I woke up about an hour ago, which makes that 04:00. I'm pretty tired and would like to sleep, but as I'm getting up in 1:20 I'm beyond the point of caring.

So how did I wake up, you ask? Mikaela exclaiming "God!" at the incessant cawing from a magpie right outside our window. I was in the dreary state between dream and reality, and didn't quite get what was happening until Mikaela got up, got the keys and got outside.

What the hell was happening? Were some neighbours brawling? No, all was quiet. I thought I heard an "uf". The door opened, Mikaela sighing aggressively.

"What happened?" I asked.

"Nothing!" she exclaimed, "Nothing but me flinging a rock at that fucking magpie! I can't sleep! At least, now it's flown away a bit."

I needed a second to think about that. The cawing was still incessant, but indeed a tad further away.

"You threw a rock at the bird?" I asked.

"Yeah! And our neighbour upstairs turned on his lights just as I did so and he saw me."

I'd given anything to see that from his perspective: an angry, tired woman standing outdoors at four o'clock in the morning, flinging a solitary at something. Quite the Don Quixote.

We whispered about how Mikaela'd be carried off into the air by the cawing birds the next time she went out, et.c. and we laughed till tears rolled down our faces; Mikaela fell asleep a while later. I couldn't. I've been sleeping bad for a week but come the weekend, I'm about to amend that as my month-long summer-vacation starts Monday. Oh, that's going to be very welcome.

As I'm up and about I'll tell you that I'm writing this from Flock. Yeah, I haven't been this upset by software in a time. I tried Flock when it was available as an alpha, but now that it's gone into its first public beta-stage, it's been improved in ways I didn't even think of. Sure, it's a Mozilla Firefox-spin-off, and that's a good thing. E.g. converting extensions from Firefox to Flock isn't hard (according to those in the know, and there's even this Flock-extension that'll do it for you). Anyway, I really like the splendid built-in functions such as blogging, displaying flickr-pictures in-browser, the ability to sync my Flock bookmarks with my del.icio.us-account, reading my RSS-feeds in-browser (even though I won't use it much due to Reblog 2.0 beta 2) and getting live search-results from an online search-engine every time I start searching for a word using the search-bar. All very, very interesting. There are a few kinks in the interface, such as having to click extra times when switching between live news-feeds that you have in your quick toolbar plus there not being a "save as draft-function" in the blog interface, but I hope they'll get loads of feedback on the positive sides as well as the draw-backs, but it looks very thought-through.

I just noticed Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier looking very nice: a double-DVD-package with both the original 1979-version and the 2001-version (a.k.a. "Apocalypse Now: Redux") plus so many features you'll need to see this page where there are two scanned images of all the extra stuff.

I'm getting enthusiastic over a DVD-box at half past five in the morning. Yea! Erhm. Let me quote a Beastie Boys-sample: "Time to get up! Go to work!"

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