Friday stuff

After the mad wordathon of nano, I’ve been feeling rather drained and seem to have misplaced my blogging mojo. Apologies to anyone who’s been wondering where I am. Oh, you weren’t wondering? Ah, ok, ahem, I’ll just talk to myself then. Anyhoo, long time, no blog, so what have I been up to recently?

I usually leave my house about ten to eight in the morning, or thereabouts.

Yesterday was a snow day, although the snow was barely enough to cover the pavements and do much more than leave a thin film of slush on the roads. That was sufficient however to bring the whole transport network grinding to a halt. People in humungous 4 wheel drive behemoths were crawling along clutching their steering wheels looking like they were at the helm of three masted schooner in a force ten gale in the southern seas. What’s the point of driving a big vehicle like that if, on the one day of the year that you are actually driving it in the conditions it was supposedly designed for, you drive like a frightened rabbit?

So, I crawled all the way to Leeds along roads that were barely wet, and didn’t get in to the office until a quarter past nine. Today I set off at exactly the same time and I was sat at my desk with a nice cup of coffee at half past eight. Madness? This is Sparta! Er, I mean South Yorkshire.

Jamie has been off school with a nasty bug all week and I think that I picked up a dose of it as well, with Wednesday being particularly bad, necessitating working from home, or at least within sprinting distance of the loo. I managed to get a big chunk of work completed on the module for printing P45 tax forms for submission to the HMRC with a ridiculously exacting specification defining the location of objects to the nearest 100th of a millimetre. Madness? This is ... (cont. page 94).

At least my boss and the consultant who is going to be implementing it were suitably impressed, so hurrah for that. Genuine quote – “Wow! This is really being printed out of our system?”. ~metaphorically buffs fingernails on shirt~

What else?

On the games front, we traded in the stunningly beautiful but repetitive Mirror’s Edge for the more visceral thrills of Left 4 Dead, a co-op zombie apocalypse first person shooter. Wow. What a taut, edge of the seat game. It really does add to the atmosphere, knowing that your fellow survivors are being played by real people and liable to wander off, do something stupid or possibly shoot you in the back if you get into the line of fire whilst under attack from a horde of rabid zombies. Excellent fun. Just remember not to startle the witch ... J

Bookwise, I’ve just finished listening to the audio version of The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. This has been described as a version of The Jungle Book, but with ghosts and graveyards rather than jungles and bears. It follows the life of an orphaned boy called Nobody – Bod for short – as he is raised by the late inhabitants of a graveyard on the edge of a provincial town, including his adoptive parents, the kindly Mr and Mrs Owens, and the mysterious Silas who is not dead, but not really alive either. Each chapter is a self contained short story, with an overarching plot concerning the deliciously nasty man Jack who killed Bod’s family, and is now hunting for him for some nefarious purpose. In the best traditions of all books ostensibly written for children it is spine chilling in places with the scariest monsters being the human kind, and the ending is suitably moving. Highly recommended.