So along with the irksome work crises, there have been some upsides in the last couple of days. Somehow I managed to get the spare room cleared out and the flat into some semblance of order before Mum arrived on Friday night. We cooked up a nice steak dinner and watched a DVD. Yesterday, we trundled into town to scour the charity shops, and our luck was in - there was a book sale outside Oxfam HQ in Summertown. Between that and the shops there, we picked up a fair few books, and I garnered an original edition of Trivial Pursuit. Lunch was at Pierre Victoire - their usual excellent deal, £8.90 for a three course meal. After this, we went to the pictures to see Down With Love, then home. After tea, we pursued trivialities until the crises returned once more.
So, I had that strange feeling that something wasn't quite right on the way to work this morning. Come lunchtime, I figured out what it was - the missing weight of my bag on my shoulder. No bag = no wallet, no wallet = no way to buy lunch. Thankfully, I have a well-stocked snack drawer in my desk. Even less fortunately, my web browser had a tasty meal of freshly prepared LiveJournal posting. Meaning I'm retyping the whole blasted thing now. ( Collapse ) ( Collapse )
Friday: Went to work. Came home. Started to learn PHP. Developed obsession (and the beginnings of a webapp).
Saturday: More PHP. Went into town and wandered round the shops. Picked up Billy Joel CDs for £2 in a charity shop - go me! Went to the Order of thePhoenix Picture House to see Spirited Away, which was cool, although subtitled rather than dubbed. Came home. Coded more.
Sunday: Slept late. Coded more PHP. Watched Gigi. Only just remembered in time to go to Sainsbury's. Did some more perl hacking on my new code for RS.
Today: Work again. Took delivery of two hefty tomes containing the Illiad and the Odyssey plus new toys. Managed to cook dinner despite having forgotten to get more olive oil yesterday.
Tomorrow: Tomorrow, I love you, Tomorrow, you're only a day away!
I spent last weekend in Chicago, my last visit to the old chez hermorrine, hopefully I'll be visiting the new chez hermorrine sometime next month, time off and flights permitting. ( Collapse ) On the way out, I had a nice selection of ground-based delays: the bus into Oxford got stuck in traffic forcing me to catch a later coach to Heathrow which had to skip the M25 and head through London's suburbia. This just left me enough time to check in and take a much delayed (and extended) lunch break before I was due at the gate. We then proceeded to get stuck in traffic on the taxiways for the best part of half an hour before take off. On the plus side, I was through immigration and customs and out front of the airport in less than ten minutes from arriving at the gate at O'Hare.
The weekend itself was mostly full of movies ( Collapse ), strange (but good) American food and generally Quality Time - see hermorrine's entry for more details. We also got to talk some things through on person rather than on the 'phone or via Y!M. The trip back was rather more straightforward, despite being laden down with several tons of Mountain Dew and Reese's. Spent the rest of Monday jet-lagged and resisting temptation to go to bed too early.
Back to work yesterday (albeit from home in the morning as there were builders doing work who needed access to my flat), but clearly the jet lag is still at large - yesterday I went to run my bath to discover I'd forgotten to turn the immersion back on again after being away - and then failed to do so properly. Today I went to cook my dinner only to remember that I hadn't been able to get ingredients at Sainsbury's yesterday (they only had large packs of beef, pork and turkey mince, and using lamb mince in bolognese has unpleasant side effects). Fortunately, I actually had something other than ice-cream in my freezer for once.
In case you hadn't realised just how virulent the SoBig-F email virus is, our virus scanner logs show that we've found more than twice as many copies of SoBig-F in the last week as we found all viruses in total for the preceding year.
Last night's movie was A Knight's Tale, a film I knew was going to be fun the first time I saw it - when Queen's We Will Rock You starts up, it manages not to be incongruous with the medieval setting, and it takes you a while to realise that the amassed peasants (and indeed nobles) are stamping, clapping and singing along. This interweaving of the modern and the historical continues throughout the film to good effect.
Re-watching that was inspired by my re-reading of Tamora Pierce's swords and sorcery novels - some of the later of which feature jousting. I've been reading these books for the best part of twenty years - they are "Junior Fiction", aimed at a slightly older age group than Harry Potter - and the three Tortall quartets continue to be among my all-time favourite books. Happily, I can see from Ms. Pierce's site that she has plenty more books planned for the next few years.
Watched The Shawshank Redemption this evening. It remains in my estimation one of the greatest movies ever made - if for no other reason then because it's a film that I can watch whatever my mood, and always get something out of it. The film manages - eventually - to be feel-good without restoring to romance or sentimentality, and puts you through an emotional grinder along the way. There seems to be a huge amount of plot and character crammed into it, and yet at the same time the pace is leisurely, never rushed. It never puts a foot wrong, and it seems a shame that none of its seven Oscar® nominations produced a statuette - Morgan Freeman in particular was robbed in my opinion. It does have popular acclaim, though - both IMDb's Top 250 films and the top 100 movie list on Channel 4 a few months back had it in the number two spot, behind The Godfather and Star Wars respectively. Oh, and it serves as a reminder that Stephen King can write more than just trashy horror tomes...
Monday sees us finally checking out of the Swan, hermorrine's friend kindly furnishing with transport to the airport - via a Mexican lunch with her and the girls. The flight was for once smooth and uneventful - except for a malfunctioning Jetway leaving us stuck on the plane for half an hour before we could actually disembark.
In the evening, we went to see Pirates of the Caribbean (the movie, this time) - which was great fun, but finishing late enough to scupper any chance of a sit-down dinner and reducing us to take-out. This we ate chez hermorrine while watching Better Off Dead - a t00by movie if ever there was one - before heading to bed.
