I've been a bit quiet lately as you may have noticed. I had a couple of weeks where my symptoms flared up significantly so didn't feel like doing anything. Trouble is I've now got into the rut of sleeping all day and being awake all night. It's not nice when you wake up to find the sun has already gone down. It feels like you've wasted a whole day, even if you're busy doing things all night. I've tried using Nytol to get back into a more sociable routine with no success so far. I'm not even sure they make me feel drowsy - they're only anti-histamines anyway, otherwise known as Benadryl. Piriton makes a lot of people drowsy but has no effect on me at all...ho hum.

I indulged my audio gadget obsession again and bought a 320gb media player. It's basically just a cheap hard disk enclosure with integral mediaplayer (which you can buy empty for £40), plus a 320gb hard disk. I got it on ebay for about a hundred pounds. You can see some pics here. It has quite a lot of annoying quirks - the navigation is cumbersome, it lists folders with short names in capitals, longer names in lower case, but lists the two seperately so you have to scroll twice through the alphabet to get to the file you want. Anyway, I've organised my thousands of files in such a way to make it less painful. I've got loads and loads of CDs and am buying new ones most weeks but noticed that now in the advent of mp3, I never bothered playing any cds which weren't on my computer - simply because it seems like too much effort. Lazy innit. There was a time when people had to get up and change the channel on the TV by hand, that seems unthinkable now too. I figured that if I had all that music close to hand I'd actually listen to it all and wouldn't have wasted all that money... I'm not sure how many dozens I've ripped but I've filled up about 60gb so far - and done a few films too. Oh yes, one of the most annoying quirks is that the sound is kind of weedy and lack the highest and lowest frequencies. So much so that I'd rather not listen to. So... I've had to indulge my obsession again and get a graphic equaliser in order to compensate. I got one for a tenner of ebay. When that arrives I'm all set! (for a while at least)

I found out today that I'm on the Scientology mailing list. I bought some books on behalf of a friend (from that well known auction site), he just fancied a laugh. He was expecting them to be all about Xenu and aliens in volcanos, but they were just pseudopsychology and cartoon drawings of people on drugs and what mumbo jumbo you should use to "help" them. Anyway the seller asked me if I was interested in more information. I was tempted to write back saying I was researching evil cults but never got around to it. Anyway today I got a copy of their latest newsletter in the post. I hope they don't come after me.... I notice they didn't invite me to Tom and Katie's wedding