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Dear Diary,

Last night I was feeling naughty so I took Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni Boccaccio to bed with me. These two great men amused me with their wit and humour and wicked stories about cuckolded husbands, stupid lovers and lusty nuns and priests. It was marvelous.

The Miller’s Tale was so funny – I know the humour is puerile, but when Nicholas gets what’s coming to him from the womanish Absalom, I laughed until I almost cried.

And therwith spak this clerk, this Absolon,
“Spek, swete brid, I noot nat wher thou art.”
This Nicholas anon leet flee a fart,
As greet as it had been a thonder-dent,
That with the strook he was almost y-blent;
And he was redy with his iren hoot,
And Nicholas amiddle the ers he smoot:…

Giovanni’s humour is quieter, but no less bawdy, than Geoffrey’s – but on the whole, I think I prefer Jeff. He’s more down-to-earth somehow and he has such a way with words!

There are other nights though, where I want to be seduced, I want the words to seem to go on forever and Charles Dickens, that consistent and faithful man, never disappoints. A few nights ago he made me positively dizzy and dreamy with this:

On the motionless branches of some trees, autumn berries hung like clusters of coral beads, as in those fabled orchards where the fruits were jewels; others, stripped of all their garniture, stood, each the centre of its little heap of bright red leaves, watching their slow decay; others again, still wearing theirs, had them all crunched and crackled up, as though they had been burnt…An evening wind uprose too, and the slighter branches cracked and rattled as they moved, in skeleton dances, to its moaning music.

Charles, my silver-tongued fox, nothing could be more erotic than your descriptions!

Some nights though, I turn to my girlfriends, Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters are my favourite friends. We stay up until the wee hours of the morning trading tales of romance and broken hearts:

“…Could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connections? To congratulate myself on the hope of relations whose condition in life is so decidedly beneath my own?”…

“You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way than as it spared me the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner.”

Everyone Jane knows is so eloquent! And, for the record, I’m not sure I could have refused Mr. Darcy – even if he was rude.

Emily, the quietest of our group, shared this gem:

“I’ve no more business to marry Edgar Linton that I have to be in heaven;…It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff, now; so he shall never know how I love him; and that, not because he’s handsome,…but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.”

How Catherine could turn away from Heathcliff to marry that milksop Linton, I’ll never understand.

Of course, there is one man that almost no one knows about – he’s moody and distant, but he makes me trip over my own feet and tangles up my tongue until I feel like a stupid schoolgirl – Rainer Maria Rilke. Even his name is like music!

We meet only rarely – I wish it were more, but I know better than to push. Poets are so difficult! But then he writes things like this:

I am, O Anxious One. Don’t you hear my voice
surging forth with all my earthly feelings?
They yearn so high that they have sprouted wings
and whitely fly in circles around your face.
My soul, dressed in silence, rises up
and stands alone before you: can’t you see?
Don’t you know that my prayer is growing ripe
upon your vision, as upon a tree?

If you are the dreamer, I am what you dream.
But when you want to wake, I am your wish,
and I grow strong with all magnificence
and turn myself into a star’s vast silence
above the strange and distant city, Time.

It’s hard to be angry with someone who brings that with him when he finally emerges from his seemingly sulky silence!

I think I had better stop here for today – there are many, many more entries to come, but for today, this is enough.

P.S.: What the hell will I do if Joe ever finds out?

This post is dedicated to Curlywurlygurly – I have a magic button for you!

When Microsoft introduced the new Office Suite 2007, I went right out and paid full price for a copy. I opened Word with my head full of feel-good marketing stuff about a new look and ribbons. It sounded pretty and superior to the old version

I was totally flustered when I saw it for the first time.

Where the hell were the file menus? What was all that mess across the top of the screen? Why are there tabs all over the place and why don’t they make any sense? Why did Microsoft have to so brutally kick me out of my comfort zone and take away all the stuff I was familiar with?

But I’m no complainer, so I gave it a try. I typed up a blog post in there intending to copy and paste it into WordPress. I generally use a lot of keyboard shortcuts when I type, so at first everything was OK – but everytime I wanted to use something from on of the old toolbars, it wasn’t there. I wanted to change the properties on the document and I couldn’t figure out where to go. I wanted to save the document so I could possibly retrieve it later – assuming Best Buy could sort of broken bits of laptop because I was ready to drop the thing off the roof of the house.

I wanted my damn file menus back!

But then, the fog of frustration rolled back to reveal this:

This is the Office Button – it’s in the upper left corner of the Word screen. Click it to reveal this:

And there they are – all those items you miss from the old File menu.

Look under Prepare for nifty things like changing document properties and encrypting documents.

I am ashamed to say it took me several weeks to realize that Office Button was a button that did anything. I figured it was like the Internet Explorer icon that I see in the upper left of my screen as I type this. Just a little picture to let me know which program I’m using – in case I forget. A mere decoration, but not something useful.

The Office Button is the only complaint I have about Word 2007 now. I like the ribbons – no more searching through menus and drop-down lists for basic stuff; it’s all in the open. I can do what I want to do much, much faster now.

I have let go of my Word 2003 blankie and I am taking my first steps. If I were several years younger, someone would be offering me a cookie and some praise right now – I’m still open to that offer at the ripe old age of 32 – especially if you’ve got chocolate chip!

I entered a doodle contest at Curlywurlygurly (my doodle is #8 in the list).

The prize is a really cool Envirosax bag – so go vote by leaving a comment about your favourite doodle (mine, right?).

PS: It’s ok if you vote for someone else’s doodle. I won’t be mad.