Well, I hope you all had a pleasant and peaceful festive season.
I've been hiding out in darkest Kent for the period, which means there's an element of doubt about whether I'll be able to make it back to London today or not.
Ho hum.
Typically, I'm in an environment with proper snow, in daylight, and my camera, my beautiful new camera, has ceased to function.
I swear, I have some kind of snow photo jinx.
But it's really so very disappointing to find, when excitedly realising that ABC1 are showing Sports Night, the series he did before West Wing and settling down to watch it two nights in a row, that said episodes are uncannily familiar.
Last night's episode was clearly the test run for the West Wing episode called The Stackhouse Filibuster (which happens to be one of my favourite episodes ever) and tonight's episode was clearly a forerunner to Somebody's Going to Emergency, Somebody's Going to Jail, another of my favourites.
All of which makes me wish I'd seen the site which lists all the crossovers between Sports Night and West Wing earlier cos I could have made myself cry watching Extreme Makeover: Home Edition - How did they do that? instead.
So yeah, I went ice-skating last night.
Admittedly, it was more sheer bloody-mindedness than anything else, given I'd spent the last week wrestling with various bits of my skeleton which just did not want to stay where they were supposed to...
... but I'd wanted to go skating in London at one of the winter skating rinks for a few years now, and just hadn't gotten round to it, and well, I just wanted to see if I could still do it, since the last time I'd been skating was well over ten years ago.
Of course, ten years ago I used to go skating three evenings a week and had my own figure skates which fitted and were comfortable, and I wasn't wearing hard plastic wellies with ratchet closures.
Yes, they're designed to be hard-wearing and give good strong support to the feet and ankles of skaters of wildly varying levels of holding on to the side-ness, but what I didn't expect was the unfortunate side-effect it had on my feet: an intense burning pain as several of the small bones in my feet were partially and in some cases totally dislocated as I skated.
In a word: OWFUCKINGHELL*BREATHEBREATHEBREATHE*OHGODTHAT
HURTSPLEASEMAKEITSTOPNOWANDIPROMISEIWON'TDO
ANYTHINGSILLYLIKETHISAGAIN(ATLEASTFORAFEWMONTHS).
HONEST.
So I took off the figure skates and asked for a pair of hockey boots - which they had, but the size was slightly too big, so although they weren't turning my feet to jelly, they weren't giving me a huge amount of support and stability either.
So I did a couple more circuits of the by now even bumpier ice (I think it's probably the worst surface I've ever skated on), and then decided that discretion was the better part of valour and handed my boots in and headed for the cafe, just as they were blowing the whistle for the end of the session.
But while I may not have participated in the entire session, and some might feel I didn't get the best value out of it, I proved to myself that I could do it, and that, like the Tube Challenge in August and the Circle Line Hike in September, is an important thing for me mentally, especially at the moment when things feel so thoroughly out of control.
So yeah, ice skating in London in Winter (check).
Some of you might remember me posting a plea for help earlier this year, on behalf of one of my colleagues, whose baby son was in a horrific, near fatal car accident.
Against all odds, Sam is still fighting, and has even been allowed home for a day here and there, but although this is progress, he still has a long way to go.
Since his accident, Sam's been looked after by the staff of the Paediatric Intensive Care Unit at Bristol Royal Children's Hospital.
Now, I've mentioned before that I work with an amazing bunch of people, and as an example of just how amazing they are, one of my colleauges, Henny, is going to raise money for the unit by dog sledding over 250km in the Arctic Circle in January. Her initial target is £3,000 and she's putting up the cash for the actual sledding trip herself, to make sure every penny raised goes to the hospital to buy equipment that will directly help Sam and the other children being treated there.
To find out more, and to sponsor her, you can visit her justgiving page.
Any contributions would be incredible, and even a couple of quid will go a long way! Feel free to forward this to friends, family and colleagues, or to post this information on your own blog.
Thank you for your support - it will really help Sam and other children like him.
Welcome to the 2005 edition of getting to know your friends. What you are supposed to do is copy this entire blog entry and paste it onto a new blog entry that you'll post. Change all the answers so they apply to you, and then publish! Leave a comment if you do this.The theory is that you will learn a lot of little (random) things about your friends, if you did not know them already.
Over the last three months I've been thoroughly spoiled. I've also been thoroughly slack in not posting about it.
... and now having had a couple of clues (and with the help of google, who sees all and knows all), I can fairly confidently guess that my secret pal is the lovely Madeline of Mad Knits (I hope - please tell me if I got it right), who, in a lovely coincidence, won some yarn as a result of a competition set by the pal I was spoiling, the incredibly talented Uknitty. Such a fabulously small world.
Anyway, on to the goods. A couple of months ago, the first package appeared and contained:
A copy of At Knit's End: Meditations for Women Who Knit Too Much, by Yarn Harlot Stephanie which I immediately read cover to cover, laughing, cringing, vowing to never do that, and reading bits out over the phone to people to try and normalise my newish found obsession.
A fabulous mix-cd called Music to Knit By containing lots of artists who I'd either heard of but not heard their stuff, or heard some of their stuff but not that paricular song, and more amazingly, there's not a single song in there I dislike. Fabulous stuff, and someting I've listened to lots in the intervening time.
A bar of lovely Lindt chocolate, which, unsurprisingly, didn't last long.
A pair of lovely scented candles (which are currently, along with some other non-scented candles, providing non-overhead light illumination following the death of my desk lamp).
Why I didn't take pictures of any of this at the time I can't actually say. Most unlike me. Anyway. All of the contents, although unphotographed, were and are very much appreciated.
But the fun didn't stop there... oh no... there was more...
A few weeks later, package number 2 arrived, all beautifully wrapped (like number 1 had been).
In it were:
Some handmade stitch markers (which were very photogenic)
and also very pushy, pushing themselves in front of the two balls of Artesano Alpaca Inca Cloud Yarn in beautiful deep purple and a box of cat tongue shaped belgian praline chocolates.
The alpaca yarn is so lovely that I had it resting on my bedside table for weeks so when I missed hitting the snooze button on the alarm every morning my fingers would find it and I'd not feel quite so grumpy when waking up.
Then yesterday morning, while still mostly asleep, I answered the door and was handed parcel number 3, and once I'd managed to get my eyes open and my hands to answer commands from my brain sufficiently, I opened the jiffy bag to find yet more beautifully wrapped parcels.
Then a little while later, when I'd woken up a bit more, I took a picture
... then woke up a little more yet, and managed to unwrap them, which revealed them to be:
A "Knit Bits" daily calendar, which will be fabulous for my desk at work.
A cute little japanese style pocket mirror and comb
A stick of Scottish Rock (which made me giggle and also feel a little nostalgic)
and a skein of Colinette Point Five yarn in colourway 90 - Venezia.
Now, I've looked at Point Five in various places, and it hasn't really grabbed me before... but let me tell you something - this stuff grabbed me, big style.
So much so that within minutes it had become transformed from a skein into a centre pull ball:
... and then a couple of hours later, it had become knitting:
From being someone who'd never knitted or thought seriously about knitting a shawl before, I found myself creating a shawl as I went along, without heed to pre-conceived wisdom or anything as pesky as a pattern.
I've since frogged it and am re-knitting it having developed a better pattern for it while I was knitting it, and am on the hunt for another skein (or perhaps two) to complete my masterpiece*.
So thank you Madeline for being such a fabulous pal, and putting up with me being such a blog-flake. I really appreciate the time you've taken to pick such appropriate and inspirational gifts for me over the last few months, and I'm really looking forward to getting to know you now I know who you are**.
* this may or may not be the actual case once it's done, but for now I'm calling it a masterpiece in the hope that positive reinforcement will work its magic.
** and obviously I'll be really embarrassed if I've got it all wrong.
Yes, I've been overdoing things.
Yes, I've been pushing my luck.
No, that's no reason for Murphy to start paying close attention to my daily doings and start throwing spanners.
Because obviously, when I think to myself "ah, I just have to get through the frantic fortnight then I can settle down to do the really cool thing at work that I can't quite believe I'm getting to do, along with a couple of other fairly small things and I can set up everything for that big project I've been given responsibility for and that'll be quite a nice relaxing week to set me up for the busyness that will follow just before and after Christmas", I really want to be given a complex, difficult, incredibly politically sensitive project to do that's incredibly urgent and needs to be done in significantly less time than usually allocated for such a project and also have to take a day out to go to an important meeting in a different office (the fastest journey to which requires me to change trains not once, but twice!), leaving me one day to shoe-horn all the other bits I'd planned to do and not actually get to do any of the nice project at all.
... and obviously, when I wake up on that one day, feeling a bit out of sorts, I want it to be an arse-about-tit migraine that starts with the feeling sick and doesn't develop the funny eye and splitting headache symptoms until I'm six feet from the front door of the office, making me exclaim in surprise as the pain arrived like a combination of lightning bolt/axe to the head and then feel even more queasy as my vision started to go fuzzy/blurry round the edges in a manner not unlike trying to look out of a window when there's water running down it.
... and obviously in being stubborn enough to try and use mind-over-matter to make it go away I will stay in the open plan office (albeit in the semi-dark) and endure the pain of every word spoken in my immediate vicinity being like a blow to the head and not be able to capitalise on my sudden ability to overhear conversations way out of my usual range, because these feel like someone dragging a cheese-grater repeatedly over my brain.
... and obviously, when I finally give in and go home, the usually quiet train will be packed so I won't be able to get a seat even though the nausea is back and I feel like I'm going to barf/pass out at any minute.
... and obviously, when I finally get home I'll be completely unable to find the injectable migraine medication I know I have somewhere, and will crawl into bed pleading for the bastard to give me a break and let the gods of sleep grant me a few hours of restful and restorative shut-eye.
... and obviously, when they grant this request, I'll be woken by the noise of footsteps outside my bedroom, rudely and with a start, my body going instantly into panic that I've overslept and it's morning and I'll miss the first of the three trains that I need to board to take me to the very important meeting I need to attend in the other office and my heart will be racing and it'll take vital seconds for me to be able to focus on the nearest clock and realise that I've been asleep for a whole two fucking hours.
... and obviously any relief that I may have felt will be immediately replaced by irritation that not only am I now awake, but my head hurts worse and it feels even more like someone is trying to push my eyeballs out of my head from the inside.
... and obviously I won't be able to get back to sleep and don't feel well enough to make anything to eat even if I did have an appetite, which I don't, and so I'll lie staring at the wall for a bit before opening the laptop, even though it makes the pain worse, because the boredom makes the pain worse and any distraction is very welcome.
... and obviously, when I accidentally find the aforementioned migraine medication while looking for something else entirely, it will be three years out of date cos that's how long it's been since I had a migraine of this magnitude and thus not safe to use.
... and obviously this will mean that because I've changed doctors three times in the last three years, I won't be able to phone the surgery and arrange for a repeat prescription that I can collect on my way back from the big important meeting in the other office because the doctor will need to see me because they can't just prescribe drugs on the say so of a desperate sounding pleading woman so I'll need to make an appointment to go and see him which I won't be able to get tomorrow afternoon.
... and obviously this will mean that the migraine will drag on through the big important meeting, through the afternoon working at home which I was intending to do and will mean that I really won't be able to deal with going to see Lee Evans at Wembley, which I was unexpectedly offered a ticket for earlier this week.
So yeah, I'm a little grumpy.
So much to say, no idea where to start, and all I can think of is annoying alliteration (see above).
Phrases like frantic fortnight and gaggle of geek gatherings spring to mind, although unfortunately they arrive in my brain without the surrounding words that would make sense of them to anyone other than me.
So I've come to the conclusion that I've got cranial constipation as a result of excessive change to the normal pattern of my life and the unusually rich social life consumed of late.
Well that, and the fact that I've had so little sleep of late that I'm using all my energy to force myself to be able to concentrate at work (well, as much as I can), and have no energy left over at the end of the day (and then can't sleep, perpetuating the cycle).
So in an effort to unblock my brain and get some room for thoughts to move, a stream of consciousness type list, in no particular order, of the things I've wanted to blog about in the last couple of weeks, but just haven't, for whatever reason.
Phew. Glad I got that little lot out. There's more, but that's a good start
1,197 pictures and counting.
Cheap carpet + lots of walking = static shocks. From every. sodding. metal. thing. I. touch. Argh!
The very fact that I'm wearing a badge that states "photographer" and carrying a big non-stealthy camera should be enough to assure you that I'm not taking photographs of your wares for the purposes of industrial espionage. Stop harrassing me when I'm taking pictures that will ultimately be advertising your products.
Sleepless and thirsty at home is an easy problem to solve. Sleepless and thirsty in a hotel when the bar is closed, there's no room service and the water is cloudy is a more difficult propostion.
Providing comedy small side-plates for guests to eat their (buffet) lunch from will not stop them eating more, it just means more stuff falls on the floor and people will make more trips.
Experience should have dictated that, in this particular buffet style of catering in the "restaurant", dinner would be exactly the same stuff as was provided for lunch. It didn't. I ate the same thing twice (sausage casserole). The cake was different though, so that was good.
No, I'm not eating alone because I'm a norma no-mates, I'm eating alone because I didn't want to listen to anybody prattling on so I could eat quickly and get back up to my room to relax. I would rather have eaten in my room, but going back to the buffet for seconds is more difficult and they'd wonder why I was taking plates of sausage casserole up in the lift.
The reason I didn't go back to the buffet for a second helping of cake was because I was entirely full, not because I thought the few people left in the restauarant would thing I'm a fat bloater (honest).
I'm reading a magazine. Stop talking to me.
The world is separated into two types of people - those who notice your footwear (and comment on it) and those who don't. I thought I'd got away with the not-strictly-professional-but-funky boots, until a delegate spotted them from across the room and made a beeline for me to compliment me on them, which was nice.
... the online home and (not very) alter(ed)-ego of Ann McMeekin, a recently freelance Web Accessibility Consultant.
... passionate about many things, most of which will turn up on this site at some time or other.
... contactable via email.
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