Well, that was a day...

On the plus side, I now have a new car - a Skoda Roomster SE 1.9TDi in Rosso Brunello (deep maroon to you!)

Initial impressions - wow, it's LIGHT. The panoramic sunroof really does make for a light, airy, roomy interior - so much so I keep wondering if I left a door or the back open or something. And the 1.9 has a nice comforting grumble as it runs, and plenty of pull.

More than that'll have to wait till I've driven it more than 10 miles.

Finalising the sale was a little more fraught than expected. First off, the dealer's valeting team, to a man/woman, called in sick. Today, of all days: today is the first day for '59 registration cars, so they had TWENTY new cars waiting to be valeted and collected. They wound up sending them out to a third-party, and my 2pm pickup turned into a 6pm.

Second, Anne's dad had generously offered to better the Skoda finance deal: unfortunately he didn't decide/tell us this till it was too late, and the Skoda deal does have about £300 in upfront fees that 'er indoors didn't really want to pay just for what would be a one week loan (or less - the money should arrive today or tomorrow). Cue much faffing and juggling, before I remembered something about the way our mortgage account works, and Anne discovering she'd just got paid. Modern banking rocks - in about 5 mins the necessary funds were in the right account for us to hand them a debit card for the whole amount.

On the minus side:

Something in our solar panels has stopped working and, to add insult to injury, the original suppliers are in administration. Good old Peterborough Boiler Services to the rescue - but the guy who's the expert is on holiday till next week.

One of Anne's PC's at her work picked up a virus - specifically 'Total Security', a particularly nasty specimen that hooks in whenever you launch a .exe and pops up a fake security scan.... Spent till midnight disinfecting it (fortunately, it's dormant in safe mode), and really really must have a TALK with Anne's boss, who still seems to think that a practice with about 20 PCs doesn't need to pay for sysadmin work, or a non-free download-scanning anti-virus package, beyond a nod in my direction every so often. I wish someone'd write a nice practice-management package that either ran on Mac or Linux, or in-browser. I also wish they'd actually run the anti-virus scan every day AND update its definitoins more than once every 6 months.