07:53 pm - Posting policy Almost all new entries here are friends-locked. If you want to read, comment here or friend me. Comments on this entry will be screened.
09:44 am - It's Götterdämmerung, Jim, but not as we know it Twilight. The EU Commission can be seen in the background, seated, motionless, at their table in Brussels. In the foreground, Theresa May appears, cheered on by the tribe of the Give-Us-Things. She declares that all is now clear to her, that she knows what she must do.
The great pile of wood assembled by her predecessor stands ready by the Thames, and Theresa May, fearless, bids the Give-Us-Things set light to the pyre. She greets her horse, Article 50, and mounts him with fierce determination. Turning to the people, she speaks briefly of a momentous journey, and then, representing every person in the whole United Kingdom, she rides Article 50 into the flames.
As the Thames breaks its banks, the music swells. The Brussels motif sounds out: "Freude, schöner Götterfunken...", and then fades, drowned by the motif, not of love, but of selfishness and greed. All appears lost. But that motif fades, too, as the Brussels theme returns, stronger than before. The flames rise, engulfing the Hall of the Give-Us-Things, as it crashes to the ground. The river surges over the ruins, and sweeps them away. As the curtain falls, the people look with new hope to Brussels and to each other. The Ode to Joy rings out loud: "Alle Menschen werden Brüder wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt."
Ok, not today, maybe. But coming soon to a country near you. Current Mood: Remaining hopeful
08:02 pm - Outta here Bother, I was going to leave work at a sensible time today. So much for that.
Before I go, a big hurrah for Lush's new bubble bar products. And another hurrah for the fact that, although they are revamping most of their hair products, the Coolaulin conditioner will remain. (Yes, I know I keep my hair short enough that conditioner isn't really necessary. But I like coconut.)
11:57 am - Sidetracked, or, I know what I did last night Going to find those recordings with José Bros was a bad idea. Putting me in front of my CDs always is. I will generally either stand there paralysed by indecision, or else be overcome by a succession of enthusiasms for whatever catches my eye, hop from one thing to the next, and thus ensure that I never get to listen to what I started out to find, or indeed anything else, for more than a few minutes put together. Last night's listening was of the second type. I'll write it up, but more because I happen to feel like it, than because it's either profound or interesting to anyone but me. :-)
06:25 pm - Long weekend Feels like it, anyway. I'm sure it's been going on for several days already.
Worked late Friday night, and made it to the gym only just in time for a short session before it closed, leaving me feeling somewhat underachieved for the week on that front. (However the main driver for it - badminton - continues to go well, and a strenuous set of games on Thursday left me unfazed. Plus, I managed not to fall over or otherwise inflict damage on myself. Cool.) Having been kicked out of the gym, I went home to manufacture a pile of new LJ icons, of which I eventually approved of only two. Note to self: need more glitter! Finished the evening worried about someone, but things don't seem quite so bad today.
Went into town this morning to find it full of tourists and language students. Most distressing, not least because it will probably stay like that now for most of the summer.
The promised sunshine didn't appear; two loads of washing hang damply on the line outside. :-(
current mood: hungry current music: The new-ish Roberto Devereux from Opera Rara again. Especially surprised/impressed by José Bros, whom I've met before only on a couple of Nightingale recordings (i.e. opposite Edita Gruberova :-)). My lasting impression from those wasn't anywhere near as good as this. Must pull them off the shelf.
05:04 pm - A good principle I was reminded this morning of my driving instructor (this is going back 20 years or so - how did that happen?). He was very sweet, but had a fondness for various sayings of his own creation, which he would repeat regularly, several times per lesson. One of them was intended to tell me that I shouldn't drive too slowly, but neither should I drive dangerously fast. What he actually said was "Be progressive but safe." It's struck me since then that perhaps this wasn't a bad piece of advice in general.
But not all of his sayings were quite so gnomic. Towards the end of my time with him, we were talking about how to plan the last couple of lessons, and he told me, spooneristically, that I had "three queer leeks until the test". It was touch and go whether I would make it to the end of the conversation without having to be carted off in fits.
Looks very decorative no self-confident behavior only courageous if necessary needs goodwill and pleasant surroundings very choosy often lonely great animosity artistic nature good organizer tends to philosophy reliable in any situation takes partnership serious.
Actually, some of this is true enough. And the rest gave me a good laugh.
11:04 pm - Ivanova speaks... In honour of my new persona, a couple more classics from Ivanova:
Mr Garibaldi, you're sitting at my station, using my equipment. Is there a reason for this, or should I just go ahead and snap your hands off at the wrist?
Franklin: You're a pessimist. Ivanova: I'm Russian. We understand these things.
Does the phrase 'No way in hell' ring a bell?
Draal: I like you: you're trouble Ivanova: Why, thank you. That's the nicest thing anybody's said about me in days.
02:00 pm - Less hair - you know it makes sense The weather, combined with all the talk of lnr's tonsorial success, finally prompted me to address my own hair problems. A quick trip across town while out for a meeting, and it's all sorted for another while. This time, I only lasted 70 days between cuts. The last one was 83 days. And once, last year, I managed to go for 148 days!
(Yes, I know. I keep accounts. This is why I'm Ivanova.)
11:56 am - Knit one, perl one Well, if our exam results were a pile of 227 woolly jumpers, one for each student, they would be just about finished now, apart from the little labels describing their composition.
They are not, of course, a pile of jumpers, woolly or otherwise. They are, however, just about finished, and they did involve an awful lot of (sorry!) both knitting and perling. The knitting involved getting the marks out of the examiners and into the database, scaling, normalising, and weighting them, and then matching them all up into something like a coherent whole. The perl part was getting the data back out of the database again in an assortment of formats, for which the examiners' requirements changed day by day. The biggest of the courses was new and ridiculously complicated, with a new chair of examiners, and a new course management system for which the development resources were probably about half of what they should have been. Not a recipe for a comfortable time. In fact, the last couple of weeks have been distinctly uncomfortable.
But now, there are just the students' transcripts to do, and that's - relatively speaking - a piece of cake. So we've made it to the end of the first academic year using the new system, and I have to admit to being quite pleased that it's all worked. No, I'll rephrase that: I'm bloody amazed. Current Mood: accomplished (and in a somewhat silly mood)
09:08 am - Words While I was writing last night's (friends-only) rant, some words struck me:
First, a typo: 'bigotry' originally came out as 'big tory' (Sorry, altariel!)
Then I was reminded of two ironies: 'christian' as a general adjective meaning 'civilised, decent'; and 'catholic' meaning things like 'broad-minded' and 'tolerant'.
[Edited to note that those definitions are taken (selectively) from the Concise Oxford Dictionary that came to hand.]
Your meme, should you choose to accept it, is to rank the following things in order, from "couldn't live without" to "couldn't care less". To add value to this process, you must also add one item to the list - which can be achieved by subdividing an old category if you like - before passing the meme on (including these instructions). You can remove one item too, if you want.
couldn't live without My friends Books Recorded music My computer The Internet Cinema Irony Television Live music My family Pubs Tools Comics Boats Video games Swimming Dancing couldn't care less
10:51 pm - Probably apocryphal... ...but I was put in mind of this by a comment earlier today, and egged on just now by an appalling pun by trixieleitz. I think I read the story about 20 years ago, and I've never seen the film concerned. So this is basically a work of complete fiction. Move along: there's nothing to see.
In The Greatest Story Ever Told, John Wayne plays a Roman centurion. He has only one line in the entire film. After Jesus dies, there's a clap of thunder and general heavenly goings-on, and the centurion, amazed and reverent, says, "Truly, this man was the son of God". Except, of course, that 'amazed' and 'reverent' weren't even remotely in the Duke's repertoire. So, during the shooting, the director had to have him try again, saying, "Come on, put some awe into it." So the cameras rolled, the thunder clapped, and the centurion said, "Aw, truly this man was the son of God." Current Music: Not that kind - Anastacia
10:30 am - Eeek There's an old Flanders and Swann song about an enormous spider in the bath. Well, when I got up this morning, there it was. The spider, that is, not the song. Standing like a Wild West gunslinger, with its elbows up high, ready to draw. The first thing to do in such circumstances is, of course, to go and put on some slippers. This had the desired effect, and I was then able to do the old glass-and-postcard trick. But it wasn't the best way to start a Monday morning.
Speaking of frights, the cats clearly didn't like the lorry that did the green recycling bin collection this morning. Thomas jumped off the kitchen table where he was eating and started growling. Muffin ran downstairs, then upstairs, and hid under the bed. Weird: the usual collection lorry is fine. Strange people, cats.
The weekend was quite productive, at least in terms of chores. I even managed to wash and hoover the car as well as the usual. Sadly, I got almost no work done, despite the list of things that I made and stuck to my laptop before I left the office on Friday. Current Mood: unachievementful Current Music: Ombra fedele anch'io - Arno Raunig
04:20 pm - This morning Went into town this morning for the usual shopping trip, but it was too warm for me to summon up much enthusiasm. This was only compounded by a visit to the Marks & Spencer sock department, a place guaranteed to rob anyone of the will to live. After I'd puzzled my way through the gamuts of materials, lengths and sizes (and avoided the rather scary-sounding 'anti-bacterial finish'), I had to retreat to the nearby Starbucks for a grande vanilla latte, and that was pretty much it for the morning.
Feeling much better now I'm back home with a jug of water and my rainbow maker scattering pretty colours round the room. Current Music: Bianca e Fernando (Nuova Era - live 1991) Current Mood:relaxed
07:30 pm - Shiny pretty II Well, the processing of exam marks seems to be going ok. Data entry was done smoothly by the admin people; examiners' ears have been boxed where necessary (and sent by post to their families); and much jiggerypokery has been employed to deal with all of the oddball situations that can occur. If ever there was an example of Pareto's Principle this is it, except that it's not 80:20. It's more like 95% of the work (and certainly the angst) being caused by 5% of the data.
Anyway, at lunchtime, I reached a major milestone, so I went into town and treated myself to some new sparkly gel pens (blue, purple, green, and gold, and one each of green and purple with colour-coordinated glitter - hee!) and nail varnish (clear - hopefully longer-lasting my previous lot :-() . I'm not sure that all this qualifies me as pretty, but I'm certainly shiny. Current Music: Melissa Etheridge - Breakdown
12:19 am - Shiny pretty I received a belated birthday present on Sunday (the mail order company had fouled up). It's a solar-powered rainbow maker. No, really. You stick it to the inside of a window, the sunlight drives a motor which rotates a crystal suspended below it, and the sunlight gets refracted by the crystal into a swirling pattern of small rainbows around the walls, ceiling and floor. Which may sound rather dry! In fact, it's really pretty - I tried it out this morning and I couldn't help squeaking. It's a bit like having my very own glitterball.... Current Music: In quale aspetto imbelle (Armida - Rossini)
12:04 am - Gosh, it works I haven't yet mentioned the new addition to the glitterboy household: a breadmaker! It moved in about a month ago, and jolly good it is, too. I'm not the world's greatest cook (in fact, if it weren't for their lack of opposable thumbs, the two cats would probably make better cooks than me). I generally convince myself that this is mainly for want of time and having lost practice and confidence. However, even at my most self-delusional, I have never claimed to be able to make good bread. But, and this is the wonder of it, with this machine I can. Whole new vistas of bread-related wizardry are opening up before me...
In other news, I'm listening to the new recital by Juan Diego Flórez, and we're back with the word 'wizardry' again. But more about that another time, perhaps. Current Music: J.D. Flórez - A te, o cara
11:32 pm - [Oops - thought I'd posted this yesterday!] Friday and the weekend Friday during the day was a nightmare: a 'client' for one of my projects panicking about completion, and two other projects trying to come back to haunt me ("how about this extra thing which I didn't think about at the time, but which I'd really like now?" No. Go away.).
However, the evening got better: I spent a pleasant couple of hours chatting with a colleague and partner after the gym, and arrived home to find deliveries of a couple of cases of wine and a box of chocolates (ChocExpress - recently, and strangely, renamed Hotel Chocolat). So, a definite improvement. But after that, the weekend was pretty uneventful. I did, however, got a lot done - largely tedious slogging with database forms and seeding of data ready for an important data entry task starting Monday (exam marks - guess I'd better get this right, then....).
I got two important things done outside work, too, last week, and I did another one today (Monday).
[Edited for time references, because they were bugging me. At least I didn't add any hyphens.]
07:21 pm - Bored Sitting here waiting for a database job to finish running, so I can turn my machine off and go to the gym. I meant to do it earlier, but I forgot to press the Return key. Oops. Current Mood:bored
10:10 am - Loud Last night was the loudest thunderstorm I can remember for a long time. I don't know about the cats, but it certainly worried me. Current Mood: glittery (see icon!) Current Music: Nina Simone - Feeling Good
10:01 am - Gosh A group of friends went over to Dublin for the weekend, partly to have a weekend of fun, and partly to take part in a 10km race today. I have no idea whether I could run 10km. They can, though. Wow. And I've also just seen that yonmei did 5km yesterday. More wow.
Seems like everyone is getting good at this. For myself, I'd better stick to the gym, where I can just stop the machine whenever I like.... Current Mood:impressed
06:20 pm - A thing about hyphens .... I have one. No, not that sort of thing. Just a strong preference for them to be in their appointed place, and a slight twinge when someone writes "a small scale factory" when, in fact, the place has nothing to do with the manufacture of weighing machines. Look, I'm an ISFJ; what do you want? Anyway, I recently had a chance to indulge my love of the little beasties, scattering them freely over page after page, debating with myself over whether one was, strictly, required in this or that case. This was enormous fun, though marred slightly by the realisation that I was probably consuming a significant proportion of the national hyphen reserve, and that, just maybe, I was a little obsessed. Sadly, this has now been borne out by the Economist Style Guide, which, on its page about the hyphen, quotes the OUP style manual:
"If you take hyphens seriously, you will surely go mad"
Current Music: Mercadante: Zaira (new-ish Opera Rara recording)
10:27 am I went back and tidied my experimental quiz from Sunday night, mainly to see whether the site was any faster at this time of day. It is - a lot, so I might do a proper one sometime. Especially as I still can't be bothered to write my own: the book/film/music catalogue comes first.
04:08 pm - Birthday - backlog Ok, it's two weeks and a day since my birthday, but I'm still going to write about it. It's my journal. :-)
Work wasn't, let's say, the best of days, with deadlines of various kinds. The evening, however, was excellent. I've developed a very effective technique over the years, whereby I tell lots of people that I have a birthday coming up, and then hound them mercilessly until they agree to go out for drinks and a meal. It was even easier this year, because one of the invitees has her own birthday a week after mine, so we put together our powers of persuasion and succeeded in badgering 23 people into attending a combined birthday celebration. (Sadly, only one - altariel - has an LJ account; the others are unconverted. We have hopes of 'siring' more.)
So it was that we started with drinks after work, accumulating people slowly over the next couple of hours, until we eventually descended en grande masse on the curry restaurant, where we remained for the rest of the evening. There were food and drink in large quantities, and presents of a number and shiny gorgeousness to make even a hardened shopaholic like me weep. They included candles (including some with a beautiful holder), a mirror, a photo frame, painted glassware, a copy of 'The Hours' and other books, Lush stuff, a cookie jar (with cookies, naturally), coasters and many many more. The highlights, however, were the even greater quantities of talk and laughter. Friends are a Good Thing.
01:26 pm - The Matrix Reloaded I saw this with several friends yesterday afternoon. Unfortunately, I didn't get to hear what the others thought of it, but my recommendation is pretty simple: if you liked the first one, you'll want to see this. If you loathed the first one and all its works, you'll loathe this one, too, and not even Keanu's scrumminess will help.
10:13 am - Sunshine, on a Bank Holiday? Came into work slightly late, on the grounds that a) it's a Bank Holiday, and b) no one cares, anyway. Wish the traffic were that light all the time! Glitterboss is away, as are various members of the group. Must...make myself...do...some work.
10:19 pm - Quiiiiiiizzzzzzzziiiiiiiilllllllaaaa Just spent ages experimenting with making my first quiz. If the site had got any slower, it would have come to a complete halt. *Sigh* Wonder if I can be bothered to write my own? Probably not. Current Music: Still Lorraine Hunt - Mirami altero in volto Current Mood:frustrated
In the meantime, some comments on How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days before I forget. I think it has to go down as mixed, but there are reasons for seeing it. ( DetailsCollapse ) Current Music: Shakira - Dónde están los ladrones
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exhausted
silly
relaxed
bored
impressed
frustrated