say the least. It's about 15m long - it runs from my room to Ali's at the front of the house. It seems fine until it gets to the socket at my end. To begin with I thought it was just a bit loose - when you wiggled the cable around it tended to work. But it kept getting worse, so I took it apart and looked inside. None of the wires seem to be connected properly - there's no sign of any solder or anything else holding them in. So they just float around. Sometimes they make contact, sometimes they don't.

Normally I have a connection speed of about 44kb/s. Yesterday I managed to connect at 14!

And it keeps cutting me off. Even when I've wedged the cable so it shouldn't be able to move.

Aaargh!