So it’s been my habit – if something you do once a year can be called a habit – to wish her a happy Christmas, via the Internet. She never replied, I never expected her to. It was just one of those things.

Until this year, when she did reply, asking me not to contact her again.

I was mildly surprised – I thought we’d parted on relatively good terms. But I’ve been wrong before, and probably will be again. So that’s one less name on the Christmas card list. Figuratively speaking.

I was also mildly surprised by my reaction. Or lack of it. It didn’t bother me as much as I might have expected. Admittedly, it’s been a few years & all. But even so..

So I thought about it. I’d read her blog before messaging her, that would doubtless have had some impact. And it wasn’t hard to think up a reason or two. Like, when we were together she was a girl dreaming of traveling round the world before going to University at the far end of the country; a few years later and she’s not even left her parents’ house yet.

But that’s a little on the analytical side. Doesn’t explain an emotional reaction.

I thought a bit more. And it seemed to me that it was one more example of something that’s been bugging me for most of 2011. And that is: How happy most people are to be mediocre. The world is full of people who aspire to do nothing more with their lives than work 9-5, go home & watch TV, and wait for the weekend.

A simple “acid test” is to look for the presence of at least one of the following traits:

• Creativity – do they spend a significant amount of time making things, writing, painting, whatever.
• Learning – do they spend a lot of their time reading, studying, experimenting, etc.
• Insightfulness – are they able to take what they already know, find holes and inconsistencies in that knowledge, and come up with new ideas on their own?

Most people fail on all counts.

When I first came across Naughty, it was the blog of a total stranger that I just happened to read. But that casual scanning of a couple of posts was enough to make me think “Wow.” Because she was a master of the third, hardest trait – she was insightful. Anyone can read a book or mess around with paint. It’s a real talent to be able to look at the world and change the way you think about it.

That was then. But when I took a look at Christmas.. There was just nothing there. No flashes of inspiration, not even a spark.

Obviously, I don’t claim that reading a few posts can tell you all about somebody’s life. There’s all kinds of good reasons why I might be wrong. Maybe she’s concentrating on other things and her blog isn’t where she posts the good stuff any more. Maybe she finds it harder to write the insightful stuff on a blog that isn’t anonymous. Maybe her university work takes all her resources. Maybe I’m just wrong.

But somebody who could write a few paragraphs that grabbed my attention when I knew nothing about her is now writing stuff that I find uninteresting even when I remind myself what a remarkable mind wrote it. Somebody who wanted to roam the world is excited about going to London. Somebody who wanted to wake up every day feeling lucky is content with a relationship that she describes at best as “very nice”. Somebody who could completely change the way I thought about things is now writing mostly about trying to lose weight. Somebody who had so much potential has just stopped showing signs of it.

Like most people, Darkly and I bitch about some aspects of our jobs from time to time. One complaint predominates, and it’s a quote from a Pratchett book: “People only think for themselves if you tell them to.”

Darkly moved last year from one of the most challenging schools in the country to a small private school. Despite popular belief, you don’t get particularly good teachers in private schools. Quite the opposite, in fact. Because teachers who can’t inspire interest in what they have to say would get eaten alive in a tough public school, whereas those who can get a mob of unruly drug-addicts-in-training to sit down and listen don’t need to restrict themselves to teaching kids born with a silver spoon.

Since she’s an outstanding teacher, Darkly’s encountered a fair amount of frustration in the new workplace. For example, a co-worker who was complaining that she couldn’t get the kids to do their homework properly. Asked what she did about unacceptable homework, she had no answer other than “give it a bad grade”. Darkly explained her own method: First time you mark the book and find work that’s unacceptable, write “Do this again” in green ink. Next time you mark it, scan back for green remarks and check if the work has been done. If not, orange pen a reminder. Next time, a red pen informs the student they will be redoing the work in detention.

This isn’t exactly a world-shaking technique, involving nothing but a bit of thought, three pens, and a few seconds per book. But this is what makes Darkly an outstanding teacher with pupils who know they can’t get away with not doing work properly. And the reaction from the teacher she was talking to? Was a look of bewilderment.

Myself, I work in a small department with a handful of other programmers. We were all hired on the basis of an enthusiasm for computing, hacking, and that kind of thing. Our job involves spending all day on our computers. So we use a lot of software, and a lot of it is in-house stuff developed specifically to make it quicker and/or easier to do our jobs.

Since the job is constantly evolving, our processes are too, so our toolset needs constant upgrades and tweaks. So you’d think there’d be an established process improvement procedure in place. Right?

Well.. there is. I’ll try and sum it up in layman’s terms: I do it all.

If you want the more detailed description: I do almost all of it, and my boss does some when he’s got the time.

Seriously. There’s not one single part of our job that I haven’t changed to make it more efficient in the last two years. I regularly inform people about new tools I’ve added, new features, better alternatives, etc. I document stuff on our wiki.

Nobody else does this. They happily use what I provide, but despite being just as capable as I am of making software jump through hoops.. they just don’t do it. The closest they ever came? A few months ago, two of the newer starters told me about an idea they’d had that they thought would be helpful. It was, to be honest, something I’d thought about a while previously, but not bothered to do anything with as it was a low priority. So I told them that, yes, I thought it was a good idea. Well done.

So, did they go away and implement it? Nope. They said “Great. Can you set it up, then?”

Sigh. One brief glimmer of hope, and the next moment it all goes dark again. The biggest frustration both Darkly and I face in our day to day jobs is trying to get people to think for themselves. And we’re both in jobs that you would think would demand that of everyone.

The trouble is.. people are so accepting of mediocre. In fact, there’s generally a lot of peer pressure in place to prevent you being anything else. Because if you’re mediocre, then there’s no pressure on anyone else to be anything else. But if you have start with the same resources as they do, and you build something amazing with it whilst they just sit around complaining that they don’t have enough.. well, then they look like idiots. And it’s easier for them to try and stop you succeeding than it is for them to get off their rear and do something.

Put half a dozen crabs in a basket and if one tries to climb out, the others will pull it back in. Kinda sad that humans still have the same instinct, really. Conformity is valued in most societies, and since most people won’t be brilliant..

So it’s easy to accept mediocrity. If everyone else is just as unimaginative, why should you exert yourself? And it can be so safe and easy to take the easy option. Why go anywhere when you could just stay put? Why try to learn if everybody else is ignorant too? Why do something risky when you could safely do nothing? Why follow your dreams today when you can put them off until tomorrow?

A lot of people do that. People with potential, people with dreams.. they imagine a glorious future, but the prosaic matters of today always seem to be so pressing. So they keep postponing the future by yet another day.

And then one day you wake up and you realize that years have gone by and you haven’t done anything and everything you ever dreamed of is still just a dream and you look at your life and it’s safe and sensible and normal and above all it’s grey. Dreary. Empty. Boring.

And you can either give up on all those dreams you had, and stay in your safe, boring, dreary life. Or you can walk away from the life you never really wanted in the first place, and oh my god is that hard to do.

It’s what I did. I was lucky: I only had rent and a girlfriend to worry about. Some people get to that point married with a mortgage. Some people have kids. I know quite a few. My brother got divorced last year. His fiancee got divorced too, but she DID have kids to worry about.

It sneaks up on you. You have someone in your life who you get on really well with, they’re nice, they’re safe, they’re reliable, you have a history, you understand each other.. and then you realize that all that’s true, but you’re not in love with them. Maybe you never were. My future sister-in-law married a guy and had kids with him before she realized she had never loved him.

I could never bring myself to say “I love you” to Crafty. Eventually, I realized that it was because it would have been a lie. That’s when I ended it. That’s why I tend to be very suspicious of other people who describe their significant other as “very nice” or “very sweet” or other flattering terms, but never as “I adore her” or “I love him” – if you can’t say those passionate words, it generally seems to be a reliable sign that there’s no passion there.

In many ways, my relationship with Darkly is like my relationship with Crafty – we’re friendly, we’re affectionate, we live together.. but it’s so much better, because there’s a firmly drawn line in the sand: We’re just friends. Very close friends, but only friends. It’s an improvement.

And I haven’t made all that much recently, but I’ve learned a massive amount, and I’ve got a few things planned – I’m working on a few software projects, some for my own amusement, one or two that I’m working on with Darkly that we may be able to turn into a serious product. This might be the year I finally manage to build myself a car, too – things are in the pipeline. And I’ve no money worries any more. It’s been a bit of a dull year, but it’s been a good foundation for doing some interesting things.

The thing is.. it’s been a lousy year. A lot of time stuck at home. A lot of time studying instead of having fun. A lot of time being sensible instead of doing something fun. But it’s been A YEAR, and it’s been done to give me the ability to do better things in the future.

Almost all the people I encounter in day to day life.. their every year is like my last year. And not because they’re building towards something better. Just because they don’t have any inclination to do more. They’re not working to better themselves or their lives, they’re just.. continuing. Living on from one day to the next, without changing or growing at all.

To them, this is safety and stability and security. All nice words. But to me..

I’ve got to be honest: To me.. that’s a good definition of Hell.

It sure isn’t what I could call living. If you end today the same as you were yesterday.. what was the point? What have you gained?

How can you be HAPPY to live like that??

I just don’t get it..

Mostly, the posts are funnies, with cartoons, and I have on several occasions laughed at them so hard I couldn’t breathe.

The most recent post, tho, wasn’t a funny. It was about depression.

It had quite a lot in it I could relate to.

There’s the feeling of emptiness, of not feeling anything. I had that for YEARS. I used to try to meditate in my lunch break, but whenever I just sat down and cleared my mind, instead of getting that nice happy glow of relaxation, I used to notice that I either was tense from trying not to feel anything, or I was sad.

If I’d actually been aware of my feelings back then, I might have noticed that I hated my job, didn’t like the relationship I was in, and basically had nothing in my life that made me happy. But I’d shut myself away from all that, and just carried on, numbly getting through a day at a time.

Then I finally got out of the job, and some of that numb iciness finally melted. A book I read in the library melted off even more. Did I ever mention my sort-of-superstition about books? It’s weird: From time to time in my life, I see a book on a shelf; maybe in a shop, maybe in a library, maybe in someone’s house. It’s never a book I’ve ever heard of, or an author I’ve heard of, or anything… just a book that I know nothing about in any way. And something tells me “You need this book. You need to know what this book has to say. It’s important.” And it’s always been right. It found me the book that took me around Europe; the book that gave me direction when I came back; and a few other things. And on that occasion, it found me a slushy romance book in the library that I scanned through and something in it hit me in the face with the realization that that relationship I was in with Crafty was completely wrong for both of us. So having finally gotten out of the job, I then found myself getting out of that relationship too. Which meant moving out as well, of course.

So, new home, new job, and shortly after, new relationship as well. For the first time in I don’t know how long, I was feeling things again. I actually felt happy from time to time. Even when I was feeling angry or frustrated or unhappy about what was going on in my life, it was still better than that horrible emptiness.

And then I decided that the new career wasn’t for me after all, and quit. And the relationship ended. And lacking any other idea of what to do with myself, I upped and went traveling. And that was when depression REALLY struck. With fangs. And venom. It felt like I had lost absolutely everything, I had no clue where to go or what to do, no real idea why I should even bother.. I was completely adrift and had no idea how to go about setting myself back on a new path.

That was when I experienced something else from HaaH’s post: I used to imagine depression as The Pit – a deep dark hole that you fall into and then you forget that there’s anything outside of. It’s just you, alone in the empty darkness.

Except you’re not alone, because there’s someone there with you. Always. On Haah’s post, it was kind of a bully. I called it The Liar.

It was always there, whispering so quietly that its voice sounded like your own thoughts. It was the little voice that told you that you were too tired to do anything; it was too much effort to talk to friends or make an effort to go out; that nobody wanted to see you anyway; that nobody really liked you or wanted you around.

I think that was a large part of why I could never bring myself to do what I really knew I should do, and just cut off completely from Naughty: I was trying to convince myself that The Liar *was* lying, so I reached out to somebody who I thought DID care, hoping that if I could prove that it was lying about that, then it was lying about other things too, and maybe I could stop listening to it.

But of course, Naughty didn’t really want to talk to me by then, so if anything I just made matters worse all around. It’s amazing how destructive depression can be, really.

It had been around for years, a chronic disease poisoning my life so slowly and gradually I never really noticed it. It was that period in my life that made it flare up to the point that it was all there was: My whole life was just an aching emptiness, a burden that made getting out of bed each day a huge effort and being productive when up even harder. A lot of the time, my method for getting through the day was to think about suicide: “See if you can get through one more day,” I’d think. “You can always end it tomorrow. Give it one more day.”

Knowing that you have a way out, even if that way out is just to end everything, can make such a difference. It got me through, anyway.

I never quite got to HaaH’s state of being so far into depression, I couldn’t feel anything else. Almost, but not quite. Probably a good thing: I never had the desire to not care what other people thought about me, nor any fear of horror films, so I wouldn’t have had her inspirational reaction to the total apathy that got her out.

But I have got bottomless reserves of bloody-minded stubborn-ness. It’s kind of a defining characteristic. So when I came to the conclusion that depression was an enemy that could be fought, when it became a battle of wills that I was determined to win.. it took months, and it was damn hard, but eventually the day came when I considered myself cured.

It lasted a fair old time. Until this time last year, in fact. Then I had a recurrence, again sneaking up on me, so subtle that I didn’t notice until I was deep into The Pit again.

But when I suddenly noticed that this wasn’t just unhappiness but full-on depression, the strongest surge of willpower I’ve ever felt flooded through my mind and it honestly felt like I had mentally taken hold of The Liar and hurled it bodily out of my head.

I’ve been clear of it ever since. And that hasn’t been because it’s been a good year. Three car/bike crashes, broken bones, scars, money worries, pet health scares.. this year has in fact sucked royally for a lot of the time.

But however bad it got, I never felt more than stoic resignation: Shit happens, it’s happened again, just keep going and get back on top of things. And so I have done, not necessarily happily, but at least without depression knocking me for six. Know your enemy,they say, and I’m getting pretty good at recognizing it. And fighting it.

And in a weird way, it’s been good for me. I’m much more relaxed and confident than I was a few years ago, and more well-rounded in general. Flaws I used to be told I had are gone; as are most of the flaws I noticed in myself. In a way I’d find it hard to quantify, I feel like I have more depth than I had back then. I can look back on the past and think how differently I’d handle it today.

And so the year is ending a little better than it started, and with numerous promising threads to pursue in the new year. I’m not where I want to be, but I’m closer to it than I was a year ago. I’ve got a few more people to buy Christmas presents for than I did last year, a few things to look forward to. And so we progress.

To end, a song I’ve listened to a lot lately. After so many years of having little more feeling that a machine, I can relate to the message of it.

Plus, in a world where it’s so rare to see a woman without lipstick on, there’s something amazingly sexy about a woman not wearing any :o)

But following a collision with a tree, I got carted to hospital with blood pouring down my face, immobilised on a spine board and with no feeling in my left arm.

Not really a good way to spend your holiday.

Luckily, my spine was undamaged. Darkly escaped with just heavy bruising. I have similar damage all over my torso, front and back, along with a fractured left thumb and a nasty gash in my forehead that several chunks of glass were dug out of in the ER. This was stitched up and has healed remarkably well so far. It’s still going to leave a permanent large scar, tho I do have some lotion to apply for the next few months that’s supposed to reduce that somewhat.

And looking on the bright side, there’s such a huge industry built around “If you had an accident and it wasn’t your fault” events these days, when Darkly’s insurance company finally stops stalling, I should get a decent amount of compensation out of it – hopefully I’ll be able to pay off my car, at least. That’ll be nice.

At the moment, though, knowing that I’ll get paid back for all my expenses within the next year or so doesn’t help much, since I’ve had to replace clothes and quite an expensive pair of glasses and those were expenses I really could have done without right now.

Swings and roundabouts, I guess.

After my hospital appointment tomorrow, I’m aiming to go into work for the first time since the crash. It’s nice to have the lie-ins you can get whilst working from home, but I still prefer to work in an office and leave home as the place where I live.

If all goes well and I’m able to start driving, tho, there *is* one thing that I’m looking forward to getting to this week. More news on that later.

Perhaps I should have suspected something when, a few days before I left, after months of thinking that she’d finally come to terms with the fact that we’d never be more than friends, she decided to have another try at “Friends with benefits”.

Still, that’s not exactly unprecedented either.. I didn’t really think much of it. So I left for the conference without any real concerns.

She was a little strange on IM one evening, mentioning she was drinking alone, which she usually doesn’t, and making a reference to finding sharp things attractive.

So a day or two after I got back, I couldn’t help but notice a group of red lines across the top of one of her thighs. Apparently in my absence, for the first time in a decade, she caved and fell back on cutting herself to get her through a bad time.

My first reaction was guilt – I should have foreseen it, I should have picked up on it over IM, I should have said something, done something.. It’s hardly the first time I’ve dealt with a self-harmer, and although I still don’t understand the relief it apparently gives, I’m familiar with the signs and pretty good at helping to deal with them. I should have done something.

My second reaction was to swiftly counter the first. Darkly’s a very close friend and she does matter a lot to me. But she’s not my responsibility. I’m not going to spend my life looking for all the hints and signs that all is not well. Been there, done that. And to be honest.. I’m kind of tired of it.

I have a strong sense of responsibility. I know this about myself. It’s often stronger than I’d really like, to be honest – even when I know I really should stop feeling responsible, or should never have started in the first place, it has a bad tendency to not co-operate. It still bothered me last time I worried that Naughty was unhappy. It bothers me more than it should when Darkly is having problems, and the same goes for Lazy and Lady and one or two others.

And seriously, what’s the point? What do I get out of being concerned about people who want nothing to do with me? How does it help to care about people who I can’t care about the way they want? Why do I have to spend so much time analysing so much of what I say and do because of the effect it might have on somebody I don’t expect to ever see again?

Maybe it’s self-pitying. But I really am kinda tired of caring about people who either want nothing to do with me or want far more from me than I’m able to give.

Is it really so much to ask for something that’s a little more even-sided?

…

Well, that’s today’s rant over with. I’m aware it sounds far more self-pitying than I meant, but meh, what’s a blog for if not to publish self-serving rantings in? :)

If you know anything about serious geeks, you’ll be unsurprised to hear that the most useful parts of the entire event happened in the evening when we’d all gone to one of the many bars in the capital city.

The city in question was Riga, the capital of Latvia. A fantastic place, well worth a visit if you ever get the chance. One thing that struck us both was that Latvian girls are gorgeous. All of them. Seriously, there were more pretty girls walking down the street in Latvia than I saw in Hollywood. It was quite amazing.

I think I’m going to need to give my boss a name, so let’s go with.. Smiler. We get on well because we have quite a bit in common – We go rock climbing most weeks, we both scuba dive, both have similar working habits, etc.

So. Despite Smiler’s best efforts, I didn’t get drunk whilst out there – and when you’re being handed glasses with four shots of rum in, that can take some doing. But I don’t like being anything more than a little tipsy, so I stayed that way. And for the most part, I went to bed at a fairly sensible time – before midnight, at least – and was awake enough to get a lot out of the conference talks and so forth.

On the last night, however, I was kind of out of excuses – didn’t have to be up for anything other than our flight the next day; didn’t have any money worries, we were on an expense account; and to be honest it’s been too long since I just went out for a laugh & a night on the town.

So I said to hell with it and joined Smiler and a few other conference attendees on a tour of the nightlife. He almost got sidetracked by a waitress at the bar we met everybody at (He’s an incorrigible flirt, even though he has a girlfriend) but ultimately took the barman’s advice of where we could find somewhere to have some fun and we moved onto a club a few streets away.

I haven’t been clubbing in.. god.. the best part of a decade. And I was never really all that comfortable with it – Everybody else seemed to know what they were doing, whilst I felt like I was faking it the whole time.

So I was quite happy to grab a drink and a seat and just take a look around for a few minutes. It was early enough that the dance floor was fairly clear – there was one young lady who was clearly in her element dancing with a male friend, a few people half-standing and half-bopping to the music, and that was about it.

Smiler had noted on one of his previous nights out that there weren’t many men interested in dancing in Riga, so suggested that we just hit the dance floor and we’d soon be joined by some of the girls around the edge. I confess I was the last by some way to go out onto the floor.

But then I thought about it a little. I’d not had any exercise in a few days, not even my usual daily run; I’d spent so much time sitting in talks that my shoulders were complaining; and to hell with it, I might be out of practice but I DO know how to dance.

So I finished my drink and went onto the floor. And I just stopped worrying and to be honest I was moving more to stretch out the knots in my back than to look good. But it felt good and we were having fun, I really didn’t much care about anything else.

So I was a little surprised when the pretty lady who’d been dancing earlier asked me if I wanted to dance with her. It came completely out of the blue, at least as far as I was concerned. But hey, pretty girl wants to dance, you can’t really say no..

Given that I’d seen her earlier and knew she was a great dancer, I was a little surprised when she complimented me on my dancing. Possibly the fact that I mixed in a few jive moves had something to do with it. Or possibly it was the way that we were both being very flirty, albeit in a very innocent way. Nothing anyone could object to.

Well.. It’s possible I did discover firsthand that she had a very firm bottom.. but that was it.

We chatted a bit, danced for a while, then one of her friends – an irish guy, it seemed – came over and gave her a very good-humoured telling-off for dancing with a stranger. He called me several very unflattering names, I grinned and said something like “I like you too!”, they both laughed and headed off the stage.

A little while later, one of the other men in her little party came over to have a more serious quiet word with me, of the “That’s my girl, hands off, pal” variety. Which I again shrugged off – I’d already said I was leaving the country next day, and hell, she was the one had asked ME to dance.

And so the night went on, and then a little later we bumped into each other again and she asked for another dance. To which I obliged. My comment that her boyfriend wouldn’t be very happy about it lead to the not-entirely-unexpected “I don’t have a boyfriend” reply. I warned her lightheartedly that if I got beaten up outside I would blame her entirely, and we left it pretty much at that. (We might be geeky programmers, but Smiler’s a black belt and I’ve done a couple of martial arts in my time too, in addition to being substantially bigger than anyone else in the club – I could afford to be fairly relaxed even without her assurance that everyone was friendly. They were – the worst I got were some envious looks. At one point she asked if I was making my boss angry by dancing with her, and I gave the honest answer of “Not really, he’s just jealous”)

Eventually the night was over and at around 3am we headed home. It had definitely been a fun night, unexpectedly so – I’d forgotten what a rarity it is to be a man who can dance without being a showoff; and an even bigger rarity it is to be a man who’s evidently looking for nothing more than a bit of fun without anything more serious at the end than maybe a goodnight kiss (which I got!)

Where I live at the moment is a complete desert when it comes to having fun in the evenings. At some time over the next 6 months or so, a move to a place with more to offer is very definitely on the cards. I’m starting to think that I might do better out of such a move than I had previously imagined..

The house felt incredibly empty afterwards, but neither of us thought it would be a good idea to try another puppy. So we went for the easy option: Cats.

I’ve never lived with a cat before. To be honest, I always found them a kind of pointless pet when I saw other people’s: They were rarely home, preferring to be out & about; when they were home, they didn’t really interact much – they were basically either absent or aloof. I didn’t see the point. But Darkly had had several, and since it seemed kinder to have two kittens keeping each other company while we were at work, it seemed to make sense that we’d get one each.

I basically looked at this as paying half the costs for the two kittens, as I had no real interest in owning one. We went to a local rescue center to make our choices.

Darkly, true to her goth nature, found a litter of black cats, and fell in love with one of them, which purred nonstop whilst we were there.

I almost just picked one of the other black litter at random as my choice, but then I came across a cage that wasn’t quite as empty as I’d originally thought: There was a tiny little calico kitten hiding in it.

I went in to say hello, and she was clearly a little unhappy about this, as she glanced wildly around the cage looking for an escape route. She opted to try and climb the highest thing in the cage to try to get away from me, a plan with the slight drawback that as she neared the top, she came nose to nose with my rather amused face as she stood on my shoulder.

She made a strange little noise as this point, not a usual kitten ‘meep’ but more of a squawk – she just opened her mouth wide and forced an ‘ak!’ sound out. This seemed very cute. The staff member who’d been showing us around came over at this point, and said “That’s unusual, she normally just runs away”. Darkly, who knows me fairly well, just said “You want that one, then?”

So we’d both found our kittens, and requested they be put in the same cage until we could collect them, to make sure they wouldn’t fight. The next day we were informed that they weren’t fighting, but were basically just ignoring each other. That was good enough, we figured. We were also told their histories at that point: The black kittens had been brought in by their mother’s owner, who just hadn’t been able to cope with them all. So they’d gone from a house to a rescue center with all their siblings around, no real trauma. My little furball, on the other hand, had been found on the streets, half-dead from hunger, thirst, and parasites. I was warned that she was likely to be very standoffish and antisocial, but since this was what I expect of any cat, I didn’t really have any problems with this.

Since I wasn’t all that excited by the prospect of kittens, I didn’t feel any need to be in on the collection run – Darkly went and got them in the afternoon a few hours before I got back. When I came in, I saw her little black beast prowling around, but not mine. Upon asking, I was told that.. let’s call her “Sooty”.. Sooty had come out of the carry-case, looked around, seen there was food, water, a litter tray, and a huge amount more space than she’d had in the cage, and given a kind of “Yes, this’ll do” look. Since when she’d been investigating the room nonstop.

Mine, on the other hand.. we shall call her “Squeaky”. Squeaky had come out of the case, looked around, panicked, and run into a corner to hide under the low table. Where she’d stayed ever since.

I don’t know cats, but I do know enough psychology to know that dragging her out of her hidey-hole would have been a very bad idea. But she couldn’t stay there forever. So I ducked my head under the table, said “Hello” to her, and then caught hold of Sooty on her way past and sat stroking her. She purrs quite loudly, and after a little while, Squeaky figured that it might be safe for a little kitten to come near one of these big pink blobs after all. She crept out tentatively and I put Sooty down to pick up Squeaky instead. Sooty trotted off cheerfully to investigate another part of the room and Squeaky sat on my lap for a while and got stroked.

This was the basic formula for the next few days: Squeaky would hide until Sooty and I convinced her it was safe, then she’d come out and get fussed over. The house is fairly quiet, what with both of us going out to work all day and not doing anything loud when we’re home. So Squeaky had plenty of quiet time to relax and learn to feel safe in her new home, never got pestered when she was hiding, and always got welcomed when she came out.

Our initial concerns about the two kits getting on together went away very quickly – they both approved of being moved to a big room with sofas and cushions and windows. Squeaky had been all alone in her cage and seemed glad of some company; Sooty had been surrounded constantly by a multitude of brothers and sisters, and seemed glad of the solitude. We came down after their first night here and they were both fast asleep on an armchair, tangled up together and completely dead to the world.

The fact that they were so different personality-wise undoubtedly was a big help: Sooty is a ‘proper’ cat – the whole world belongs to her, everything in it is her servant, and she liked perching on the top of the armchair where she could survey her realm in comfort. Squeaky is not a proper cat. Territorial, dignified, aloof, graceful, stealthy… these are just a few of the words she has absolutely no idea what the meanings of are. It’s become a standing joke that there’s an elephant hiding upstairs that Squeaky hunts, because she thumps around so much sometimes you just can’t believe that a cat could make so much noise.

So Sooty had no worries about territorial disputes as far as Squeaky was concerned – Squeaky just doesn’t have that kind of instinct. She wasn’t so sure about us tho – we seemed friendly enough, and supplied her food and cleaned up after her and all, but she was still a little wary that we were much bigger than her and might be a threat to her if she wasn’t careful.

This lasted until a few weeks after she arrived, when she fell ill – nothing major, just the equivalent of the kind of cold that makes a human spend a day or two in bed. But Sooty was too young to know how to cope with being unwell, and hadn’t quite learned about things like eating to keep her strength up, or drinking to fend off dehydration. So she was very weak and tired, and in that “I don’t feel well, why can’t the world just leave me alone” state you may have experienced yourself when ill.

The illness itself was minor, but Sooty being unaware that she needed to drink was a real concern – she wouldn’t get up on her own, and even carrying her to her water bowl just made her squeak plaintively until we left her alone. We couldn’t make her understand that we were trying to help or that she needed to drink: she thought we were taking advantage of her weakness and were taking over her territory.

Darkly finally resorted to the slightly drastic measure of filling a small syringe with kitten milk and injecting it into Sooty’s mouth. After a few resentful yowls about being poked in the face with a plastic tube, Sooty realised there was tasty fluid coming out and that drinking it made her feel a lot better: She lapped up the milk and after a few more doses was strong enough to drink from a bowl again.

She made a full recovery a day or two later, and all the tension that had been there before the illness was gone – discovering that she didn’t need to defend her home from us because all we did when she was ill was help her get better made her realise that she didn’t have to worry about us being around.

Squeaky, though, continued to have a certain amount of nervousness – she didn’t see the house as her territory like Sooty did. Rather, she was insecure – she had a lingering fear that we might throw her out if she misbehaved, always running and hiding if she had any worry that she’d done something wrong.

There wasn’t much we could do about that except wait for her to realise that we wouldn’t do that.

So, fast-forward a few months, and where are we today?

Well, the kits are no longer restricted to one big room – they have the run of the house and the outside world. Sooty roams the neighbourhood and picks fights with the other cats. Squeaky is quite fond of the garden, but won’t leave it – occasionally she glances over the neighbours’ fences, but never takes more than a few steps into their gardens before running home.

Sooty likes her home and is never gone for more than a few hours, but it’s not big enough for her to live in. Home is Squeaky’s entire world and she has no desire to leave it.

Sooty is fond of her humans and doesn’t mind guests dropping in: She’ll come and say hello, sit in laps, rub against legs, etc. Squeaky doesn’t really approve of any humans other than the two of us, and hides whenever other people come around. She’s completely fine with Darkly. But I’m a little different..

When I take a shower in the mornings, she goes into my room and waits on my bed until I come out and give her a cuddle as I get dressed. When I go to bed at night, she sneaks up and demands cuddles before she gets put to bed downstairs. And if I’m late home, or if I go out without her knowing about it, she cries.

I swear I’m not making this up – it drives Darkly nuts. Squeaky walks around the house looking for me and squeaks nonstop until I come home. And she does this without fail, every single time. I actually have to tell her I’m going out if I don’t want her to drive Darkly crazy.

Darkly used to warn me that I was about to get my hand clawed off for what I was doing when I was playing with Squeaky – I’d pick her up and swing her around the room (to prove that we had enough room to swing a cat), or hold her upside down to rub her tummy, or some such. She’s long since given up on this, and instead just shakes her head in disbelief at what I can get away with with Squeaky.

Squeaky has huge eyes, giving her a perpetually-startled look, and it’s a standing joke that she doesn’t have a brain: she just has a head full of loose wires that short-circuit so much that her head is full of a sparks. Every now and again, Squeaky just sits and stares wide-eyed at nothing, and this is labelled as her watching the fireworks that she has in place of thoughts. Her behaviour is so atypical of cats, being more like a cross between a kitten and a puppy, that it’s easy to joke about her being completely daft.

But she’s actually very intelligent – she figured out how to open doors months ago, something Sooty still can’t do, and how to get behind the curtains in my room, and various other things. She learns very fast when she wants to.

She’s actually brought home as many mice as Sooty has, despite never leaving our mouse-free garden. And she has an uncanny knack of finding rubber bands, even though Darkly and I are both certain that we’ve never brought any into the house.

I’ve said before that I have a hard time getting angry – I can count of the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve been truly angry in my life. I discovered one thing that does the trick tho, courtesy of Squeaky. The other cats in the neighbourhood tend to bully our two, who are still a way from being fully grown. Sooty, I’m under no illusions, thoroughly deserves it – she goes into other cats’ gardens, eats their food, and generally pushes her luck to the breaking point. I don’t blame them for making her have to dash for home when they catch her.

Squeaky, on the other hand, is completely un-aggressive and never leaves our garden. Other cats coming in to our garden in order to chase her into the house are just bullying, pure and simple. So any offenders get a faceful of water and chased out of the garden.

But there was one time when I heard a plaintive little squeak from outside and looked out to see one of the big cats had put itself BETWEEN Squeaky and the house, and was now stalking towards her menacingly as she backed away.

I imagine that this cat still wonders just how everything went so suddenly wrong, because two seconds after the helpless little kitten voiced its distress, there was a human coming up on it from the house behind it and a vengeful black kitten had warped from wherever it had been prowling and was on the fence above the little calico preparing to show this cat the meaning of the phrase “death from above”

The cat managed to exit stage right in an amazing adrenaline-fuelled leap and has left Squeaky very firmly alone ever since. I sat out in the garden for a little while until the kits had both calmed down, then went back in to get a slightly strange look from Darkly: She’d never actually seen me angry before.

Oh well, I suppose we all have our triggers – I can’t say I’m too bothered to learn that one thing that’ll move me to anger is something falling foul of my very wide protective streak.

So as they near leaving their kittenhood, our two small fuzzies have very definitely been shaped by their experiences & owners. Sooty is an independent hunter who enjoys coming back for company and affection from time to time. Squeaky is a gentle&shy but incredibly affectionate little creature with no desire to be anywhere but at home with her owner.

When we first got them, I thought that if I were to move out, they’d both stay with Darkly – I wouldn’t really miss having a cat, and Squeaky would be happier staying in the home she grew up in with the companion cat she’d grown up with.

Less than a year later, and I must admit that I’ve changed my mind: If I do move out, Squeaky would have to come with me. I’d miss her if she weren’t there, and she’d be devastated if I stopped coming home.

I’m still not a cat person – I maintain that I can’t understand what most people get out of owning their cats. But Squeaky’s not a typical cat, she’s very much mine, and we’d both be unhappy to be separated.

I took a picture the other day. See what I have to put up with?

If that idea conjures up gin-clear water and schools of fish darting through the brightly-coloured coral, then you’ve forgotten I live in England. And because of the time it takes to get trained, and the academic year, and so on, my first dive trip was to an inland dive site – a deep lake a long ways north. In March.

It snowed.

The water was bitingly cold, I was in a hired dive suit and very old, borrowed gloves – thin and full of holes. When I went into the water, my hands were so cold they ached. But after a little while, I adjusted, my hands stopped feeling cold, and we got on with things. And that was fine, until we got out of the water. My hands were so cold that I couldn’t squeeze the plastic pinch-clips on my equipment to remove it. It took all my strength to get them undone.

Figuring that this was not just uncomfortable but downright dangerous, I went to the site shop and made my first purchase of scuba gear: Some gloves. Which I wore on the next dive.

I did notice that the cold water wasn’t quite so painful to start with, but then a funny thing happened: I never got used to the cold. My hands were aching with cold from start to finish. I got out of the water convinced that I had wasted my money on a lousy pair of gloves – the crappy hole-ridden old gloves had been better than these shiny new ones!

And then I went to undo the plastic clips again, and they squeezed open without any trouble. And something went ‘Ping!’ in my head as it all suddenly came clear.

The original gloves had done such a lousy job that my hands hadn’t ‘gotten used’ to being cold – they’d just gone so numb that I didn’t feel it anymore. The new gloves were better, so my hands had felt cold the whole time because they WEREN’T numb. Hence why I had had no strength in them in the old gloves. The new gloves had kept my hands warm enough to feel how cold they were, giving me a false impression of how well they compared to the old ones.

Why is this relevant to today? Well, because every now and again in recent months, I’ve gone into a bit of a downer. And this has puzzled me, because I never used to get these periods where I felt sad and depressed at how my life was going; and yet on the face of it my life is better now than it used to be. Why am I occasionally unhappy now when things are pretty good, when I never was a few years ago when life was pretty crap?

And this is where my scuba experience comes in as a handy metaphor, because I realised that in the same way that I noticed the cold more when they were warmer; I’m noticing the down times specifically because I’m mostly pretty happy. They’ve become the noticeable episode rather than the numbing perma-state.

A few years ago, I basically didn’t like any aspect of my life. Didn’t like my job, didn’t like my relationship, etc. etc. Quitting my job to start out afresh training as a teacher was the snowflake the triggered an avalanche: I moved home, split up with my girlfriend, met somebody else, all was well.

Then I decided that teaching wasn’t for me either, and quit that. My girlfriend split up with me. Suddenly, I had lost every focus of my life and I was completely at a loss as to what to do next: As a result, the unhappiness with nearly all aspects of my life that I had been living with for a long time became so acute that I went into a massive bout of depression.

I was asked recently by somebody I met in that period if I remembered a conversation we’d had. I thought about it for a while, and then gave the honest answer of “No”. Thinking about it a little more, I realised that I actually barely remember anything of the entire period. There’s a huge mental fog with occasional isolated islands of unrelated memories.

I remember my trip through Europe quite well: I remember talking to a man in the campsite with him speaking in lousy english and me in lousy french because it was the only way we could communicate. I remember my first ride on the French train, being so baffled by their seat reservation system that I didn’t want to challenge the man in what seemed to be my seat, so I grabbed the conductor and asked him where I was meant to sit. And he didn’t challenge the guy in my seat either, but found me another seat. I remember the chocolates I found in one little shop in Belgium that were so good they almost count as addictive. I remember the crazy parisian taxi driver who was so determined to get me to my train on time that he was pulled over the the police and drove down a pedestrians-only street. I remember getting so blase about seat reservations by the end of the trip that it was 50/50 whether I’d be asking somebody to move by waving a ticket at him and using sign language, or whether I’d be the one getting a ticket waved at me for nicking somebody else’s seat. I remember the strange spanish lady I met in Venice who wanted to kiss me. I remember being told about the dirty secret behind one of Rome’s most famous fountains… There were a lot of interesting things on that trip that stand out from the haze. But the rest of the time..?

I have no idea how I wound up staying with Darkly when I came back to England. I can’t remember how Naughty and I went from being very close and trying to make it as “just friends” to being at war so badly that we had to stop talking. I don’t know why Lazy decided to come over and visit me, I barely remember her visit and I have no clue why she now hates me. I’ve no idea what’s happening with Lady, who I’ve known for nearly 15 years but haven’t heard from in a year… I genuinely have no idea how I wound up in my current situation. I know that events are made more or less memorable depending on your emotional state, and I remember just how bad a state I was in, so I assume that’s the reason: When you’re not just numb from the cold, but feeling like you’re almost dead of it, you’re not going to be committing much to memory.

But, as I was reminded recently by an online acquaintance, eventually something happened that made me determined to get out of the mental pit I was in; and being a stubborn man I dug in my heels and made it happen: Slowly I got out of the depression, I found a job I liked, sorted out a home I liked, and generally started replacing all the things that had made me unhappy with things that I enjoyed. I found some direction for my life. It was a long process and it took a lot of determination, and it still isn’t over, but it’s trundling along in the right direction.

So yes, it does sound a little odd to say that the reason I notice I feel sad more often now than I used to is that I’m happier than I used to be.. but it’s true nonetheless. And in a strange way, I count it as a good sign when I notice that I’m sad, because it’s become unusual enough to be noteworthy.

Long time no see.

It’s not that I haven’t had anything to say – there are posts that I’ve been meaning to write for the last six months. And new ones keep coming along too.

Problem is, I just never seem to get the time. I’m either busy, or so tired from being so busy that I just don’t want to sit and type out a blog post.

But enough’s happened recently that I wanted to get written up, so I’ve written this blog post bit-by-bit in my occasional blips of spare time at work. It may, then, be slightly lacking in coherency and flow.. it’s taken about two weeks to write!

So.. unlike most people I know, I enjoy my job. However, I have a tendency to have the same mindset that teachers are told to watch out for: You can watch someone spend an hour giving a brilliant lesson, and at the end you ask them how it went and they’ll say “Terrible: I forgot to do this; and when I did that I should have included the other” – they’ll have failed to notice all the stuff they did right, and instead see all the things they did wrong.

By the same token, the level of knowledge needed to be able to be self-sufficient at my job is something that anybody would take years to acquire: There are multiple languages to learn, and multiple systems to find out about. I’ve been here a year and I’ve been soaking up information like a sponge, but I’m still not even close to knowing enough to just get on and solve the difficult tasks. Which I find frustrating, because it means (as above) that I’m mostly aware of how far I’ve got to go, and don’t appreciate at all just how far I’ve already come.

However, over the last month or two a few notable things have happened that have made me challenge the feeling that I’m still barely even a competent beginner at my job. Hence this post.

I probably need to explain a little bit about my department’s structure for the rest of the post to make sense. When I started, there was my boss, who’s an uber-programmer. There were two experienced programmers, and two new hires – myself and one other who started a couple weeks before I did.

A year later, one of our experienced guys had left and we took on two new guys. I was asked to do all their training. This was a minor surprise, but only minor: I knew I had learned far more than my fellow new hire from the year before; and our experienced guy was overloaded with work. Plus, I’ve trained as a teacher; and I’m the only one who bothers to update our wiki with helpful documentation. So I was told to write an induction and then get them up & running when they started.

This I duly did, and I have to say, they had a much smoother time then I did with their first few days – there being no induction at all when I began. My boss’ review agreed with this assessment, with a single caveat: There had been times when I was deeply into a complex task and unable to stop and give a hand when our newbies got stuck, so one of my colleagues would step in. This, I was told, I should try and keep to the bare minimum possible, because he didn’t want them to pick up bad habits in their early days.

This was a bit of a surprise to me, although on reflection it shouldn’t really have been. We all have our ways of getting things done, but whilst my co-workers tend to get “Why are you doing that?” and “Don’t ever do that again!” quite often, most of my working habits have been pointed to as Best Practice and quite a few of them have become actual standards. I hadn’t really considered this anything particularly noteworthy: Just a result of two habits I have, of wanting to keep things organised; and wanting to find the best/most efficient way of doing things.

But it was kind of flattering to be told “Don’t let them learn from other people, you’re the only one with good working habits.”

More than that, however, was the fact that, busy times aside, whenever they had a question about “How do I..?” or “What does this..?” etc., I was very rarely unable to answer. Our software is immensely complicated, being multi-layered and written in a variety of languages, and it takes a long time to learn enough of the basics to even stand a chance of working out what’s going on. So having a couple of new people come in with no idea what was going on, and being able to tell them “This is happening, because of that, and here’s some context to make it all make sense” was surprisingly helpful to me: Day-to-day work still presents me with endless situations where I don’t know enough to complete a task; being able to sort out the problems of the newcomers made me realise just how much I’ve learned in the last year. The fact that you’ve got a lot still to learn can make you lose sight of the fact that you’ve already learned an awful lot.

So, having some newcomers added to the team has been good in a number of ways. For one, it’s nice to be in a company that’s expanding during a recession – takes some of the worries out. For another, it’s made me focus on just how much I’ve learned instead of how much I still have left to learn. It’s also hilighted the fact that my basic working habits are considered not just good, but good enough to be how newcomers should be trained; and shown that I’m still able to do a good job of creating resources and teaching people – In fact, in a recent meeting, my boss described our newcomers’ induction as “the biggest improvement in years” courtesy of the work I had done and the training I’d given. It’s nice to get that kind of feedback about the way you work, especially when you haven’t been making any special effort, just doing what comes naturally.

After years in my old job, which I didn’t like and was told I couldn’t really be promoted as I wasn’t really suitable as a role-model (something I agreed with, I might add – I hated the job but I did like my old boss), it’s nice to now be doing a job I enjoy and know that the way I’m doing it is considered the way other people are being told to emulate.

So that’s all very good and positive. But (is there always a but?) a black cloud did recently loom. We took on yet another new guy.

In fairness, he did come in at a somewhat more busy time than the previous new guys, so he didn’t get quite as much of our time as the other two. But he still got a full induction and was handed the typical easy tasks that are given to newbies for learn-as-you-go purposes.

The problem was, he didn’t seem to be learning as he went: Although he was already a competent programmer in one language, he seemed unable to transition to the ones we use. Worse, he was struggling with the underlying logic that should be universal to any programmer. I was also frustrated by the way I would spend a lot of time explaining the task to him, telling him where to look, giving pointers as to what to do, showing him examples, etc. etc., ending up with “Do you undersand what you need to do?” and being told “Yes, it’s all clear”, so I’d go away, come back an hour later, and find that he’d made no progress and couldn’t have taken in any of what I’d showed or explained: He’d just spent an hour randomly doing things instead of asking for help or admitting at the start that he needed more clarification.

So I had a review with my boss two weeks after the newest new guy started. Ostensibly, anyway: It went pretty much like this:
“Everything okay?”
“Yup.”
“Great! That’s that sorted. So, what are your impressions of the new guy?”

I hate such open-ended questions: It’s so hard to know what you’re being asked. So I took a few moments to consider my answer, and then admitted that I had some concerns: Lack of communication, lack of understanding, lack of progress…

These, it turned out, were exactly the same concerns my boss had. He had also noticed something that I had overlooked: The new guy had so far failed to actually produce anything of his own. All the work that he had done, had actually been done by other people helping him when he got stuck. He was literally doing but asking for help until somebody did the next bit for him, and doing this over and over until he was finished.

Normal process at this point would be that my boss monitors the new guy, and if he doesn’t make progress, he’s out. However, boss was too busy to spare that time if he didn’t absolutely have to, so he asked me to do it.

I said ok; the new guy was given a list of places we wanted to see progress and targets we’d be measuring; and a week later, I was asked for my report: Bluntly, was he worth keeping?

Regrettably, my answer was negative: In the three weeks he’d been here, I simply hadn’t seen any signs of learning or progress. I could cite too many examples of problems, and honestly couldn’t give a single positive example of where he had achieved anything.

Based on my feedback, that was his last day.

I was also asked for some feedback for the other two new starters, which I gave – they’re both doing really well, they were actually productive and doing useful work from the beginning of their second day. Having been the one who’d trained them, I was asked if I’d be okay with sitting in on their first performance review. I said yes. I was then asked if I would be okay, all going well, with subsequently being the one who GAVE their performance reviews.

That question, and the implications it carried, genuinely took me completely by surprise. As far as I was concerned, I was just another junior programmer, in pretty much the same bracket as the new guys themselves. Suddenly I was being asked if I was ok with going in the direction of basically becoming a manager.

It took a few seconds for me to realise that I really ought to have given an answer by now, so I admitted I had never really considered the possibility, but was okay with it. Maybe I should have been more prepared for it – having been doing all the training & monitoring and all – but I’m just not used to thinking that way. I haven’t been working towards a promotion. I’ve just been working.

So, in summary, work is going well – apparently better than I realise, in fact. We have yet another new starter beginning in a week or two, and I was actually one of the interviewers for him. I’m doing all the training again, and so it goes. And though I was planning on writing a bunch of other stuff into this post, it’s already long enough, and TAKEN long enough, so I’ll end it here and write the rest of the post later.

The only downside came around Xmas last year when I was concerned about her and had no way of finding out if all was well other than getting in touch and asking her. Which I don’t want to be in the habit of doing. So I decided to modify my “Do not read” policy slightly – I occasionally wish her well, such as on her birthday, so I decided I’d take a look at her blog at those times. So a couple of times a year, I could make sure that all was well, and thus leave her alone.

Which seemed a reasonable compromise, until it was her birthday the other day. When I looked at her blog. And was promptly tempted to respond. Which I don’t want to do. But, as so often happens, it’s become like an itch I can’t scratch. So I’ve decided to go with a compromise: I’ll reply here.

Does she still read this thing? I have no idea. I don’t have many readers and I don’t know who most of them are. So she might see it or she might not, I don’t know. But at least it’ll stop bugging me.

Hopefully.

It’s nothing important. But I read the post where you lamented that you didn’t seem able to be deliberately funny – you only made people laugh by accident.

Well, maybe that’s true. But the world’s full of comedians and funny people who can tell jokes well. One more person who can get a good laugh wouldn’t be all that noteworthy.

You might not have a talent for making people laugh. But what you do have, and what’s rare, is a talent for making people happy. They’re better for having met you. You might not be aware of it, you might not believe it when you’re told about it. But it’s true, and it’s something I think most people who know you would agree with if you were to ask them. Which you probably won’t. Which is why I’m telling you.

That’s all I wanted to say.

Apropos of nothing, this song’s been on the radio a lot this week and I rather liked it. Gwyneth Paltrow has a surprisingly good voice for an actress.

I was trapped at home and working via an unreliable internet connection on a laptop that is slowly dying when it snowed. When the snow came, it took weeks to finally melt.

It was the darkest, coldest, most wretched winter I’ve ever experienced. It felt like it lasted forever.

Sure, the fact that I live an hour’s drive away from where I work and the office hours are 8:30-5:30 really didn’t help – at least when I worked from home it was light when I got up – and neither did the run of nonstop bad luck that both Darkly and I had, with all the broken bones, unexpected bills, the death of our beloved puppy, the unreliable car… all of which made it really hard for me to realise I was stuck in a major bout of depression until I’d been in it for *weeks*

I hope you’re beginning to understand that it was, as far as I’m concerned, a really, really lousy winter. One that felt like it was right out of Narnia and would never end.

Well, the purpose of this post? Is to express my joy at the fact that, at long last, it *has* ended. At long last, this week, spring arrived.

And what a spring it is! Record-breaking warmth for the time of year. A spectacular bumper-crop of bluebells and other spring flowers is expected. Along with a corresponding explosion in the population of birds. It’s ideal conditions for all the lambs being born at the moment. It’s warm well into the evening, it’s almost light when I wake up. The office at work is getting so warm we’re already using the aircon. I go for walks at lunchtime and don’t even bother with a sweater.

Yesterday I mowed the lawn, did some other gardening, tidied the house, went out to a garden center, went for a long walk, caught up on some reading, and it still felt like it had been a deliciously lazy day. And there were still 4-5 hours left of it. It was amazing.

Today we went down to the marina for no other reason than we felt like it. Had a variety of breads with oil&vinegar and some ice cream and watched the boats coming in and out of harbour.

After the lousiest winter of my life, I can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying the early spring. It’s almost enough to make me believe some kind of cosmic balance is being restored.

The only fly in the ointment is that I still can’t ride my bike again yet, and this is *perfect* weather for being out, cruising down the country roads on a motorbike.

Give it a few more weeks, maybe…

It’s been a good week and a brilliant weekend. This week I’ll be training the two new hires at my place of work – despite having been there only a year, I’m considered the second-best coder and the absolute best trainer available; and I do enjoy teaching so I’ll be enjoying the morning. Then I spend the rest of the week doing my normal job – which I enjoy – and continuing with the training of the new guys; and then I’m on holiday for a week. Followed by a three-day week and another four-day weekend, courtesy of the royal wedding.

It’ll be a month before I’m back to working a full five-day week. And the weather forecast is sun and warmth. And I’ll finally get my old computer desk back from my parents so I can stop using the poxy laptop that beeps at me all the time.

Life, in short, is good. And I don’t often say that.