Long day today; I seemed to spend a lot of time answering stuff away from my desk, or otherwise being interrupted. So I stopped on until about 8pm to get a few things done. Oh well. Also not helped by having woken up at 3:10 and 5am this morning.

Otherwise, I can't think of anything much else that's happened. No Caroline today; I guess she's been busy, unwell, or the router has died. Any or all of the above might be feasible. Had a long chat to Chris this evening anyhow, which was nice.

I'm back from Claire and Justin's now. I've had a lovely time. Bethany's birthday went off pretty well. Alexander is gorgeous and I had a great time with him. And... all in all it was pretty relaxing. Returning home was a little less stressful than getting up there - only 5 hours-ish rather than the 10 it took to get there. But hey-ho.

On the plus side, I found that Darlington train station lounge has free wifi, which is handy if I happen to get stuck there again for any period.

I'm back at work tomorrow, which I find vaguely daunting. This is actually the first holiday I think that I've taken ever. I don't remember taking any proper holiday before - not where I've had to actually request holiday. Amusing that I should get to this point and not have done that but... oh well.

Anyhow, I'm home at the moment. Reasonably safely and soundly. Very tired though, so must sleep...

I had to go from Reading to Saltburn on Friday. That would have been fine except that I bought a Saver ticket and ended up having to wait until 7pm at Kings Cross because the ticket isn't valid before that. Somewhat annoying thing that I didn't know. And then the train was completely packed all the way to Darlington. I was lucky enough to find a seat. And at York we found that there were problems with the power lines so we hung around at the station for about 45 minutes, and had to go slowly and stop the rest of the way to Darlington. I missed the connecting train and they had to give us taxis to get there. Which wasn't too bad, but it meant that I got to Saltburn about 5 hours later than I should have. Fortunately, Claire was a very understanding angel .

At the end of Sunday, now, I've had a nice time so far. I've got to spend some time with Bethany, and with Alex, and - of course - Justin and Claire. Bethany can be very tiring - I guess that's normal for a 2-year-old.

I've also had a bad headache since Saturday morning. It actually seems to have gone now, but it was quite... annoying.

I've had a really tiring day. Actually, over the past 3 days I only seem to have actually spent a few hours at my desk. Every time I get settled to do something, someone wants my attention. Not that that's a problem, but it is a little distracting. Today I've got a reasonable amount done after people had gone home, but then had to go home myself - packing and washing beckons. 'cos I'm going to see Bethany and Claire and Justin and Alex over the weekend ! Yay.

And Caroline rang me today, too, just to let me know that they were well and enjoying themselves. Hey, it might not be much, but it's always enough to offset any other bad feelings.

I feel quite awful tonight. But I was mildly amused that the name 'Deacon' on the Squeezebox remote is '332266' which is quite cute. Not just because it has repeated numbers, but also because 3 * 2 = 6. That just amuses me.

I woke up last night at around 3am. Couldn't get back to sleep, so around 4am I did some work instead for about an hour and a half. And then I didn't wake up until 9am. I've felt really tired and icky all day .

Simon's gone home for a few days.

The swans have been out and about occasionally over the past week or so. The cygnets are... well, they're swans. They're just still grey. They're big and scarey. But cute still.

One of these days the important stuff will stop sticking in my head and it'll be really hard to do anything. At the moment it's good 'cos I can look at things and lots of stuff sticks. I'm a little worried that it'll stop sticking. But then I'm worried about all sorts of things that are far more important and yet unlikely to ever be affected by anything I do. So I guess it shouldn't matter.

I feel kinda bad today. I've had a really good day at work, but I can't tell Caroline about it. I'm just missing her.

Had a nice chat to Caroline this evening. I was really tired at the start, but seem to have woken up now. However, as I woke at about 2am this morning, and 3:10, and then 4:05 and then had some cereal and stayed up for about 40 minutes powering about, and then about 6am and 7:20... I'm hoping that I'll sleep tonight properly. I'm mildly annoyed, so I'm not certain I'll sleep. I'm working on the principle that there's nothing waking me, but just that my body wants to stop me dreaming. Having said that, I did dream last night, before 2am, about catching a train and and meeting someone that I knew from long ago and who remembered me (and now I'm awake I don't know who it was) but that she didn't like the jumper I was wearing as we were going out to dinner, so made me change into one that had a different pattern. That's odd.

I'm still not getting a sensible amount of sleep. At 2:30 I woke up this morning, and every couple of hours or so I woke up again; but in between I was still awake for half an hour or so just trying to doze off again. I'm reckoning my body's either... telling me it hates me, keeping me from dreaming, or being disturbed by something that I've just not found yet.

I'd like to be able to sleep better. I seem to be waking up at about between 3am and 4am every night for the past week or so. This morning I woke up and decided to get a drink, and before I did I thought "best check what time it is" and, on seeing that it was 3:28 my immediate thought was "Oh, of course it is".

We spent summers out beyond the bay And you said these were such perfect days But if the bomb drops baby I wanna be the last to know [ Always The Last To Know, from Hatful Of Rain - The Best Of, by Del Amitri ]

I wrote another one of those paragraphs that I tend to do when the mood takes me. I ended up quite a bit more upset than when I started. Oh. Bother.

A perfect day, a perfect night Tell me all those perfect lies And lie back in the garden till it's light Perfect silence me and you It's really me, I really do Remember every moment magnified [ Perfect, from Like You Do (The Best Of), by The Lightning Seeds ]

I never quite know whether Lightning Seeds tracks are intended as ironic or sarcastic.

I was pondering this afternoon, after saying something to Caroline, about the phrase 'A little south of sanity' and trying to work out where it came from - it had just popped into my head. It turns out it's the title of a Aerosmith album, which is amusing - I must have seen it when sorting music and remembered it. It's like remembering Y'all get scared now, ya hear!, by The Raindeer Section because it's just such a cool title.

I had a really crappy dream this morning. I hate me.

I'll come dancing through your door With hands out to the poor And you won't know my name But you will play my game [ The Shadow, from The Masquerade Overture, by Pendragon ]

Alex mentioned today about the Yangtze river dolphins probably being extinct. The only thing I could think of was Last Chance To See - Douglas Adams and Mark Cawardine's attempts to hang a microphone over the side of a boat in order to hear first hand what it was that was causing the dolphins to become extinct and the sheer noise that they heard instead. And of course, their attempts to buy water-proofing equipment for the microphone in the first place. But mostly the fact that they knew about it and tried to make people aware of it back then. Very sad.

A week or so back I had a dream that Lynda had proposed to Spike, and I'd woken up and wrote some random rubbish about it...

What would have happened if Spike had actually proposed to Lynda ? Would she have quit the paper ? Would she have actually been happy ? She wouldn't have known what to say. She'd have needed prompting by someone to tell her what to do. I don't think she'd know how to deal with that kind of thing, but if there we someone there to talk her through it, or if Spike got his timing just right, she'd say Yes. And she'd quit the paper and take up the bigger job she'd been offered. She wouldn't be afraid of not being the one in charge any more, and to prove it, she'd make sure that people knew it - obviously that's putting herself in control again, or at least making it seem that she was. She'd announce it over the paper PA system, that she was leaving for better things, because she'd want everyone to know. That, by the evening when Spike proposed there wasn't anyone in the building hardly wouldn't be important, although she'd make damned sure that anyone that /didn't/ know the next day, despite not having been there, was clearly not doing things right. But right then she'd want people to know. She'd go and tell the paper's owner that she was quitting right there and then. Before even telling Spike yes. He'd be standing there, in the office, beside the cleverly concealed wedding ring which he'd hidden and she'd just found and after which he'd said his small piece on how she might be crazy and she might always need the last word, but that was ok, because he loved her dearly for that and he promised to always be there to stop her having the last word if only she'd marry him. Or something like that. He'd have been planning it for weeks and he'd manage to fluff some bits of it, but it would all be ok, and after a little bit of searching she'd say yes. Not because it was good for her job, or to out play Spike, but because she loved him too. But of course, none of that actually happened. Lynda died in the fire in the office and Spike and she never got together. She wanted so much to be in control of the paper and it was so important to her, that she destroyed any chance she'd had with Spike and ended up trapped in the fire. Sometimes there are crocodiles, and it would have been better if she'd known that before. [ What If ?; Justin ]

There's hundreds of little test things all over the 'net. Ian pointed me to one at Pie Palace which gave him a quite high value. I tried it and managed a 39, which was higher than him, and well into the 'extreme' rating. Heh.

Starting up Steam yesterday, there was a big announcement about all the Id software games being available on Steam. Well, I've actually got most of them - not Doom III but I'm not sure I'm that bothered at the moment. However, I thought it might be nice to see Heretic and Hexen as they have been re-released as well, and Hexen II, which I never saw.

It's embarassing. Heretic and Hexen appear to run inside the DOSBox emulator - they're the actual originals. So they only run at 320x240 like the originals did. Mine run so much better than that, on lesser hardware. Worse, though, are the palette problems on Hexen which mean that sometimes you get massive palette corruption and all the colours on the screen become tutti-fruiti (to use the phrase from the visplanes bug that Doom had). Really quite embarassing as a commercial release.

I did a little bit of coding today to automate the end of the month in the diary. In theory, all the pages should now be updated at the beginning of the month without my having to do anything.

Managed to wake up this morning at about 5am, which is getting better, but... still not great. It's just after midnight now and I'm beginning to fall asleep.

I was trying to work out, this evening, why I'm so very tired. And then I remembered. I woke up at 4am. So I'm going to put down all my frustration and achingness to being tired and go to bed.

I'm also trying an experiment this weekend. It's only a little thing, but I'll see how I go.

I've finished the most recent batch of training that we've been doing. Mostly learning about Flash stuff. Very interesting. I still don't like its use on the 'net all that much, but I can see that it's quite useful.

We got our new Kitchen on Monday, which was really great because it doesn't mean going upstairs at all. It's all kinda exciting.

I had something of a problem with Caroline at the beginning of this week resulting in both of us being upset and my being (I think) firmly to blame. I'll get things right one day.

I had a nice chat to Jessica this evening, though, and got to see her blue and flowery flip-flops. Aww .

Julian was in Reading today for an interview, and so we met up and had tea together, which was kinda cool. And I bought myself a book - this morning I woke up and had a small section of a story in my head. I didn't know what it was, except that it was Roald Dahl. I wandered over to Waterstones and searched through the books until I found The Wonderful Story Of Henry Sugar. That's the one. So I bought myself a copy. Usually I'd have just lamented the fact that I remembered it and didn't know what it was, but I actually went and bought myself a copy. It's kinda strange, even still, to think "I wouldn't mind a copy of that" and to translate that into "I could get a copy of that". I know it's easy with films for me to buy them, but for other things I still just don't think like that. Oh well.

And this afternoon I got a chance to play Tennis on a Wii. It's actually really fun, albeit my being sucky at it. But yes, really run.

And in yesterday's news, I saw "The Simpsons Movie (2007)Animation, Adventure, ComedyHomer adopts a pig who's run away from Krusty Burger after Krusty tried to have him slaughtered, naming the pig "Spider Pig." At the same time, the lake is protected after the audience sink the barge Green Day are on with garbage after they mention the environment. Meanwhile, Spider Pig's waste has filled up a silo in just 2 days, apparently with Homer's help. Homer can't get to the dump quickly so dumps the silo in the lake, polluting it. Russ Cargill, the villainous boss of the EPA, gives Arnold Schwarzenegger 5 options, forcing him to choose 4 (which is, unfortunately, to destroy Springfield) and putting a dome over Springfield to prevent evacuation. Homer, however, has escaped, along with his family. Can he stop the evil Cargill from annihilating his home town, and his family, who have been forced to return to Springfield?The Simpsons Movie" .

And I think the diary's going to be all broken because it's a new month and I've not bothered to sort out the files properly. I'll do that later, because I can't be bothered right now. I should really automate that. That's the price you pay for writing your own publishing system.