I haven’t had time to do a lot of blogging lately, due to lots of reasons that are probably too boring to elaborate here. I’m just going to chill out tonight and watch Dr. Strangelove, and hopefully tomorrow I’ll get around to posting a couple of half written things that have been sitting around. Then it’s off to Amsterdam on Monday for a few days. If I get the chance I’ll post something from there, too.

I love the tube. I came back into work this morning after a day off sick. At about 9am, stuck in a tunnel outside Finsbury Park on the Victoria Line, I started to wonder why I was bothering. Finally got in at 9.45. It usually takes me about 25 minutes, today it took something like an hour and a half. And it doesn’t look like it’s going to get a lot better soon.

Devon was great, but unfortunately I’ve picked up a bug from somewhere and don’t feel too good right now. Ugh.

I’m off to Devon for a long weekend – can’t wait to get away from the city for a day or three. I won’t be picking up my email for a while, so if you want to get hold of me before then and don’t have my number, leave a comment!

Some friends of mine have recently got a kitten, so here he is – Charlie Humbug himself.

I’d love a cat of my own, but it’d be a bit cruel in a flat the size of ours. One day though. In the meantime I’ll just have to make a fuss of everyone elses.

Mid-January. Two weeks until payday, but it feels like it should’ve been last Friday. Still dark when I get up and when I get out of work. It’s a cliché, but it’s true, the January Blues exist.

It’s been alleviated a bit since we started planning a trip to Brussels and Amsterdam for the end of Feb; nothing like a holiday to cheer you up. Not to mention the fact that, at the end of the day, I’m pretty fortunate and don’t really have much to gripe about at the moment.

Especially when I think of some of my friends and family – it seems like the shit’s been hitting the fan for a lot of people I know. A close friend was made redundant this week, pretty much out of the blue. Another friend of ours just had a miscarriage. A colleague’s father passed away just before Christmas. My sister had a car accident a couple of weeks back (she’s OK, but her job relies on her being mobile). A couple of other family members are unwell – not life threateningly, but enough to effect their quality of life. My thoughts are with them all.

Then there’s the omnipresent terrorist threat that the media and the government seem to delight in reminding us about every day. We’ve lived through this sort of thing before. We know something might happen. We know we’ve got to be on the lookout. What else are we supposed to do about it?

Oh, I suppose that we could go to war. The whole Iraq situation leaves me with a bad feeling in my guts and a funny taste in my mouth. I don’t want to see Saddam waving nukes around any more than any other sane person, but I can’t help feel cynical about the whole damn thing. And I can’t help feeling that a war in Iraq is going to make things worse, not better, in terms of the threat of more terrorist attacks.

I suppose that this is one reason to live for the day, and not to wish life away. We might well be at war by the time January rolls to a close, and then who knows what’s going to happen.

Peace and love, people

When I looked out of the window this morning there was a light dusting of snow everywhere. I can’t remember the last time I saw any snow at all; it almost made our street look attractive.

At last, it’s going to start getting lighter again.

Not being a Christian, I tend to think that the fact it’s the solstice on the 21st sort of makes the holiday spirit a bit more appropriate. I suppose that if I wanted to follow this feeling through to it’s logical conculsion I’d want to do the gift giving today, but I just can’t bring myself to be *quite* that anal

I’m not a pagan either, but I think that seasonal turning points like this are worth observing, and I like the reminder of the cyclical nature of things. So pause for a moment and reflect upon the fact that we’re now at midwinter, and things can only get lighter and warmer.

Can I be on _Thought for the day_ now?

I’ve been really busy at work this past couple of weeks, plus I’m doing the honours as Best Man at a good friend’s wedding this weekend, so still no posts I’m afraid. Missed lot’s of good stuff, but hopefully I’ll get it together to maintain this blog a bit more frequently as of next week. I’m going to start trying a few different Linux distros soon, so I might put up some of my thoughts about those. Maybe I’ll even get around to LFS, too.

The BBC reports: Stress Link to Heart Disease Revealed

This research was done in the Department in which I work, and although I was not involved with this particular peice of work I thought it deserved a link. Dr. Brunner’s my boss, after all.