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Well what do you get the smart 5 year old girl about town ?
It’s Joanne’s birthday and for some reason she wanted a set of walkie talkies : not very feminine but a cool way to keep up with your brother’s news from upstairs when you’re in the garden.
We all got together for champagne, roast dinner and of course birthday cake.
Afterwards we had some mango and settled on the sofa to watch Wallace and Gromit.
Cracking.
I’m still casting around for new techniques in photography. Last year it was the zoneplate this year it looks like it will be High Dynamic Range (HDR) images.
HDR’s are composite images that utilise several different exposures of the same scene to create an HDR image to which you then apply a tone curve. Sounds complicated but luckily there’s some software from HDRsoft which lets you do this easily.
For some examples of HDR images have a look at the HDR Flickr Pool.
You know it’s going to be a good day when the tooth you have been wiggling for ages finally falls out and the answer to the question “What shall we do today ?” is “Take over the world !”.
Neither of these relate to me though. The first is Richard who now has a smart gap in his front teeth while Joanne clearly has greater and grander plans.
We headed into the City today to see some mummies in the British Museum, grab some lunch at Hamburger Union in Covent Garden and then on to the Natural History Museum for some dinosaur spotting.
The problem leaving the Natural History to the end of the day is that you run out of time and risk getting locked in overnight with T-Rex ….
Over the years I have ben lucky enough to see opera in some of the great cities and with some of the great companies. Provincial opera is always a litte more hit and miss.
That said tonight’s performance by Opera International (formed of opera companies from Chisnau and Odessa) was very good. If you don’t know the story there’s a synopsis here (don’t worry I picked the short version). Ok there was a bit of a rough patch at the end of Act Three and some waiting while the scenary was shifted around but all in all it was a good evening out.
“core asconde. Ora colui che
legge dentro a un cuore
sa l’amore ed è lettore.”
I needed to step away from a lot of things this week. Take some time away and let go and forget.
I can’t tell you how great it is to see Amanda happy and settled. On all fronts things seem to be working so well for her. Ben’s amazing : a content and beautiful boy. She is a wonderful and very caring mother. But I think I always knew she would be.
As none of us could be bothered to cook we went out Epsom race course for a meal and to catch up on news. The weather’s still cold and there was snow on the top of the downs still. 
The horse trough near the finishing post was frozen solid. It really was a wonderful day. Clear blue skies and very cold.
Ben slept and Amanda and I talked which seemed to work well for all of us. We all had a lot to catch up on : some news good, some not so good. It’s only been a few months since we saw each other but we both seemed to have so much to talk about.
Tonight was time with Martin and Fhai. Boys night was put on hold as I was invited for Thai food.
Almost a perfect day.
A whole day of trying to clear the backlog of mail which has built up recently. The situation at work with one of my projects is still unclear and confused as discussions are taking place at the American HQ with the supplier. It’s frustrating to be this far away, unable to travel and having to wait.
Still, I managed a whole day of working today and cleared a lot. I am warmer and I had less painkillers.
Off to try to sleep. Catch you all later.
I managed to get almost all the way through the checkup before I felt ill. After a glass of water we finished and I walked out and that’s when it hit me. Or rather I hit the floor.
It’s taken all afternoon, several layers of clothes, the rug, the fire and a blanket but I feel just about warm now.
Perhaps tomorrow will be better.
As we move through life we seem more and more endings. From the end of a great meal, the end of a book or a play and inevitably, the end of relationships : it’s a shame that it has happened again.
Here’s another ending…
After years of living alone I seem to have gained a couple of lodgers. At least in theory.
I was out shopping when I got the call. It seems Chris has new client which will means he’s based close to me, living in a hotel, but away from his family so the logical things is Amanda and Ben lodge with me. That way he has a 20 minute drive to see them at the end of day rather than several hours. It sounds pretty cool and the company will be nice.
I was wondering Portabello Road looking for some brass door hooks for the Ice Box when I got the call which reminded me to look for something for Amanda’s birthday which isn’t that far away but inspiration didn’t arrive. I got a few things for next week and gave up early.
Tonight with L in recovery it’s mince and dumplings : a meal I still need guidance on to be up the family standard ..
It’s 11:00 at night. I sit watching L hunched over her laptop at the coffee table talking online. I can see the worry and tension on her face and I know there’s so little I can do to help .
Next to me my laptop dings as another mail comes in followed quickly by a chat message. Both online, both to the States and both lost in corporate world where we are facing some serious challenges in the months ahead. I feel so helpless and so proud. Helpless because there is nothing I can do that will really help or change the situation. Proud because I know how good and capable L is at her job and that she’s in this position because of that very fact. When you need something to succeed you go to the people you trust and with a good track record. Despite that I hate to see the tension and worry on her face. I know that this won’t be an easy time for her.
More email arrives for me. We’ve both said half an hour more and poured one last glass of wine. It seems an odd way to celebrate an anniversary but for both of us it’s necessary work and at least we are together. The Spring flowers sit in the kitchen waiting for the vase. The drawing is propped on the floor waiting for a less stressful time to be finished. As the time ticks away this month it’s important we hang on to these things as a balance to work.
Tonight we just need to sleep.
One of the advantages of working from home is that my commute to work on the days I am here is just a minute along the landing from the bedroom to the office. The disadvantage of that is the trip home is the same length and walking away from some of the craziness which seems to be happening at the moment takes longer than 10 steps.
I turn on the laptop, login to work and check the mail that’s come in from the States overnight. I have an 08:00am conference call with Europe and about half an hour before that to check the internal knowledge sites and erooms, read the mail and check on the stats for my weblog. I watch the icon spin as the RSS reader scans my daily read of weblogs and feeds. Some are updated and I read a few and wonder if I will ever write as well as Francis, Tonya, Meg or Petite. Last in my list is the stats feed from my weblog and I look at the diminishing number of hits and wonder if it’s worth it.
The call starts slowly. We use Netmeeting sometimes to share documents and websites and it seems to take an age to get connected to Belgium and for the conference leaders desktop to be shared. We talk about the need for better knowledge based systems and I wonder if this year I’ll score better against this objective and how I can get the buy in of the people who want to branch away from the corporate products and install something new, sexy and costly. We have actually done better in some respects in using Sharepoint than what’s shown on the call and we part with me promising to send then the stuff I’ve written and for us to swap ideas from now on.
One call drifts into another. Europe, UK and then the quiet time at lunch when the American early risers arrive in chat at work and want to say hi and ask how the weather is here. I can see L is online and I know she has a stressy day ahead, I’m sure the last thing she needs is another conversation right now. As another meeting invite arrives tomorrow’s calender is full from 9:00 to 18:00 with no breaks.
The call I’m on is “listen only” one so I can surf around, do a little online shopping and talk to people in my teams. We all seem a little irate at the mail entitled “urgent urgent urgent” which is asking for names for a tender document the owner of which has missed her deadline and seems to be passing on her confusion and lack of organisation to everyone else on this mail. To be honest now few of these bizarre requests surprise me. We seem more than able to mess up on a consistent and grand scale every week.
Spring must be close :it’s 17:00 and still light out - the sky’s a little red. The call drifts into the next with the same people talking about almost the same thing. A couple of hours of work and calls and it will be time for the short walk back and then we can start all over again tomorrow.
As I didn’t win a Bloggie for best designed weblog I’m trying a make over with some template changes. The only problem is I seem to keep loosing the sidebar. This seems to be a common thing with the new release of MT so don’t suprised if I give up on the investigations into HTML and CSS and put it all back as it was. Well at least for now …
Britain, UK news from The Times and The Sunday Times - Times Online
SCHOOLCHILDREN will just have to gaze elsewhere if they want to learn about our Universe and the stars in the night sky.
Madame Tussauds has decided that the Planetarium, in Baker Street, Central London, which has taught thousands of schoolchildren about astronomy, physics and space exploration since the 1950s, will be better served by a show about a different type of star.
Madame Tussauds has cut screenings of the three-dimensional Journey to Infinity at the Planetarium, renamed the Auditorium, from forty-five minutes to ten. It will reopen in July with a show about celebrities.
It’s about this time of year that I make a resolution to learn a little more about the night sky and look around for star maps. Now that the chance to visit the London Planetarium seems to have gone forever I need something else to recognise Uranus.
Maybe the answer is Stellarium :
“Stellarium is free GPL software which renders realistic skies in real time with openGL. With Stellarium, you really see what you can see with your eyes, binoculars or a small telescope. Stellarium is also used in planetariums.”
Grab yourself a copy and join me on the patio ….
With the benefit of technology and a warm Internet connection we both managed to work from home today.
I struggled against a tide of email some of which was almost immediately answered proving that I wasn’t the only one sacrificing part of their Sunday while L ran a stock check and tried to explain to me what all those figures flying past really meant.
Luckily the day wasn’t all work. We both managed something creative. I took the dog proofing down and planted the pots in the front garden. OK not that creative but unlike a lot of my work a job with a start, middle and end. Also, one that was achievable and completed.
L took on a bigger challenge and picked up a pencil and some paper and produced after a four year break something I wish I could have produced after four years of trying….
Sometimes you just need to recover and that’s all we did today.
Food can be exciting, challenging and comforting. Today we needed to be comforted so eggs and dippy soldiers were called for washed down with lucozade, a whole lot of sleep and some listless drifting from one room to another topped off with a healthy slice of Inspector Morse ….
If you have just finished the ironing and struggled folding the T shirts here’s a video which will show you how to do this like an origami master.
It’s cold and dark outside. The gritters were out on the journey home and it will freeze tonight. I’m fed up travelling in the dark. Fed up of deadlines and project plans and too tired to cook. Tomorrow is more meetings and management and trying to motivate people towards goals which aren’t mine but belong to the company. A list of to dos which seems to grow uncontrollably, stealing time from me and what I want to do. The book I bought this week lies unopened. I want sun, sleep and time to laze. Control over what I do and when I do it. I feel unsettled, tired and restless.
And then you call…..
With L’s folks final night at the Ice Box we all got together for a meal. We all seem to be better able to tame the cooker but the stew wasn’t as nice as done in their Rayburn…..
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