It really has been one of those weeks. Monday was Daisy's appointment for her snip. I'd been really worried about it - stupidly so in fact, to the point of hardly sleeping on Sunday night - but thankfully everything went smoothly and she was fine. I think the most traumatic thing for her was not getting any breakfast in the morning, but she more than made up for it when she came home. She's been as pesky as ever this week, chasing Doris and Frank up and down the stairs on a regular basis, despite a large bald patch and Frankensteinien style stitches on her side.
Work has been intensely frustrating this week too. We need to do a mailshot to inform clients about the price increase due in April, which means sending a letter and a schedule list of their system components. The letter could have been a simple mail merge if not for the multiple schedule lines (which is possible to in Word but bloody awkward). The alternative was a database report which worked, but has limitations in the way it can be formatted that involved multiple revisions and much quibbling about which things could be formatted in bold. Did you know if you have a block of text as an embedded Word document there is no obvious way to force it to be a correct point size but rather the report designer just resizes it to fit the space? Grrr.
You may remember me linking to dailylit.com a while ago. I've just finished reading Accelerando By Charles Stross in bite size daily email chunks. An excellent post cyberpunk bit of sf starting in the near future and literally fast forwarding through huge technological and social change following one family over several generations. Lots of in jokes and references to pick up as well. I've just signed up for War and Peace next, in 675 instalments. Fortunately you can get the next instalment immediately by clicking on the link in the email if you want to carry on reading.
Thursday night was Alicia's parent's evening at college, and I hope it will have given her a suitable wake up call to knuckle down for her exams in January. Enough said I think.
Today was spent painting the kitchen, including the ceiling to cover up the stains from the leak in the bathroom earlier in the year. It's taken most of the day between us, including shifting things around and cleaning up afterwards, but it has definitely been worth it. Jan's done most of the actual painting and I've mostly done the other things, but it was a proper team effort. I'm snackered now, so it's time to sit down with a nice cup of freshly ground coffee and the audio-visual wallpaper of X Factor on the telly box.
While I'm at it, have some links (h/t David Thompson)
- How to recognise a Cylon - useful advice
- Shaolin Temple of Zen - make sure to watch the animation
- Kashiwa Sato - very cool web design
Obligatory kitten picture
No comments:
Post a Comment