Hard Drives and Hecate

So - bugger Microsoft. No, really, bugger'em.
Yesterday the new Lexmark printer failed on the Windows side of the dual-boot I'm running on the desktop - Warren prefers to use Windows XP to print his staff rosters for some un-bloody-known reason, when there's a perfectly good Linux codex running the same hardware on the OpenSUSE side.
I've come to vastly prefer Linux, after a good tussle between me and the open source daemons, as the security is matchless, the maintenance effortless, and the possibilities endless...ah well, there's nothing like a convert, is there?
Well, it seems our 5-year-old Mecer is running out of steam, and refuses to continue to run printers on the Windows partition. IShouldHaveKnown. So, we're down to Rosebank, where we haven't been for a while, ever since the Gautrain started being built there, and the techie informs us, more in sorrow than in greed, that our old (old?) machine can't take another hard drive of the size we'd envisioned (a Terabyte or so), so it looks like a whole new machine, folks...

Not that the trip was entirely joyless - Isis is on the same floor as Incredible Connection, and it was the work of a moment to divert our footsteps there.
Now, I've been thinking long and hard about joining the Covenant of Hekate, so I reckoned a browse around the Goddess images in the store could help me make up my mind. I don't possess a Hecate image, you see, (She's Me and Me's She so it hasn't seemed necessary - a black mirror is the most I use) and I thought that if I joined up, I'd Do It Right for once.

Isis has become, since we last visited it, something of a Hindu Haven - but that's OK, they've got to offer what sells, I guess. So we're mulling over exquisite statuettes of Kali, admiring the most beautiful carved black Isis figure, and wondering if a spiral will do, all in a haze of Nag Champa and boxed ethereal bestseller muzac, and growing more despondent with every circuit of the shop.

Eventually, Warren gives up and goes outside, but I linger a little on my way out of the door - and lo! - just where She should be, if I'd thought about it for a moment, a perfect little pewter icon of my Matron, hanging in a glass case at the line where inside becomes outside. So I brought Her home, where She adorns the black mirror on what is about to become my Hecate altar.


Pic: Galraedia Hecate , that's Her.