Another hectic weekend passes …

I spent Saturday morning frantically trying to get my shiny new Dension car stereo installed. I had managed to acquire the magic metal release key from a colleague, which should have meant the old stereo would slide out easily (certainly according to the manual!); but when I actually tried it, the key went in to its full extent, met no resistance, and made no difference. So I lost my temper, applied pliers, managed to snap one or two non-essential bits of plastic, but still the old stereo remained stubbornly wedged.

Enough was enough, I thought, and took the whole lot to a professional to get it done properly. They apparently had no difficulty extracting the old stereo, though they wouldn't let me in the workshop to watch how they did it. When I got it home I had a close look at the old one to see what the key was actually supposed to do – and it turns out, the key really does do nothing at all that I can see. I'm completely puzzled as to how it could ever have worked.

Most annoyingly of all, though, I've now lost the old stereo's front panel. I took it off on Saturday morning before attempting the extraction, and I must have put it aside or in a safe place or something like that, but can I find it now? Can I bobbins. Which means there's an unpleasantly good chance that I won't in fact be able to sell the thing on second-hand after all. How deeply aggravating.

So I arrived at fanf and rmc28's engagement party in something approaching deep dudgeon – not even the fact that the Dension was now installed and working fine had managed to relieve my annoyance – but a few hours of good conversation and nice people eventually managed to lift my mood. Then on to the housewarming at ‘Rivendell’ in Girton, which is an unfeasibly large and lovely house. Bonus points to atreic's unfeasibly lovely house tour, in which she managed to find several witty or silly things to say about practically every room. I don't think I could do that for my place, and I've been living in it for over six months and it's got about half as many rooms :-)

This morning I find that the Dension, although still kinda cool, is rather delicate when it comes to temperature. It refused to play me any music for the first five or ten minutes of my trip to work, claiming it was too cold to do anything useful. Once it warmed up it worked fine, but that's slightly peeving. Ah well.