Fyse January 25th, 2007
I guess there are two necessary constituents of a bone fide Snow Day. One is obviously some snow, and we had a bit of that. Staring out of the window this morning it took me a while to twig that everything looked a whole lot whiter than normal. The other vital ingredient is a lack of work, and this was achieved by a day long power cut. I initially I assumed it was something to do with the snow (in England even half an inch grinds things to a halt), but it turns out workers on an adjacent construction site drilled through a major power cable. Correlation without causation, then, so probably doesn’t really qualify as a ‘Snow Day’.
My initial ‘wow, the whole buildings dark’ reaction soon turned into ‘dammit I have work to do and it’s all on my computer’. Oh, for the days when that would have been a good thing. I picked up a few papers to read at home, but there wasn’t really a lot I could usefully do. Thus an afternoon catching up on downloaded TV. Bit of ‘Numb3rs’, lot of ‘Desperate Housewives’. A half-arsed attempt to start writing a presentation I’m meant to be giving soon (tricky without any of the relevant data or graphs), followed by a touch of ‘Prison Break’. I defy anyone to say that wasn’t a constructive day…
Fyse January 23rd, 2007
I’m not sure it’s worth trying to justify myself, however. For one reason and another I just haven’t found myself blogging of late, but this will change. Armed with my beautiful new MacBook I shall sort myself out and begin to update you all with tales from my life. This has been a mere blip and not, repeat not, the end of the Floating Face. I don’t deserve to still have any readers but if anyone out there is still checking back once in a while, I apologise.
I shall bring you up to date with my life. I started my job last October, as planned, and have since been setting the world of speech perception alight with my scintillating insight and intuition. I am currently investigating options for PhDs starting later in the year, and am beginning to come to the conclusion that academia might be a viable and desirable career. I am very much enjoying not being a student anymore, particularly the money (which enables me to buy shiny new laptops) and the fact that my evenings and weekends are my own (which enables me to go out probably more than I was before). I am also playing yet another grumpy old man in a musical, this time ‘Oklahoma!’.
I spent Christmas in Devon with family, where I ate a horrific quantity of food. I then went to Edinburgh for New Year, where I had a great time despite the world famous Hogmanay Street Party being canceled due to gale force winds. (Apparently there were portable toilets bouncing down the streets. Can’t imagine why they thought that unsafe.) It was great to be back in Edinburgh, having been up there for the festival 18 months ago, even if the weather was borderline hurricane.
Living in a house is treating me very well, particularly the novelty of having a TV again. This might have something to do with my lack of blogging of late, actually. I of am of course not watching the current series of Celebrity Big Brother. We have a large living room, a kitchen with an aga and a huge garden with apple trees. We also have a slightly scary landlady who wrote an inventory including such gems as ‘one curtain rail, 37 curtain hooks’, ‘ceiling - wallpapered’ and ‘one driveway (tarmac)’. Clearly worried she’d come round one day to find we had laid gravel.
I think that’ll have to do for now. Must sleep. Brace yourself for more soon…
