I was late finishing the ironing and laundry tonight, but for once, it wasn’t L.’s fault; I was talking to B., and he’d said he was there for just a few minutes, so I thought, “That’s fine…I have stuff to do anyway.” I was getting fidgety because it takes him forever to type, and I can’t type whilst he does because he forgets to look up and doesn’t see what I’ve written, so I clicked the “draw” tab in MSN and grabbed the stylus. I wrote my name and drew some little faces, and a flower, and although I meant to erase it all, I instinctively hit Enter when I’d looked up to read his message. He’s about as interested in computers as I am in NASCAR, so I thought he’d just laugh and forget about it, but I was wrong. He said, “How did you do this?” and when I told him where to find the tab, and what to do, I thought he’d just say “Datanörd stuff!” like he usually does, and ignore it. Nope…I spent the rest of the evening being entertained by little drawings and written words in between typed responses. I’m not convinced he was paying too much attention to what I was saying, but that’s all right–it’s always fun to see someone when they discover a computer can do something they want to do. He’s pretty damned good at writing with a mouse, too; I suck badly even with a Wacom tablet, but he did just fine. He can’t read my handwriting at the best of times, though, so I stuck to drawing a few little pictures. He’s a funny man…never know what’s going to catch his attention next, and when something does, he’s like a six-year-old turned loose in Toys R Us (where is the goddamned full Character Palette in openSUSE’s fucked-up menu? I want a backwards R!)

I even got to do something helpful for L. today. Bless his heart, he never asks me to do anything; once in a while he’ll spell a word two ways and ask which is right, but that’s nothing, and he’s always got one of them correct. This morning, though, I’d just got out of bed, turned on the coffeemaker and booted the computer. I was typing a half-asleep response to P., who’d sent me *mjah* from his phone (he likes MSN now that he has it on the phone), when another window popped up and L. said, “Payback time!” I thought, “Christ, what does he think I did?” but he wasn’t pissed or anything. He’s test-driving Ubuntu on a machine at work and couldn’t get sound to work in aMSN. I’d run into that myself, and it’s just a matter of changing “play $sound” to “aplay $sound”, but it did take me some time to find that answer when I encountered the problem. I thought it was a PulseAudio issue, but now that I think about it, I didn’t have to change it on openSUSE, so it’s either not PA, or it’s some issue with Ubuntu’s implementation thereof. Anyway, I was rather pleased that I could finally do something helpful for him. Under the big, scary tattooed thug exterior, he’s an absolute living doll. He made the sweetest page for H.; she showed it to me last Monday, and all I could think was, “AWWWWW!” She’s got a real treasure in that one; he absolutely adores her, and I hope she knows that men like that don’t come along every day of the week. Yeah, he’s stubborn, and yeah, he’s given more to brooding when he’s pissed off than to saying anything about it, but he thinks the sun rises and sets because she exists on the earth. Goddamned fine man.