I'm turning into a car obsessed freak. Well, not really but it seems to have been central to my day

I'm scared to drive my car at the moment. I'll tell you why.

I'm notoriously bad at cleaning cars. Even though mine is quite a decent one I'm not really a car person and I largely view it as a tool for getting from A to B rather than something to be washed and polished on a weekly basis. In fact although I bought mine brand new from the dealership 3 years ago it's only been cleaned four times. Twice I've taken it through car washes before meeting important clients, once an ex-girlfriend decided to clean it for me as a surprise, and the fourth time was when I leant it to my father during a recent trip to Australia and he couldn't bear to drive it around all covered in muck.

But I've got to sell it this week and hence a major cleaning effort was required. My sister cleans peoples houses in her spare time for cash so she offered to clean the inside with a variety of products. My dad likes shiny things so he offered to polish up all the alloy and chrome bits and I done the main washing. It actually looks pretty smart now.

But since this monumental cleaning effort I've almost crashed it twice. How typical would that be eh? Within 5 minutes of driving it post-clean, an idiot tourist decided to completely ignore a mini roundabout and pull out in front of me. Hmm. Smell of burning brakes and rubber is always lovely isn't it?

The next near incident wouldn't have actually damaged my car but it was an amazing display of shitty driving. At the end of my road there is a busy junction where it meets another major road. Naturally there are traffic lights there to control the traffic. There is also a "cyclist waiting area" which is an area immediately between the lights and the junction. The idea of this is that cyclist can wait in front of the cars and just before the "main" lights change to allow cars to move the cyclists get a green bike symbol to allow them a bit of a head start.

Cars of course are not allowed to obstruct this area. This is hinted at by the fact it's made from red tarmac and has a 2m symbol of a bicycle painted across it. The guy in front of me stopped at the red lights for about 5 seconds before he got bored. He just pulled straight across the bike area and started edging out into the other busy road.

Other cars already on the main road started to get panicked by this obvious idiot that was trying to barge his way into the traffic and started hooting at him. He simply didn't care though! The moment there was a bit of break in the pretty constant flow of traffic he was off, causing much shaking of fists and profanities from other drivers that had to slow to avoid hitting him.

I really couldn't believe that he done that, if I'd been a car traveling on other road I think I may have attempted to pull him over but I decided it was probably best for me not to get involved. I'm only here for a week, I don't need confrontation!

Anyway, enough drivel about cars and driving. I've got to spend tomorrow driving around local dealerships seeing who will give me the most for it. If anyone wants a Vectra SRI fitted with all the posh bits, optional extras, full service history, etc, please feel free to contact me! Rapid sale required so I'm willing to compromise on price!

What else? I've got a really annoying spyware issue on this computer. I use Xoftspy to control spyware and Norton AV to control viruses. Xoftspy keeps telling me I'm infected with a very serious keylogger and successfully removes it until the next time I start windows. Norton is trying to convince me that there isn't a problem, even though their website has loads of info about it. Very confused. At the moment I'm just letting Xoftspy remove it every time I start windows. And apparently it only effects IE, so I'm making a point of using Mozilla Firefox - when I remember...

Sorry this hasn't been a particularly entertaining post, I'll tell you all about the hair removal cream later when I've got down to the important business of having a Saturday evening beer. Back in a bit! Byeee...