This year's carvings:


My witch and cat familiar.


Kev's Jack Skellington.

I love carving pumpkins. This year we got a proper carving set with tiny saws, a plastic 'drill' and all sorts. Made it much, much easier than trying to do it with a kitchen knife. Probably safer, too.

Me working on transferring the hand-drawn design:



Gutting the pumkin:

It's been a while since I've whined about my wisdom tooth, but it's that time again. It's been shifting about since April last year, on and off, with a series of minor infections, aches, and general unpleasantness. The other day I caught a look at it in the mirror, and frankly, it's just sitting there, rotting. So last week I went to see my dentist down in Dorset, to plead with him to remove it. When he looked at it last, a few years ago, he took an x-ray which showed that it was embedded too deeply to easily remove, and would need to be pulverised by ultrasound under general anaesthetic. Yeah, that didn't sound fun to me either.

Now, however, it's a different kettle of fish, as it's surfaced considerably, with only a small corner still hidden in the back of my jaw. So, it's time. I can't say that I've ever looked forward to having a tooth pulled out, but in all honesty, I am looking forward to November 15th, when a local anaesthetic and probably quite a bit of tugging will hopefully result in me being one tooth the poorer.

It also gives me a good excuse to take a few days off, as it's going to hurt like hell and I'm sure I'm not going to want to do much the day after. I can't wait.

Off for nearly 3 weeks, so no blogging during that period. Back after hols. Yay! Hols!

I had such plans for today, including lunch plans, that all went for a Burton when I noticed at about 10.30 that I couldn't read. My heart sank. I hate migraines, and the first sign for me is that I lose the ability to see what's in the centre of my field of vision. Shortly after, I get visual disturbances, then if I'm lucky, it clears up. If not, I get the headache, and maybe the nausea. Got all three today, and spent three hours in bed, feeling crap and trying to sleep.

Eventually, hunger forced me out of bed and I'm trying not to go back again, despite the fact that it's several hours later and my head still hurts. It's that sort of dull ache behind the eyes, similar to the sort you get when you have eye strain.

I've not achieved anything useful today at all, and i don't feel particularly bright, certainly not bright enough to tackle any of the big important tasks I have to get on with. However, I'm hoping I feel better by 5pm as I have a call from America scheduled, and I have to be a bit intelligent for that.

What a waste of a day though.

Finally starting to feel human again after a very long, sleepless (and late) flight home from San Francisco. I had a nap for an hour this afternoon which generally speaking made me feel worse rather than better, but after a lovely risotto and a glass of wine, I'm feeling much more normal.

I am fully cognisant of the fact that this feeling won't last, and that jetlag will kick in at a moment of maximum inconvenience. I have some melatonin, which really didn't help on the flight at all - I didn't sleep any more having taken melatonin than I have in the past without it, so not hugely impressed. However, I'll take some tonight too, just in case maybe it does help.

Slightly weird that, in the light of this post, that the whole 'London bomb plot' thing is also repeating itself from two years ago. The fire that freaked me out in 05 came the day after the London bombings, and two weeks later we had the failed repeat attempts.

I think I'm going to avoid San Francisco in the summer of 09.

Meantime, I wait with bated breath to see which of our civil liberties the government's going to remove next, in the light of these recent events.

UPDATE: Hard to tell if it was the melatonin or simple exhaustion, but I slept like a log last night. Feeling a bit groggy today, but that's pretty normal. The key test will be tonight - it's always worse the second night.

Just when I've settled into being back in San Francisco again, it's pretty much time to leave. I fly tomorrow afternoon and land Friday morning, and spend the intervening hours wishing that someone would just get on and invent that damn teleportation device we've all been yearning for. It's been a great trip, and I'm sad to leave both the city and all my friends - old and new. I will, of course, be happy to get back to T'Other, though, even if he does fly out to Kuala Lumpur on Saturday morning!

Meantime, I'm left bemused that the events of the night of 8 July 2005 were, last night, replicated almost perfectly. Two years ago, I awoke to sirens, eventually getting out of bed to see that there was a large fire in progress just down the road. Last night, just before 5am, I awoke to sirens, eventually getting out of bed to see that there was a medium-sized fire in progress just down the road.

Weird.

Here's the picture from last night:



And the picture from two years ago, which I think I took from higher up the staircase:



Weird, eh?

(Note: I swear I'm not a firebug!)

Yes, I do believe it is. That means my mad week of conferences is over. The last two days have gone very quickly, and I've managed not to really get jetlag, although I did quite spectacularly run out of energy at 10pm last night, as if someone had just pulled the plug.

I'll leave the conference round-ups for later, but it really was lovely to see lots of old friends, and to meet lots of new people. That's what I like about conferences - not the sessions to much as the bits in between.

I've got the weekend off now, to chill out and do a bit of shopping. Then next week is pretty crammed full of meetings, which is just how I wanted it. I could likely have stayed another week and managed to do even more meetings, but you have to put a limit on these things.

It's funny how quickly I settle into being in San Francisco. I think overall I must have spent about nine weeks here in the last two and a bit years, which is enough time to start to feel at home here. I understand at least sections of the transport system, can navigate my way round bits of the city, and quite a bit of it I know well enough for it to look familiar when I see it. It's a nice feeling.

Of course, I'm staying with my friend Maciej, as I always do, and it doesn't seem like ten minutes since I was here last. I know all the lumps in the spare sofabed, know where the nearest source of English chocolate and Mexican Coke is, and know how to use the washing machine.

This time, though, I find myself missing my T'Other dreadfully. Of course, I missed him last year too, when I came to FooCamp (which is actually happening this weekend, but I'm not invited - that's fine, I'd rather they invited new people than the same old people all the time), but somehow this year it's worse. Whilst I am loving it here, I really can't wait to be home.

Although, as soon as I get home, Kev buggers off to Kuala Lumpur. Lucky git.

I think it's Wednesday. I could be wrong. In some time zone, and to pick a random one, say BST, I am. I'm not sure what time zone it feels like, but I know the feeling of sleep deprivation any day of the week.

I'm learning that jetlag isn't predictable. Like altitude sickness, it doesn't matter how many times you travel or climb mountains, you can still be struck down. Last year, after returning to England after a week in Washington DC, I got the works. Tiredness, sleeplessness, loss of appetite, nausea. I didn't even know nausea was part of the package, but it is, and I got it.

This time round, I fell into the typical first day trap - jetlag doesn't really kick in for 24 hours, so for the first day you think you've got away with it. You haven't. On the second day, oh that's when the thumbscrews come out.

I got to Boston on Sunday, feeling tired but ok. I stayed awake until 10pm, and slept pretty well, spending just an hour and a half awake during the night. Monday passed without any real problem, and I happily fell asleep at 10.30pm, feeling quite smug that I'd missed out on the jetlag this time round. I fell asleep immediately, but at 2am, my eyes opened, and that was it for the night. I was awake. I knew that if I got up and did something, I'd end up more awake, not more tired - and it's very difficult to mooch about someone else's house - so I stayed in bed. I dropped off again about 10 minutes before I had to get up.

At one point, I got a bit peckish. I learnt a long time ago to always travel with food, so I had a nibble on a 'Brunch Bar', but a nibble was all I could manage. As soon as I took a bite I felt nauseous.

So yesterday I was running on nothing but the smell of an oily rag. I will admit that my talk was really not my best. I really struggled to string a sentence together, to hold my thoughts in order and present them in a meaningful way. I don't know how much it showed, but I felt crap.

Last night, I was asleep, again, by 10.30pm, but I slept the whole way through until 7am, which is not bad going. I lounged about in bed, answered email, and then packed ready to catch my 12.35 flight from Logan airport. As it turned out, the hotel that the conference was in, and where I stayed for one night - the Westin Waterfront - is right by the airport. Well, across the water from the airport at least. Convenient.

Less convenient was finding out that my flight was cancelled. Earliest flight that they could put me on was the 8.20pm flight to Vegas, connecting through to San Francisco, and arriving at 1.30am. Great. After an hour in the queue, I got rebooked and went back to the Westin to hang out with Thomas and Leisa, whom I bumped into when I got there.

I'm now back at Logan airport, ready for my flight to Vegas. Apparently it's overbooked. I really, really hope that I get a seat, because if I have to fly tomorrow, that would be really, really bad. If all goes well, I'll be in bed by, I dunno, 2am, maybe 2.30am. Supernova starts at stupid o'clock. I think I'll be missing a few sessions.

I just hope I can nap on the plane.

Btw, there's no wifi here. I'll post this tomorrow which, for you, will be today, but just know that this post was written in the past, sitting at Gate 20, Logan Airport, praying that it all goes ok.

UPDATE: The journey went relatively well. I dozed on the first leg, although real sleep was prohibited by the uncomfortableness of the seats and the snoring woman beside me. Had a bit of a moment at Vegas, when it took them 20 minutes to get the jetway up to the plane so we could disembark, but I did manage to find my onward gate ok. I'd been booked into first class for the second leg - shame it wasn't the other way round. Slept like a log for an hour and a bit. Lovely!

Maciej picked me up at SF, at 2am local time... which was 5am Eastern and 10am BST. Gah. My body has no idea where it is. I was in bed by 3am, but awake again by 7.30am. Well, I guess we'll see how today goes.

Right now, I'm off to Supernova and hoping I can hold it all together for another day.

I have so much I want to blog about at the moment, but I've just been up to my eyeballs in stuff, and by the time I get to 10pm, I really don't want to be on the computer anymore.

I have to take my Macbook in for repairs very soon and it's causing me a lot of pain - I have to make sure that everything I have on this machine is available to me when the machine itself is not. This isn't just about convenience - my entire ability to do my job is wrapped up in the data on this chunk of plastic and without it I am totally screwed. Yes, I have a back-up, but it's non-bootable except on another Intel Mac... which I don't have. So I'm preparing my old iBook to act as my spare machine, which is far easier said than done. It would be so much easier if I just had another Intel Macbook, so that I could simply replicate this machine and not have to worry about it all... but I don't, and I am not likely to suddenly have the money to buy one any time soon.

Meantime, I want to blog about that really appalling Panorama program on wifi last night, and the bloody stupid decision XFM made to sack all its daytime DJs. But both those will have to wait.

How is it that I am always so busy? I think I may have to put a lot more effort into employing the 'N' word over the next six months.

Probably not the best time to be blogging, but I am trying to blog more these days, so I'm going to anyway.

Next week will see a shift from blogging here to blogging more at Strange Attractor, as I'm off to Xtech in Paris on Tuesday, and not back til late Thursday night. I've a lot to get through this week, especially as I actually haven't yet written my presentation that I'm giving at the crack of dawn on Thursday. I need to bring myself up to date on evoting and copyright term extension, but that shouldn't take me long. Hopefully I'll have time to do it tomorrow.

Although frankly, tomorrow might get eaten up by dealing with email. I still loathe email. I wish there were a way to ditch it completely, but I've yet to figure out a way to do that which is actually feasibly. Meantime, I just have to put up with it. Bloody stuff.

Haven't seen the mouse since Wednesday, so hoping that it was a one off visit and that said mouse discovered nothing worth coming back for.

Meanwhile, progress is being made in all sorts of areas. I will blog about it, but just not tonight.

I will admit that the flat has really been getting me down lately. It's very easy for such a small space to descend into untidiness very quickly when you've got too much stuff that doesn't have a specific place to live. And of course, working from home doesn't help matters - you just end up with heaps of papers on every available surface.

At last, today, we bit the bullet and bought a set of shelves with two drawers, and Kevin spent all afternoon putting them together whilst I provided him with essential advice from the couch. They are now standing proudly on the only bit of wall that was free, and are full of books and DVDs. The flat is much tidier, and will be even more so once we've finished sorting out all the random piles of crap that have accumulated.

It makes me very happy to have a proper bookshelf for my books. I should imagine it makes them very happy too.

It's not been quite so easy to blog every day over the long weekend - I had imagined that our time would be fairly free, but it didn't quite work out like that.

Not a small amount of time was spent attempting to locate the kittens, Castor and Pollux, who appear to have become escape artists of the highest calibre. So many times in the past we've had cats who've been killed on the road or who've been attacked by other animals, sometimes fatally, so my parents are a wee bit overprotective. But despite my dad's best efforts to strategically place chickenwire to prevent escape, Polly especially seems to be always able to get out (although then less able to get back in again), although it was Cassie who caused all the trouble on Monday. Cue much walking round the block, rattling the cat treat container in an ineffective attempt to lure her home.

Also got a fair number of chores done whilst I was there, including throwing out a ton of papers from my filing cabinet which still resides in my Mum's room (no space for it here, so she's going to empty it and flog it). Threw out a whole load of old client papers and research materials, which made me feel a bit odd. Kept all the stuff to do with the old business. Lots of dark memories in that filing cabinet. I'm glad they're not here in London with me, I don't need them.

Then yesterday was a flurry of going to the gym and dealing with email and client work. A good, productive day, but a day that passed way to fast. I barely realised that I hadn't blogged before the chance to was gone. I need to try harder this week though, not to let myself slip again. It's really hard sometimes to find the time to write, but it's got to be at the top of my priorities again.

The gym is actually going well. I never thought I'd enjoy it this much, actually, but although it can be hard to haul my ass out of bed that early, I do feel good once I'm there. Of course, the fact that I weighed myself down in Dorset and discovered that I've actually put on half a stone did not go down so well. I'm now the same weight I was at 19, after putting on 3 stone in Australia. That's enough to make me swear off Coke and chocolate until I've lost a stone.

Also need to put a bit more effort into ensuring that I get my five portions of fruit and veg a day, although yesterday's consumption of twelve medium sized tomatoes in the form of soup was probably a bit much. I had intended to freeze half of it but, well, I was hungry.

Regarding what I'm doing at the gym, I had my second session with the 'personal' trainer last week, who added a few more machines to my agenda, including a steppy army swingy thingie, and a calfy squeezy thingie. She attempted to add some more machines that exercise my arms, but as I started pulling against the weights I could feel my scar going taut - not good.

Kev and I have about 40 mins each morning to do our workout, which I think is quite enough, but we can't fit in all the machines we've been given to do. I suppose the smart thing to do would be to rotate them, but instead, I'm just dropping the machines that make me use my arms. The scar twinges sometimes, and I'm still rather paranoid that if I use it too much I'm going to end up with a huge red stripe - it's already widened a bit but not too much. I don't want it any wider.

Plus I loath the steppy army swingy thingie (the crosstrainer, for those that know). I have fuck all co-ordination, and the damn thing nearly makes me feel seasick, so I'm just not going to bother with it. I'm quite happy with the treadmill, bike, and the machines that focus on my legs. It'd be nice if I could keep up with Kevin when we go out walking, instead of me holding us back.

Meantime, we have a guest. As I was sitting on the sofa this morning, slowly waking up, a small mouse ran out from under my feet, heading for the space under the fridge. I'm not scared of mice, but I will admit it did surprise me, and I may possibly have let out a rather strangled yelp. Unfortunately, this nearly gave MrA a bit of a heart attack.

Whilst I was yelping, a part of my brain was watching with amusement as the poor mouse struggled to gain traction on the slippery laminate flooring, its little legs going all ways. I have no idea where it was - I still have Mr Neil's keyboard in its box under my coffee table as I've yet to get to meet up with its rightful owner - so I'm wondering if it was in that, looking for food or nesting material.

Either way, this explains the godawful stench in the bathroom when we got home Monday night. There's no doubt in my mind that that was the smell of rotting mouse, probably under the bath or cabinet. From memory - yes, I've been through this before - it takes about 3 days for a rotting mouse to stop smelling, so I'm betting it died on Saturday.

Time to break out the human mousetrap, I'd say.

Kevin and I have been out and about yesterday and today. Yesterday we were in Ringwood buying various birthday pressies and then chilling out at the Sheaf of Arrows in Cranborne. Today we went to Corfe Castle and then Lulworth Cove, along with a lot of other bank holiday weekend visitors.

i took my camera but forgot the newly charged battery, so managed to snap one photo. Guess I'll have to wait until Kev uploads his.

Meantime, I'm feeling rather full after making fabulous tomato soup (that's the second time that soup's come out well!), and rather tired after much walking up hills and over beaches. Further updates will have to wait for me to feel a bit more energetic.

(Details tomorrow.)




.... ok, so I cheated. Bite me.

I was sitting on my couch this afternoon, slaving away over a hot laptop, when I heard this amazingly loud chirping. It sounded for a moment as if some bird had managed to get into the flat and was, quite possibly, sitting on my shoulder, cheeping. I was pretty sure that there wasn't a small brown Richard III (that joke's for all you Two Ronnies fans out there) sitting on my shoulder because, well, I think I would have noticed.

The sound was coming from a fledgling blackbird (or possibly starling) that had landed on the window ledge. It was staring in through the window at me, screaming for food. I tried to grab my camera, but it flew off before I could get a picture.

If there's one thing I miss about living in the countryside, it's the small birds. (Cats would be the other thing, but although many bird lovers are cat haters we used to manage to have both in the garden in quantity at the same time without too many problems. Small birds are, usually, faster than well-fed, ageing domestic cats.) I particularly miss the fledglings - cuter bundles of fluff it's hard to imagine.

Back when I was in one of my interim penniless periods down in Horton Heath, the house where I grew up and where my parents still lived until a few years ago, we had bird feeders hanging up in the garden, right in front of large patio doors. The view was fabulous. What made it even better was that there was a washing line nearby and Dad had suspended the feeders themselves from a cane that protruded from the brick shed roof. All that equalled plenty of perching space.

The fledgelings would line up on the cane or the washing line and call for food. The adults would visit the feeders, then attend the chicks. We'd get a lot of bluetit chicks, all lined up in a row, all identical, all being fed by a variety of parents who didn't necessarily seem to remember whose chick was whose.



(Thank you ljpixie75)

But my favourite was always the long tailed tits, who'd swoop into the garden twice a day in a flock of about eight, see what they could find at the feeders, and then be gone. They were fabulously pretty, and the cutest thing this side of Cute Overload. But the chicks... oh my. The long tailed tit fledglings were just small round balls of pink and black fluff with a ludicrously long tail stuck on one end. Like ping pong balls that have been rolled in pink lint.



(Thank you Simon D Barnes)

I couldn't find a pic of a long tailed tit chick, but they were just gorgeous.

When I was a kid, Dad and I would go to a place called Whitesheet - forestry commission heathland that had been severely denuded in the fire of 76, but which now supported a population of nightjars and hobbies. (The BBC article on the fires actually mentions Horton 'common', which must have been Horton Heath itself, which was at the top of the lane where our house was. I was five, and if I remember rightly, we moved in towards the end of that year - I remember driving over there and there being smoke in the air and fires breaking out all over the place. Hurn Forest, which would have included Whitesheet, lost 50,000 trees, and the military fuel dump at West Moors was nearly encircled by flame.) There was one bird that used to slap its wings together in a really distinctive sound, but I can't for the life of me remember which one it was. We didn't often see much, being fairweather birders without that much of a clue, but I used to get very excited when we saw a hobby.

It's funny, recently I've started reading the Birdchick's blog, mainly really to see how Mr Neil's bees are doing, but it's reminding me a lot of how much I miss birds. I'm no birder - I have little to no knowledge of birds, but it doesn't take knowledge to appreciate how cute lil fledgelings are.

* Not really.