I told R that in the future if he should get a similar request, he should say I am ignorant of such matters. I sort my life so that I am seldom stressed, but this request caused me some.
The late Dame M's Boarder called on the telephone. For the party last Saturday night, Jasmine was going to do a number or two. He wondered if we could help him get a Mae West cd called Mae West's Christmas Classics. He had tried many record stores for a cd, but the timeline was too short for ordering.
Maintaining my aversion to paying for anything on the internet, I got down and dirty into music searching and downloading via a free program. I managed to get three of the eight tracks, but this had taken me hours. I could not see my way to getting the rest. It did not help that the album seemed to have two different names. I burnt them to a cd and it would not work in any of our players. That could be my fault for a wrong choice when burning.
I spoke to The Boarder on the phone and ascertained precisely what he wanted and the name of the cd.
Ok, this will cost, but The Boarder said he will pay. I went to Amazon and installed a program to download the album and joined up. I should have gone through the front page where I would have seen the notice that MP3 files are only for US residents. More time wasted.
Right, I found it on Itunes. Will the same thing happen again? No, Itunes seems to know I am in Australia. I set up an account and I paid.
I am not sure at what point I felt like murdering R, The Boarder and anyone in sight.
Music download went ok. Now, if I burn it like the three other tracks, will it work? I was impressed that Itunes let me transfer the music to my hard drive. I believe it was not always the case. Then I noticed a button at the bottom of the Itunes screen that said something like, 'burn cd'. I clicked and it ever so effortlessly burnt the cd.
Oh, I forgot to mention, I was out of blank cds, so we had to visit Officeworks at 8pm to get some. I was still being nice to R, through gritted teeth.
So cd burnt. I made a list of the tracks and R resized it to fit on the back of a cd case. I did have some of those. Then added this picture from the original album to the front and no doubt breached some copywrite. We were rather pleased with ourselves.

We called The Boarder and told him that the mission had succeeded. The Boarder is vague at the best of times, so when we said we would drop it in to his place, he started to rattle off what he was doing over the weekend. I cut him with that we would stick it in his letter box if he was not home.
On our way, no out of way really, when we were going to Prahran for breakfast and shopping, we decided we would drop the cd into The Boarder. As I said, a girl needs some rehearsing time. We had not been to his new digs since he moved out of Dame M's place. It is in Ripponlea. As we were approaching the place, I saw drapes being opened, as would happen at 9am. I did not know it was his place until we were there and R explained that The Boarder had the top flat over the garages. We rang the doorbell, no reply. We rang home phone, we rang mobile. No reply. We tried again, nope. We left messages. Nope. We tried to put in into the mail box but it would not fit. We tried putting it under the door to his exclusive entrance, and it would not fit.
After about fifteen minutes, R chucked the cd up onto his balcony and later we learnt it was a perfect chuck, landing on his balcony door mat.
I suppose he could have been in the shower or something, but we were quite annoyed. No matter. We had done the deed. We will get a Mae West christmas performance at the dykes' christmas party.
To cut to the chase, ha bloody ha, the dykes are all digital (do not misinterpret) and do not have a cd player. No performance and no offer of $10 payment for the download cost.
And you wonder why at times I seem bitter and jaded.
But then along comes a friend who I know via the net who is staying near Birregurra and she sent me a lovely book and an article from a newspaper.