Hot stuff

The weather has again taken a turn for the warmer to the tune of almost 30C temperatures this week. It has reminded us why it would be nice to move from California to somewhere more moderate. It is only March for goodness sake. Last week we had multiple days with torrents of rain, enough for no water rationing this summer and now we have clear skies and hot days. I wish the weather was a little more consistent and not so variable.

There we go, this blog has turned to talking about the weather. Isn't it a thrilling place to be? At least whomever reads this will get a break from my waffling maybe when we go off on our trip.

It gets worse

  Just having an IM conversation with someone and this is what they typed, literally.

nd u carry few tests on the new n/

n/w

cn I hav a minute of urs

?

Not long now

  Nearly done with this work week which has been far too busy for its own good. Then finally on Monday we get to fly to England (yay 11 hours in a plane) for a visit which has been a while coming now.

  We picked up the keys to the caravan yesterday and had our walkthrough. It was meant to take 2 hours but we were done in 30 minutes. Looking everything over it was all pretty logical where stuff was and how to use it. Not sure why it was meant to take as long as they said it would, maybe people just need things explaining to them carefully. I don't know. Didn't get a chance to see how to hook up the tow hitch obviously since we don't have one on the car yet but we will do that when we get back from England.

  Been doing some thinking on another subject I want to rant about that my wife has been stressing about. I need to find the right words to put together my argument (or at least my opinion which is always the right one obviously). There are a few things in the world which annoy me, especially when it is a result of what people and the media try to persuade everybody (themselves included) what the "right" thing is. Not sure if I'll get it written down before we go but maybe this weekend I'll have a bit of time to express it. Pictures may also be required to explain my point so I need to find ones to illustrate my point.

  I'm also hurriedly trying to finish up Dragon Age 2 before we go away. I think I'm close having got the game clock to over 40 hours now in almost 3 weeks of playing. The conversations in this game are much more interesting than the first since your main character is actually voiced as opposed to a mute cipher as in the first game. The recycled environments drag on a bit though thankfully they look much better than the very murky look the first game had. The change in art style is most notable when characters from the first game show up and they look quite different, and in a couple of cases very different, from how they originally where shown.

  Going to do some more work now before it gets too busy here and I get interrupted a million times. Just finished breakfast as well while typing this (quite an achievement typing and eating cereal at the same time). Today I had cocoa krispies for a change rather than the honey nut cheerios I've had for a while now. I may switch back and forth or even try a combined bowl one day to see how that turns out (yeah I'm strange in my tastes sometimes).

I like being clever

  Just a small sort of brag post that will probably mean nothing to people who don't write code but I have a nice little design here whereby I can get other people to do my work for me. Basically I can get people to define their objects properly and then run another program to automatically generate validation code so that the code I am actually writing myself can use this automatically generated code to confirm that the configuration of the system if valid.

  Yeah, I know, sounds stupid complicated or just nonsensical but as a coder once you see it in action (or will do since this is what I've been designing) it is going to make my life so much easier. We are talking about writing maybe a few hundred lines of code and having another several thousand being generated for me to use. I also won't have to make any changes to the code I write as new things come along, that will all get picked up in the automatically generated code.

Something to start the day with

  Don't you hate it when you get to work, sit down, log on and immediately 3 different people are already bugging you over IM wanting you to do stuff? Yeah that was my start to the day. I did manage to talk to my wife briefly over Skype though which put a big smile on my face. With that though I need to get back to work (bah humbug) so I'll just post a quick picture and be off.

Another busy day

  Why is it that the week before you go on holiday that everyone wants something done? Been trying to get a few things finished here at work and more stuff ends up being sent my way. So far today I've updated two design specs, fixed another persons bug since I noticed something that they completely missed and had 3 meetings. I still have 2 more meetings and need to get this piece of code checked in today before I leave. Fun.

  In other better news I have in my hand (well not literally because that would make it awkward to type) the cashiers cheque for the rest of the money down on the caravan to take with us tomorrow. Can't believe that as of tomorrow afternoon we will be official owners of it. Now I just need to finish getting the tow hitch on the car so we can actually take it places and fun times can begin.

  Time to put my code up for review, a mandatory process so that the obvious bugs are weeded out most of the time, and get ready for the last meetings of the day.

Cuteness

  Just a couple of quick pictures of our smallest cat Daisy to start today. She is incredibly nimble and lithe to go with her relatively small size compared even to her sister Lucy. She also has the cutest face.

Adorable bundle of fur

  Presented without any further comment, Fudge.

Water is scary

  Saw this link earlier today and thought I would share it here. Bloody scary.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_b-2iByqHVI

Zombie mode engage

  I was in full on zombie mode this morning getting to work. Then when I get there I find all the lights outside were not actually on so it was nice and dark trying to walk to the door. Then finally whilst I'm sitting at my desk with no one else here I've moved so little the motion sensors in the building turn off most of the lights. Kind of spooky and nice at the same time. Felt like I could have a nap although I only managed to keep the lights off for two minutes before it detected me fidgeting slightly in my seat and turned the lights back on.

  With that thrilling start to the day I'm going to try and finish this piece of work I'm currently on before too many other people get in to the office and ruin the peace and quiet here.

Dreams and fantasies

  I've had some very vivid and wonderful dreams over the years. Some of the best have involved me and my wife believe it or not. I rarely remember most of my dreams but the few that I do I can remember for a long time. I still remember some of the ones I had when I was a child.

  Still the best ones have quite often involved me and my wife. I think when you are completely wrapped up in someone they permeate your every thought waking and sleeping. They also don't always occur in places or times we have ever actually been to. For some reason my imagination in my dreams is much more capable than my conscious mind.

  I think a lot of my dreams involve the randier side of me since the way I feel when I wake up most mornings I just want to jump my wife there and then. I know a lot of men would fantasize about all sorts of things but when I think about that it usually involves my wife. Not always just her mind you, sometimes there are more people there but it always involves us in some way.

  A lot of random waffling going on in this post but just trying to write things down to clarify some thoughts in my head right now and I find this incredibly useful. My wife did something for me last night (her patented headache cure since I had a wicked one) and it didn't last very long at all with what I was thinking about my wife at the time. The pictures I can see in my mind become incredibly vivid and take me over totally. I end up losing myself in her and the world around me fades away to nothing. There is just me and her.

Saturday random musings

  Just finished getting another couple of things for the new caravan. Getting quite excited to actually have it and start traveling around with it. Anyway on to the random stuff

• In clearing out my wardrobe the other day I found some clothes I have not worn in at least a decade. They actually fit again which means I'm the same waist size I was when I was in my twenties. See, hanging on to old shit does pay off :-) . They are also not completely out of style and unfashionable since they never were fashionable in the first place...
• Still can't quite seem to lose any more weight than I have whilst I'm on the subject of shrinking waist lines. I seem to be hovering in the 175 to 180 pounds range. Not bad but I would prefer to be under 170 to be honest.
• Finally finished Bulletstorm last night. Very fun game even if the swearing is kind of over the top. The ridiculousness of the violence in it though more than makes up for it and makes it a change to the usual FPS action you get. Recommended anyone pick it up to at least try it if they can.
• California is now above average rainfall for the year already. We had 4 inches of rain in one day last week, which if you consider we only get 15 inches per year total is a hell of a lot. I'm kind of glad I didn't drive in to work that day. Combine that with 40mph winds that day and you get the typical California wet weather disaster on the roads going on.
• Going to see if my parents actually remember to use Skype this weekend. If we can train them to use it instead of the phone we can finally be rid of the landline.
• I think I may need to clean up my phone soon, it is a 16Gig one and I only have 3Gig free. Almost 10Gig of apps is a little bit much me thinks. Time to delete some of the free junk I don't use anymore.
• Lucy serenaded us again this morning with her plaintive mewling around the house as she realises that she has been away from us for too long. She gets very attached to being able to run up to us and get a fuss and if she can't she gets quite upset. She is similar to Fudge in that way, he gets in to an almost panic if he wakes up and can't find us.
• We already have two trips away booked with our caravan. Did I mention that we are looking forward to using it?

  There we go, mind emptied out of the random things going through it. Now off to find ways to completely shut it down for the weekend so I can switch off for a bit mentally speaking.

More details

  Don't know how many people would care but we got this trailer for a pretty good price to say the least. Financing it was a piece of cake with my credit score (down a bit from where it was but still way up in the 700s). Pictures will be forthcoming next week when we do the full inspection and stuff on Wednesday. Looking forward to it to say the least, going to be fun to hook it up, drive somewhere and have somewhere comfy to stay cheaply rather than noisy naff hotels.

  Today was a busy day all told, a bit of work in the morning with the usual daily conference call. Then off to look at the caravans and spending a couple of hours going over the paperwork and stuff. Then back home to hop on to another conference call and a little bit more work then out shopping to get stuff to put in the caravan. Only just slowing down now and we still need to clean up a bit with the mess we made getting new stuff. Got the insurance and the tow hitch arranged as well, not going to be too much for those.

  The new phone has come in incredibly handy. Having a phone that can basically bring you the entire internet wherever you are is beyond useful. I don't think of it as a phone and more as a data device that can get me information I need and communicate with others via useful methods. I'm very glad I got work to buy me the phone and get me off of the crappy work provided phone I did have. I don't talk to people directly much and am probably going to have a ton of minutes rolled over and saved up over time but the data stuff is so useful and cool.

  And for now I'll finish with a picture of my wife wearing one of her lovely new dresses we got the other day on date night.

Late to the party

  I know this is probably old news if you follow my wife's blog but we have bought a caravan (travel trailer for all you US people). Kind of exciting, a nice big 24 foot long one with all we need to travel and stay somewhere. Now I just need to arrange getting a tow hitch on the car, sort out the insurance, do the final inspection next week and then give the rest of the payment and pick it up after we get back from England. Simple.

Itchy stubble

  Feeling all sort of smooth faced right now after having a shave. It has been a couple of days since I last had one and my stubble grows rather quickly, something it seems I inherited from my father. I don't mind a bit of stubble but it grows so quickly I need to shave every day usually. I don't see how people grow beards, it would annoy the hell out of me to have that much crap on my face. Why can't someone invent a way for men to not have to shave every day?

Such a lightweight

  I drink very occasionally, tonight being one of those few nights. We have an open bottle of red wine we used for cooking last week so I had a glass with dinner. After it I was ever so slightly wobbly, I really am a lightweight when it comes to alcohol consumption. Get a little more in me and I start to get giggly and loud, it can be quite embarrassing sometimes :-P .

  One of the times I've been really drunk, our honeymoon in Venice. My wife dared me to drink a whole bottle of cheap 50p wine we got in a local supermarket so I did. To say I was wobbly would be an understatement. I did manage to guide us halfway across the city though to find the only chinese restaurant in the whole of Venice and get us back to our hotel in the dark. Not bad considering my physical condition.

What people get used to

  Been doing some work today at home and was reminded about what people put up with and get used to. They then become so used to it when things improve they complain and don't like it. What do I mean by this then let me explain.

  The software I write in its simplest description handles telephone/voice calls. There is a lot more to it than that but it can be boiled down to that as a rough description. Therefore I know quite a lot about how telephone calls work and their various foibles. Think about when you are on the telephone with someone and neither of you are speaking at that moment. You will always hear a slight hissing in the background yes? That is called "comfort noise" and is actually deliberate believe it or not.

  To get to the explanation of why this is you need to go back to the old analogue phone lines that were basically just two wires connecting one phone to another via various mechanical switched exchanges between the two. As a result of this analogue signal going along the wires clearly there would be some interference along the way, hence the slight noise that is always present. Fast forward a bit to the 80s when these old electromechanical exchanges were ripped out and replaced with fancy new digital exchanges. The main reason for this background noise went away and people didn't like it. They assumed that because there was no noise on the line the line was dead since that was one way you knew you had a dead line, it was completely silent. So what did people do? Obviously artificially inject noise so that people did not freak out and were happy with this new technology.

  Stupid huh? It gets worse. Let us fast forward to the days of VoIP that we have now where telephone calls can basically travel purely over the internet (in fact current cell phones work on the same technology as well FYI). In this case the voice travels back and forth as pure packets, no potential for interference at all and with the right codecs and bandwidth the voice quality can be vastly superior (another story for another time as to why telephones sound as bad as they do). Again what happens when people stop talking. For bandwidth reasons you don't sent packets containing nothing you send a CNG packet (comfort noise generation) to tell the far end to generate noise and stop sending packets until the person speaks again..... Really silly huh? All this just because people are used to something.

  Basically what I am saying here is that people got so used to something that was not very good. Then when something better came along it was artificially gimped so that people would not complain and accept it. Even though there are better ways of doing things people still stick to what they are used to rather than accepting something new and improved. It can explain a lot of how people are incredibly resistant to change despite the fact that their lives would actually improve if they would accept the new.

I am here

  If you subtract Boots and add my butt his is where I am today. Managed to worked from home today to be with the wife while she is sick. She does feel better today and so do I actually being able to be here for her.

  Read some more interesting bits in that book I'm reading. It dealt with how people do actually love more than one person even if they chose to be with only one. It was dispelling the myth that monogamous relationships are the only real relationship and the things that that kind of relationship is not supposed to have. With what has happened recently it is kind of obvious to me now but I wish I knew and felt that way last year. It also deals with the fact that just because you love and lust after one person you will actually feel attracted to other people and there is nothing wrong with that. As I said, interesting stuff, to me at least.

Picutres for today

  Just a quick post with some pictures for my wife and I since today is being a bit of a crap day (in case you didn't get that from the amount of swearing in my first post from today).

Painful

  Just interviewed another guy who's main spoken language was not English. It was painfully slow to say the least. I know a lot of what my job is doesn't involve spoken interactions but being able to communicate clearly is kind of vital. Kind of glad the interview was over by the end of it since stilted pause ridden conversations are never fun.

Bugger this for a game of soldiers

  I said that phrase here at work last week and one the of few American engineers looked at me like I had suddenly spoken French or something. Clearly it is more of a British phrase than a generic English phrase. It does sum up my attitude towards work at the moment nicely though. So much crap is being dumped on me with no thought to actually helping me out it just makes me want to tell them all to fuck off (the less polite phrasing of this posts title).

  My wife has come down badly with this cold that came from someone here and I've got so much crap on at the moment including another interview I have to do today I really don't want to deal with all this shit here. I would much rather be at home looking after my wife who really is feeling cruddy right now. Some days I just want to tell everyone here at work to bugger off.

Lots done today

  Managed to get a lot of work done today but still a pile a mile high left to do. I have enough work to keep going for something like 3 or 4 months before I would be done with what is on my plate. Not that this amount of work is out of the ordinary around here at the moment, there are a lot of new things we want to get in to the product now it is released that people are asking for.

  Only 3 more days left of the noisy ex coworker who is working here on a contract before he goes to work at Apple. From the sounds of his complaining of the cost of housing near Apple though he won't be getting paid a huge amount just more than he earned here. Makes me glad I earn what I do here as compared to some other people. He does have a point in that $2000 a month rent for a one bedroom apartment is quite a lot but some of the best schools in the state are in Cupertino so it is not surprising. I think myself and my other cube neighbours will be enjoying the quiet from next week onwards.

  Just thinking that this time in 2 weeks we will be at my parents house in England trying to stay awake from jetlag and getting ready to go visit our nephew. Going to be so weird being back there after so many years even though we both still consider ourselves British people that just happen to have lived in another country for 13 plus years.

  Time for a little bit more design work before I get out of here and call it another day of work done. Feels good sometimes to finish work at the time I do when other people are barely half way through their day.

Leave me alone!

 Gah, can't get any peace here at work since the guys in India keep bothering me, including mister I can't type to save my life who opened with (and I quote here) "so hw r u feeling 2day?". Sometimes I really feel like just taking myself offline and pretend I'm not here to try and get something productive done. Having instant communication with anybody in the world is useful but can be far too interrupt driven sometimes.

  Played some more of the increasingly silly Bulletstorm last night for a bit. The methods of killing the enemies in that game just get more gruesome and complicated the further you go in to the game. Still very stupid fun for a game.

  Been thinking a bit about how I'm going to get to retire. The economy really did a number on our investments and I'm not looking forward to still working for another 20+ years just to afford to be able to stop working. Think I need to find something that will bring in some more long term income so that we are not so reliant on just living off of savings when I stop working. This is probably due to me being 40 this year and knowing that I'm getting close to half way through my professional career with being at this company for 17 years now. You would think I had more to show for it other than experience and a bit of money stashed away. Kind of depressing in some ways.

  Hey, what do you know the megamillions lottery is up to $244 million. That should be a good retirement plan yes? :-) Only a 1 in 175 million chance of winning the main jackpot, easy peasy.

Classic coding error

  Reading through some code someone else wrote in order to extend it for a new feature I'm designing and implementing and I came across this.

enum SESSION_TYPE_T
  {
    SESSION_TYPE_DS,
    SESSION_TYPE_IS,
    SESSION_TYPE_SS,
    SESSION_TYPE_CS,
    SESSION_TYPE_TS,
    SESSION_TYPE_NS
  };

  All I can say is wow. Really, how much is just wrong with this from the pointless repeat of the enumeration to the utter lack of any useful description of the difference between the values. Single character differentiators between values are pretty much meaningless. This is also in code that has pretty much zero comments explaining stuff. I know who wrote this, they are no longer here, it shows just how junior and inexperienced they are despite their title containing senior.

Where has today gone?

  Already gone midday and my work day is almost done, just another couple of hours and I can get out of here to go home. Stupid busy this morning though with a very boring meeting thrown in to the mix. Good news is that we are going to offer the guy I interviewed a job, just need to see if he accepts what we offer. If he does work here his commute will be all of 2 miles.

  Checking the calendar and it seems that this week is only the second week this year where my wife has not had some form of doctors appointment or physiotherapy. That is quite a scary thought. Hopefully the worst of all this crap is now done with and she can get back to not seeing health people for a bit. Still some more physio to go but that isn't until next week and when we get back from England.

  Time for me to do stuff for us for the rest of the day. I've been far too productive today work wise, can't make the other guys here look too lazy :-| .

Finally done

  Just finished interviewing the guy who was meant to be here last week and the week before. Not bad, he has a good all round knowledge of the required protocols and good experience. We shall see how the rest of the interview goes.

  Time to share another picture, this time of Fudge curled up on the bed with us yesterday as we watched the film. He really is an adorable ball of fluffiness.

  Been playing quite a bit more of Dragon Age 2 over the last week. I can see the differences between it and the first game. They are going less for the saving the world style of story line and more personal and varied characters. Everyone you have in your party has an interest in the events that are taking place, not all of them necessarily the same interest so having conflicting people with you can lead to some very different responses in how they react to your choices.

  My wife seems to be getting to the snotty nosed bit of the cold today after feeling very grotty all weekend. Even I have a little bit of bunged up ness even though I feel fine. This cold really was an icky one.

  Going to go get back to work and blog a bit more later. Too much stuff going on here at the moment to spend too long doing anything else.

Descriptions

  Just finished watching a film with the wife in bed. It was a gripping story about a single father trying to raise his two children. He is struggling to make ends meet, ends up falling for a rich heiress and is a bit of a mad inventor. There are car chases involved, an evil dictator overthrown and in the end the father ends up rich and gets the woman. There are also a few musical numbers dotted around the film. Confused yet? When I tell you we watched Chitty Chitty Bang Bang you shouldn't be :-) .

Quiet Sunday

  With the wife sick in bed and me not feeling totally great either it is a very quiet day here today. Outside is still really grotty (or at least California grotty). There were some wicked winds last night and the pool has a couple of tons of leaves at the bottom of it. Really really windy to say the least, let alone all the rain that came with it. It sucked as well since there was so much cloud cover my wife didn't get a chance to take some moon pictures.

  I've been reading an interesting book my wife got me. It talks about how to go about doing something we have fantasized about even though I very much doubt it will ever happen. Just reading about it though makes it very clear what it takes to make it happen and I'm not sure I'm capable of it. Still, I know my wife is trying and I'm trying as hard as she is. That wasn't too vague was it :) ?

   Can't believe that in a day over two weeks we will be heading off to England, it has been so long since we've been back. Despite the shortness of the trip it is going to be fun to see the old country again as it were. With it being winter here in California the land and hills around us are actually green instead of the dead grass look it has for a large part of the year. One thing I do miss about England is how green it is everywhere unlike here even if the scenery in California is more varied that what I grew up with back there. Not sure how seeing the family will go, especially since we are mainly going only to see our nephew but we could not not go see him.

  Going to find something to do for a bit whilst my wife sleeps (and all 4 cats, the lazy buggers).

Auctions almost done

  Sitting here watching the last few stargate auctions go by. We got 3 things that we wanted, one for far cheaper than expected. The big disappointment was the uniform that went to 2k that was too much. Quite a few things have gone for 6k or even over 10k, including a fully functional malp that went for 12k.

  Just need to wait for the email in the week confirming the total cost of our winnings, the bids, sellers fees, sales tax and shipping costs and then see if we can get the items shipped before we go to England. If not it will have to wait until we get back to actually get our hands on the items.

  In other news we are looking at a big caravan to tow places and go traveling with. We never like the hotels we stay in much so this seems a better option in the long run. It means we can also take the cats with us when we go away for the weekend or something like that which would be fun. Need to arrange the tow hitch for the car and look at financing the caravan anyway.

  My wife is really coming down with the cold I had so I've been looking after her as much as I can. She soldiers on though since she doesn't have man cold so clearly she is not as sick as I was :-P .

Damn

  Hmmm, managed to get one uniform we were after from the auctions for $700. Another one though we had to give up after another bidder kept out bidding us and pushed the price to $2000. Fuck them.

Watching

  Sitting here watching the stargate auctions going on waiting for stuff we want to bid on to come up. Highlights so far are pieces of the stargate that went for 12k and 14k. Yikes. Also 7k for O'Neils combat vest. Luckily we won't be spending quite that much on what we want....

Date night report

  We had a good night out last night despite the bloody awful rain in the afternoon. I managed to get home early from work, avoiding the real rain (tm) for once in California and the multitude of accidents that Californian drivers seem to get in to when it gets wet.

  We had shopping, a scrumptious prime rib dinner and then when to see Paul which I think I enjoyed more than my wife but it was nice to be out. My wife wore her kick arse LBD and looked stunning and I almost looked as good wearing my smart black shirt and trousers. It has been a while since we've actually gone out like that and it was great to just be together doing stuff. Being able to fuss over my wife and show her how much I love her was great.

  I think it is safe to say that I don't think I've seen my wife look more stunning than last night, she put everyone else to shame last night with how she looked. I'm going to remember that look forever.

  Today is going to be SGA live auction day starting in a couple of hours. We have a few items we want to bid on out of the 460 or so there are in this auction. Might be a little expensive but it is just about the last chance to get this stuff since after this I believe there are no more items left to auction off.

  Just also doing a quick clean up of the house since we have the pet sitter coming over in an hour so we can introduce Lucy and Daisy and more importantly show the sitter how to apply Boot's thyroid medicine he is currently on since he needs it twice a day.

  Think we are going to finally ditch the landline, we have switched over both my parents and my wife's sister to Skype and just need to get my wife's mother to actually use the internet. Other than those few people we really don't need a phone at home since everything else we do can be done on a mobile phone or online.

  Oh, in case anyone cares I'm going to change the url on my blog to something else since my parents now know my grugvoth username (since I use it in Skype) and I don't want them finding this blog.

Another mess

  Seems I misunderstood my wife completely when I checked on her before leaving for work this morning. She had a headache and I asked if she wanted tablets. I only got a "eh" out of her before she turned over and went back to sleep so I assumed she was ok. Seems she wasn't and was expecting me to get tablets for her. Nice going me.

  I've been out sick from work 3 days and I get back to find a pile of shit left for me to deal with. There seems to be things that nobody wants to be bothered to deal with when I'm out so they all get left for me to sort out. Thanks guys.

  Since I need to get back to work and try and catch up with the stuff that has been left for me I'll stop here and just finish with this picture for my wife.

Time for bed

  Feeling just about right to go back to work tomorrow and my wife may be coming down with the same cold I'm just getting over, hows that for timing? I'll see how she is in the morning and may end up working from home to look after her just as she has made sure I've taken my medicine and had things to make me feel better these last few days.

  Until the morning then when we shall see what the world is like in another new day.

And we're back

  Well that was relatively painless, called up comcast, told them the cable modem was dead. They agreed since they didn't even see it on the line even though it was powered on and connected. Drove down to the local office down the road, 3 minutes later I walk out with a new modem. Get home, plug it in and a 4 minute phone call later the internet is back. If only fixing everything was this easy.

Almost human

Some would say that is my default state but I think I'm finally getting over this cold. Hopefully today I don't end up annoying everybody in the house as much as the last couple if days.

Going to keep this short since I think the cable modem is dead and I'm doing this on my phone.

Forget this yesterday

  Yesterday was my grandmother's 91st birthday (I didn't realise she was that old) and my parents sent me a picture they took while they were with her. My gran has lost a lot of her memory and so doesn't understand a lot of things that go on and lives in a home now but she is the longest living grandparent I have had.

Man cold continues

  Another night survived and I'm alive somehow. The whole house does continue to suffer my cold though with my snorting, snuffling, coughing and other bodily noises. Today will be another day of suffering and trying to stay still. I did actually manage to take my wife to a doctor appointment yesterday but it left me pretty wiped, so much so that we had reheated left over pizza for dinner since we both didn't feel like cooking much.

  Hopefully I'm feeling better by tomorrow or Friday since tomorrow I have an interview I need to conduct at work starting at 7am and Friday we have a dinner and a movie date night all set up. Missing the date night is going to suck a lot, we've been looking forward to it since we arranged it last week.

Birds

  Lucy and Daisy have discovered birds and they are completely mesmerised by them. It is funny to watch them move their heads back and forth in unison as the various birds in the back garden fly by.

I is really dead

  Or at least I'm dead in the fact that I have a cold. Not just any cold but a Man Cold which clearly means I am on deaths door. Sore throat, coughs, runny nose, headaches, the whole lot. Pretty rotten night and kept my wife awake a lot of it with snoring.

  Today is a sick day home from work, time to occupy myself while feeling grotty.

Forgotten picture

  Took this picture over the weekend. We had more pancakes, for breakfast both Saturday and Sunday. I like the fact that you can see the small lake of maple syrup on top of the pancake before the second one I had that day was placed on top. Serious sugar rush going on at that time.

  Note this is a real pancake not the generally soggy mattress like pancakes that you get in the US all too often. This is the kind of pancake I grew up with and despite being in the country for over 13 years I will not switch my definition :) .

Totally dead

  I think this image sums up how my brain feels right now. What have I achieved so far in the two and bit hours I've been at the office? Not a lot really, I find myself unable to concentrate on anything right now. My brain is buzzing about things but also goes in to total fuzz mode very quickly and I lose complete track of my train of thought. Not conducive to getting anything meaningful done.

  One bonus about the hour change was there were not too many people on the road this morning even though with some rain around the typical Californian reaction to rain of slamming your brakes on to slow down by 20mph when the rain starts happened too often. Way to create more of a hazard than just carrying on driving at the same speed idiots. I could write a million words about the stupid things people do on the road.

  Watched a film yesterday we got a while ago, Salt, pretty good film but very predictable plot wise. Nice to see a female arse kicking spy type person than a male for a change although Angelina Jolie still looks weird blond as she starts out in the film. We are slowly getting through out pile of films to watch and I think we are now only 2 weeks behind on the stuff in the Tivo.

  I think I finally have an idea for my next fiction story thing I'm writing for my wife. Depending on how work goes this week I may have some time in the early mornings to get it done. We shall see if I can finish it before we go away on our trip.

 Time to be productive today, people are starting to arrive at work and I need to look busier than I am at the moment.

I have to wait how long?

  Can't believe I won't get my missing hour back until October, feeling a little out of it with just this one hour change over the weekend. Didn't sleep all that well last night so very much in a complete daze this morning and I need to get a ton of work done over the next few weeks before going to England not to mention sorting out some way for us to move house. Anyway let's start off today with a picture of another one of my shirts, this time one of my older ones that is slightly scruffy but is still comfy.

 

  Yes I do have a thing for striped shirts for those that have noticed.

  I'm really not that awake a the moment so I'm going to go get breakfast and then maybe write some more later when my brain is more switched on. There we go, something for people to look forward to today.

Delicious balls

  Just had an absolutely yummy homemade meatball sandwich for dinner. Way better than anything you can buy and totally scrumptious. My wife rules as a chef. That and spending some time watching a film made for a very enjoyable afternoon. Now on to deciding how to spend the last few hours before bed this evening to maximise the relaxation today.

Bargains

  We've done it again, shopped for lots of more stuff for our new nephew. Only 3 weeks until we go to see him now. This time we managed to get something like 17 different items (trousers, complete outfits, shirts etc) for only $121.04, serious bargain shopping down at the K-Mart one town over.

  Blooming time change last night messed me up a little bit today. Realised that rather than getting up at 7am it was already 8am, blerg. Still when we went out it was very quiet about, not many people up and about this morning which makes it nice and easy to get around.

  Our trip back to England is planned down to each meal so far it seems. My sister in law emailed us a rough menu for every day including what we would be eating where. It is the kind of planning I see in my wife as well so it must run in the family slightly. There is even a day where my wife and I get to take out nephew out for the day on our own to give my sister in law a day off. Nappy changing and bottle feeding will be my tasks for that day :-) .

  Going back to having a quiet Sunday with no real chores to do (2 litter boxes scrubbed clean notwithstanding) so an easy day is always a good thing to have every now and then.

I feel scruffy

Compared to my wife I always feel slightly scruffy. Even in pajamas she out styles me. Take when we went out today for instance. I was in nice jeans and a relatively smart t-shirt ( as much as such a thing exists:) ). My wife however had a nice skirt, white blouse and her comfy black suede heels on. I found excuses to walk behind her occasionally to admire the rear view ;) .

I do dress sort of smart every now and then but don't really pull it off that well (you should see our wedding pictures). My wife though always manages to look very presentable which gives me another reason to love her.

Hot and sweaty

Home and just finished edging, weeding and mowing the front lawn. It was last done last year so it took a while. Also as a result I am a bit stinky, so much so I may need to shower twice in one day!!!!

Time to go relax for a bit now that shopping and gardening chores are done for the weekend. Let lazing around commence.

Rested

Yesterday was a long day, work was non stop and ended with a meeting that went on too long to cover a product enhancement that is only going to take a week to do. Then we did s bunch of cleaning up in the back garden and you can now walk all around our pool again since the bushes at the back were overgrowing the oath and just about in the pool itself.

The day ended up with us flobbed out on the sofa watching TV and an early 9 o'clock bed time. I just about passed out and slept all the way through until 4 and don't remember a thing in-between which was nice.

Got up this morning and Daisy and Lucy are barreling around the house being very hyper. So what did we do? Why give them catnip of course to make them totally spazmoid. After 30 minutes they seem to be finally exhausted and slowing down for a nap.

Breakfast in a bit is going to be pancakes and then we are off to the Jelly Belly factory to stock up for us and for some to take to England for people over there. Very convenient getting jelly beans from there since they have all the ones they make available to buy in whatever quantities you want.

Freaky to watch

  I know high rise towers are meant to do this during a quake but it is still freaky to see it happening.

  http://gizmodo.com/#!5781064/watch-a-high+rise-building-in-tokyo-sway-during-massive-earthquake

Busy morning

  Been trying to goof off a bit this morning to do some personal stuff  but I've already been busy since I got here, the disadvantage of having offices in other places in the world. There is a lot of stuff I'm trying to get done and having to work is not making it easy. Top of the list is finding somewhere else quiet for us to live, either with a new job or not depending on how my company decides it wants to help me out. If they won't help me out I need to find a better job that will allow us to move. We don't really care where it is, just somewhere that will give us some peace and quiet (and maybe not quite so much heat).

  Sigh, even writing this much has taken me 15 minutes with so many interruptions. Not sure I'll get much chance to blog about crap today (yeah, I know you are all so disappointed). Time to see if I can get a moment to house hunt before the 9am daily conference call.

8.9

  That is large. Can't imagine an earthquake of that magnitude let alone going on for as long as it did. Even the aftershocks were all above 7.1. Kind of glad that everybody I care about is safe around now. Got to feel for the people in Japan and anywhere that gets hit by the tsunami after this.

Coding humour?

  Just came across this in the code written by a guy who just got a job at Apple. The kind of dumb humour he puts in the code.

long long llBikini = atoll(syElementContent.c_str());

Random music

  Decided to listen to more music on shuffle and log everything that comes up including if I skipped it. I have over 4500 songs on my iPod so this list might get big depending on how many I listen to or skip. Here we go:-

• Oasis - Hey Now!
• Queen - Sleeping on the sidewalk (skipped)
• System Of A Down - Stealing Society
• Motorhead - Jumpin' Jack Flash (skipped)
• Iron Maiden - Hallowed Be Thy Name
• Evanescence - Bring Me To Life
• Nine Inch Nails - Closer (skipped)
• AC/DC - Shook me all night long
• Led Zeppelin - Lemon song (skipped)
• Bullet For My Valentine - No control
• Static-X - Dead world
• Opeth - The drapery falls (skipped)
• Adema - Do you hear me
• AC/DC - Night prowler (skipped)
• Queensryche - I will remember
• Deep Purple - Demon's eye (skipped)
• Judas Priest - Heavy metal (skipped)
• Trivium - The crusade
• Avenged Sevenfold - And all things will end

  There we go, a quick journey through a tiny portion of my music. Probably not very interesting but meh who cares.

Less scary music

  Listening to some more music while I work on something. As opposed to the last song I posted this one is more SFW (safe for wife) and something I listen to via my wife. Here it is

Random stuff again

  Morning rituals are complete (breakfast, checking web sites, reading email etc.) so time for a random rambling blog update.

  Found out what happened to that interviewee yesterday after we (the people who were meant to do the interviewing) complained to HR and our VP. Apparently the person could not make it and informed HR who didn't think to tell us. So I sat on my arse in the lobby for 25 minutes waiting for this person to turn up when the company already knew he wasn't coming. Thanks.

  Played another new game last night, Bulletstorm. Very silly game with stupid dialogue a 12 year old boy would enjoy. However the actual gameplay is rather fun. It is a first person shooter where you get points for doing skillful or just downright silly shots. You also can kick or leash enemies so you end up throwing them through the air, shooting them in various body parts, throwing enemies around on to bits of the environment to impale electrocute and dismember them. Generally just doing stupid things to get points. There are something like 131 "skill shots" that are things you can do to get points. They vary from the simple "Kill an enemy by kicking him against a surface" to the slightly more complicated "Get an enemy airborne, kill a different enemy, then kill the first before he lands" and up to the completely silly "Shoot an enemy in the balls then kick or shoot his head off". It is that kind of game and has more swearing per second in the dialogue than any other game I've played but it just stupid fun it seems.

  Petrol has decide to get silly expensive (at least for this country) with it being 4$ a gallon. I filled up the other day and hit the $75 limit on card purchases at the pump. All I can be thankful for is that we are not still living in England where the equivalent price is something nearer $9 to $10 per gallon at the moment. That would suck majorly.

  Trying to come up with a list of potential women for my Wednesday posts. I have a few more ideas now and will probably do some women known more for being in films rather than TV as I have done so far. Also might do some younger ones since all the people I have picked so far have been around my age.

  Ok, it has been 25 minutes since that last paragraph. I got interrupted by other people here at work and have now lost my train of thought (such as it was).  I should just post this blog entry and write some more stuff later when I have a chance. Time to go kick code butt and design cool things.

I am a genius

Just got home and proved my genius :P . For some reason the router was not letting any device on and so no Internet at home. What did I do to fix it? Why power reset the router of course, something my wife had tried multiple times. Clearly it needed a geeky husband touch to work :) .

My head hurts

  My head is hurting in both the slightly literal sense and in the confused as all hell sense. Somehow I've got a little bit of a headache right now that an ibuprofen should kick the arse of pretty soon. Other than that though it has been a day of overworking my brain.

  Firstly I've been trying to think of anything I would want for my upcoming 40th birthday. At the moment I have no freaking idea of a gift I would like, not that I usually have ideas for gifts that is. A 40th birthday is kind of a milestone though so my wife wants to get me something worthy of the occasion but I'm really struggling for ideas right now.

  The other way my head is hurting is because I'm trying to scope out about 5 different feature requests on the product I'm working on right now and designing that many different things at once is taxing to say the least. Not that making the features work is going to be hard. They need to be done right though and that is where the thought comes in since I need to get enough detail down to work out how long each thing is going to take (down to each stage of development granularity) as well as making sure the detail is enough for anyone idiot to actually do the work since I won't be doing all of these features. I know this is what I get paid for but some days I would just like it to be a bit more relaxing than having to think so much. I could get a different job I suppose but I doubt they would pay as reasonably well as this one does.

  Anyway, on to other things while I let my brain rest from working. No idea where that interviewee is at all today, not heard back from HR either, so way to go in getting yourself a job that guy. Unless there is some good excuse I doubt we will be giving him a second chance to be honest.

  Almost came home with another cat the other day, we were at the pet shop stocking up on food and litter and as usual took a brief look at the cats up for adoption. There was one siamese that my wife really liked that tempted us. I think in the long term we would love to have lots of cats if we had room for them all. Maybe we could run a cat home or something when I finally get to retire? I don't know, I just love the little buggers.

  More doctor and physiotherapy stuff for my wife this afternoon. This doctor is the ortho doc that prescribed the physio so hopefully if there has been enough progress she can finish this round of physio and be done. Not sure how unstuck her shoulder is but the physio person yesterday said it had good movement even if my wife can't move her arm completely by herself. Speaking of shoulders, both mine and my wife's are sore from where we had our vaccinations the other day. It is especially painful for me wife since that is the shoulder being manipulated in her physio sessions.

  Right, back to work once more for an hour before lunch. Then I have one more meeting to go over a feature design and I can get out of here and be done with another day at work.

Not a good sign

  Hmmm, almost 7:15 and no sign of the guy I'm meant to be interviewing this morning. Hopefully the HR person didn't screw up again and forget to tell the interviewee about the interview (don't laugh, it has happened before). To make it even more awkward the front doors to our building are broken and are currently padlocked shut since the electromagnetic lock on them died yesterday.

  Heard some bad news yesterday via my wife. I hope everything works out ok since what I heard about is not something I would want anyone to go through. My thoughts are with the people involved.

  Started Dragon Age 2 last night for a bit. Playing as a female again, this time called Sarah Hawke. So far it is a good improvement on the original game but you can see how the game engine from Mass Effect 2 has been used in this game with how certain things like the menus work etc. Speaking of that other game, I didn't quite get through the second playthough of that one but I will go back to it later to finish the hardest difficulty off. It hasn't been too challenging overall, just the odd spot that takes a few tries to find the right tactics.

  Enough updating my blog for now, I better go find out WTF this person is and see if I can find the HR person as well since he has the contact details for this person.

Wednesday's woman

  Just a quick post to start today off before I go interview someone at 7am. This week I'm posting someone who is actually very cute and tiny, Vanessa Marcil. She just has that really pretty look about her when she smiles that some women get. I'm putting up three pictures this time, two usual ones and another simply because of the goofy grin on her face that made me laugh.

Pressure

  Working through an issue here at work with a customer where our equipment can literally mean life or death. Talk about pressure. You don't think about it most of the time but the equipment I write software for is used so people can talk on the phone to one another. No big deal right?

  It never really crosses your mind when working on the code, how something you are doing will have some form of "real world" implication since us engineers never really see it. I know for a fact though that code I have written has been used for large parts of certain branches of the government to talk to each other securely. Parts that sometimes really need to get an important message through. Parts that people put their lives on the line in. I think that gives enough of an idea without me having to describe exactly how what I do is used since as a company we rarely admit we have sold to these customers let alone how our stuff is used.

  It pisses me off when I see other engineers around here go "well it only doesn't work one time in a thousand". I feel like asking them how would they feel if the brakes in their car only work 999 times out of a 1000. One of the first big bugs I worked on here as an engineer was for an issue where randomly, during the middle of the day, 2 or 3 phone calls out of maybe 15000 a day that went through one piece of equipment were being disconnected. I ended up flying out to Frankfurt to sit onsite for a week just to collect data so we could track down the issue. Then when we had it and I was back in the lab in the USA it still took me another 2 weeks of poring through the code to find the bloody thing. The reason for the bug? Someone was lazy in their coding and reused references between layers of the code rather than make sure they were unique and so when one call disconnected there was a chance to disconnect another unrelated call at the same time.

  Think about that, just because someone couldn't be bothered to spend another 30 minutes doing a slightly more complicated solution to cover a corner case condition. Luckily the end client in this case was just a big bank clearing house and not something more vital. It just shows people really don't always think of the possible ramifications of everything they do when just a little bit of more thought and effort can stop all sorts of troubles. And yes I do realise the irony of me saying that given my actions lately, it is partially why I'm writing this with examples of this kind of thing being on my mind right now with what I'm currently working on.

Two important things about today

  Thought I would point out two important things about what today is. The first is obviously it is pancake day (ok, shrove Tuesday really) which is always an important day for eating purposes. They other one? The 100th anniversary of International Women's Day, something definitely important as well.Women, one in particular, have always been an important part of my life. More so than men in quite a few ways so just one day is never enough but today is the day it has been decided for it apparently.

Another fun day

  Finally managed to get to work this morning. This picture was the view out of the front of my car as I sat stationary for 15 minutes.

  There was an accident on the first big hill I drive over on the way to work. A single SUV who managed to drive in to the back of an 18 wheeler (yeah, I'm not sure how you do that either) brought 5 lanes of traffic to a complete halt. Considering where I commute from a lot of people leave for work early that is going to mess up quite a few people's start to the day.

  Anyway, on to more interesting things. My wife's visit to the doctor went well yesterday, we got one medicine prescribed at a higher dose and finally he agreed to take her off of another that she hasn't needed to take for a couple of years now. We also both got our whooping cough vaccination shots for when we go see our nephew since cases of it are on the rise here and we don't want to bring it back and infect a new born (well, he will be 3 months) baby with it.

  More good news, the California income tax refund turned up yesterday and the federal income tax refund turned up today. Cash monies straight in to the bank account is always good and a nice boost. We always end up overpaying each year and get a good few thousand back combined between the two. It seems a better method than ended up owing taxes and having to pay out more.

   I think I will end this post with one more picture of our cat Daisy. Here she is trying to act all innocent and cute after being found wandering around on the kitchen counter. None of our other cats have ever shown any interest in wandering around up there but over the last few days she has been up there a lot and we are trying to discourage her. Mainly because we don't want her walking across the cooker and hurting herself but also because there is usually some form of edible thing up there and we don't want her eating everything.

And we're off

  Finally got that server back up and running and magically the 600Gig of disk space we were missing is back. I get to leave work early today as well to take my wife to a doctor's appointment. What a productive day work wise with maybe an hour of actual work left before I'm out of here.

Still looking

  Still trying to find out WTF our server is messed up. To pass the time I'm listening to some music in my itunes library for a change. Currently up is this song. Always a song I enjoy that is actually from the last decade unlike a lot of music I have which is the stuff I grew up with in the 80s.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgiXVlW-ICE

Argh people

  Getting pretty much nowhere with work at the moment. We have a server we all use to store our code on as we work on it. It has a 1TB drive on it that is more than enough room for 20 or so engineers to use considering it only holds code being worked on not all code. Usually it has around 600 to 700 Gig of space free. This morning however, 0 bytes free. Some moron has left something running and used over 600 Gigs of space in a weekend.

  I'm currently running a script to find out which moron it was (and not it wasn't me I've already checked :-) ). This day is just getting more and more fun. Live updates as they happen.

Zzzzzzz

  Back at work nice and early again. Kind of zombiefied though so getting ready to eat my omelette leftovers since my stomach is grumbling already at just gone 6am. Decided to do another shirt picture today, this time of a really comfy one that is going to be high in the rotation it seems.

  Seems like today is going to be dealing with a ton of crap here at work, a few bugs got logged over the weekend for some of our more militaristic clients should I say. Basically you know the point in a film where you see someone in the government pick up a phone and say "go secure"? I know exactly what happens when they do that and the equipment that my company sells handles some of that. That is about all I'm going to say on that but the bugs involve this kind of secure phone call which is always awkward because those devices are very strictly controlled to say the least.

  Going to try a bit this morning of writing more of the story I was working on. After reading my wife's one though I'm not sure it will compare in the least. My mind just doesn't seem to work like that at all in the way my wife's mind can be creative. I can visualise software, see how it works and flows and just understand it without even thinking about it. Yet trying to come up with situations and describe them seems totally beyond me most of the time.

  Enough for now, food is calling and I want to get a few things done this morning before work intrudes too much. I suspect I'll be back in a bit to natter on about something else soon anyway.

Feeling strange

  I feeling a bit strange at the moment, my wife is having a nap this afternoon since she is tired quite a bit at the moment. I'm trying to occupy myself but don't seem to be able to concentrate much on anything.

  Right now I just want to take the two of us away from here and find somewhere to be together with no pressure from the outside world. I know though if I do that we will lose everything we've tried to build for ourselves, our house, our cats, our whole life. Sometimes though I just want to give all that up just so I can be alone with my wife.

  She needs more than that though and I'm trying my hardest to give her everything she needs. I get so tired but I keep going knowing that it is what I want to do more than anything. I don't care what it does to me I just want her to be happy even though most of the time the cause of her not being happy is related to me.

  One day I will earn back her trust which I destroyed with what I did. She has trusted me for so long and I messed up, not the only time I've messed up in these 20 years but the worst. I hope she realises that she is everything to me, I just let out my frustrations with my own failures in a stupid selfish way. I hurt several people in the process, saying stupid things because I've not learned to deal with how I feel about things.

  I've always hidden away how I feel, I learned that at a very young age from how my parents acted. Whenever I tried to express something or made a slight mistake I was shouted at. Not necessarily by my parents but by teachers, friends (the few that I had) and others. It made me hide anything that I thought someone would be upset about. In the end however it has caused more problems and I'm trying like buggery to stop it, I'm just scared it has become some ingrained in me that I will keep doing it and destroy myself and those around me.

  I'm not ashamed to say I was scared early on in our relationship, not by my wife but by how I saw her family act. They would lose their temper at the slightest thing despite trying to be on the best behaviour when I was visiting. It was something that was completely foreign to me and when my wife lost her temper later on when we lived together I would shut down, not wanting to live like her family had. I wanted her to have a safe and calm place to be so that she wouldn't need to shout and scream to express herself since that was the main way she knew from how she was brought up.

  In trying to balance things though I withdrew more in to myself. I didn't want to worry my wife with my problems, the one person I should have allowed to help me more than anyone. I took as much on myself as I could to try and shield her from it since she had an incredibly crappy upbringing. Everything I've done has been to try and provide and care for her. To show her how much I will do so that I can show her how much I love her.

  Well this has distracted me for a bit with more inane ramblings about my failings, the more I write these down the more I can try and understand them and overcome my problems. I know now what I need to talk about to someone to get me through this and help my wife. I know I mentioned this before, it is this kind of crap that I fail to deal with that I wanted to talk about to stop the mess I ended up creating. That is what I decided all those weeks ago but I failed to find a way to do it without shitting everything up.

  I know I've said this before but I'm sorry for what I did. Nobody deserves the crap I put people through, least of all my wife. She is the one person though who has ever tried to help me and I'm scared that with what I've done I won't even have that.

Stuffed

  Just got back from going out for breakfast. I had a huge omelette that I could only managed half of, leaving the other half to have tomorrow. Score. My wife wasn't quite so greedy as me and had healthy pancakes with blueberries and walnuts in it but even then could not manage all of it so I snaffled a bit of it. Nowhere near as stodgy as normal American pancake mattresses.

  Another good piece of news, I was meant to mow the lawn today but it is raining. Yay for getting out of chores?

 One bad bit of news, now that I have finished reading the story I'm not really sure what I'm going to do today. Can't really try reading anything else since it won't compare.

  Tossed and turned a bit in bed last night worrying about things as I do. Listened to my wife talk to herself in her sleep a bit as well which is always amusing. She sort of whispers and mutters at the same time so I can't always make out what she is saying but it is cute when she does do it, unless she is having a nightmare that is.

  Off to go and see what the rest of today brings whilst my stomach absorbs the mountain of food it has already been filled with. Not sure how much lunch I'll be able to eat after that.

Story finished

  I reached the end of my wife's story tonight, all 955000 words of it. The ending is sad and happy at the same time and I'm crying right now.

  I'm terrified at the thought of losing the woman I love, knowing I would never cope being without her. I want to grow old and be with her forever, that is the only life I can see.

  All this shit that has happened we will get past, there is no other way. I refuse to have any other path in life no matter what else happens I will always be with my wife, my love, the only person in the world that I give a damn about. We could be the only people left in the universe and I would be happy and content.

  I just hope that my wife feels this way about me as well since I know I will always feel this way.

Skid row

  Lucy seems to have found her own version of Skid Row in the huge box that an ebay auction winning turned up in during the week.

Bonus chocolate

  Just got back from going to a park to walk around and take some pictures. On the way there we spotted a chocolate outlet shop so we made a slight detour on the way back. They had boxes of 12 bars of chocolate for $20 that usually go for 4$ per bar. We stocked up on bonus chocolate (since it wasn't the intent of the trip out) to bring back home. Not toooo many :) .

  Lovely warm day today, already over 20C and virtually clear skies and lots of sunshine. We even managed to chop back the bushes growing out front in front of the bay window so we can actually see out the front of the house from inside.

  Time for lunch I think, bonus chocolate may be involved in some way.

Morning posting

  Work from home day today so I get to sit next to my wife all day rather than in my now decorated cube at work. The company here is much more preferable to any I have at work and I can sit around in my PJs all day if I want to :) .

  Bought my wife a present yesterday and it should turn up today. Hurray for amazon prime cheap one day shipping. It should be fine to try it out once it gets here.

  Just about morning meeting time again right now so excuse me whilst I call in to the conference.

  And there we go, joined and muted from my laptop. Even a conference call can't stop me from blogging it seems.

  Dinner last night at IHOP (kind of sad that I wrote it iHop last night, Apple fanboy or what?) was good. I had the fruit as the side with my dinner but it consisted solely of 3 different types of melon. How that is "seasonal fruit" I don't know since they are all variations on the same. Melon is also not my favourite fruit either so that was kind of a meh moment despite the rather yummy bacon and egg cheeseburger.

  Not long until my first preordered game of this year turns up. Dragon Age 2 should be here Tuesday, the original was a game I spent a lot of time playing so I'm looking forward to it. I went through the original one 3 times completely and started six different characters to see the various opening chapter possibilities the game has.

  8 minutes in to this conference call and so far we have discussed 2 bugs. Only 9 more to go let alone talking about any other issues we need to talk about as a group. Only 27 people on the call though so it should not drag on too long unlike the times when almost 40 people are on the call.

  Reading my wife's story update, I'm at 80% done now. Kind of dreading finishing it since I won't be able to get the enjoyment of reading it fresh anymore. Seeing what happens and loving the writing style and content is just too good. I tried reading a book before going to sleep the other night and it just wasn't the same. A published author just didn't grab me anywhere as much as reading my wife's writing.

  Going to stop writing for a little bit, want to sort of pay attention to this call and fuss my wife. Back later.

Breaking the suspense

  Since I know this is a vital piece of information that thousands of you are expectant over knowing where we went for dinner. iHop, exciting huh?

Lucky number 129

That is the number of this blog post that bored me is doing while sitting here as my wife had her physiotherapy. That is a lot of boring shit I've written down isn't it? Not that I'm going to stop anytime soon.

What is on my mind right now? Dinner mainly, trying to decide where to go since we are eating out tonight rather than cooking. Nothing too fancy just something yummy.

Need to decide if I'm going in to work tomorrow or working from home. Probably the latter since all I really need to do at the moment is boring documentation/design stuff, no fun actual coding right now.

Need to badger my boss again soon to get him moving on helping us move. Something really needs to happen after we get back from England in April. This is the year for sure, both of us need the change in surroundings.

Think we will settle down and watch a bluray or some tv tonight. Something where we can lay back on the sofa together and just relax.

That's all for now, typing these on the phone is never that simple since the blogger interface doesn't work perfectly. Until next boring old waffle from my mind.

Big bushy thing

  Just a quick picture of the big purple bushy climber plant thing at the front of our house. It is buzzing with bees at the moment so the whole thing is actually rather noisy. It only looks like this for a couple of weeks a year around about this time and looks really nice.

Day with the wife

  Took today off work so I could spend it with my wife. We need this time together after the last day and a half. Not sure what we are going to do really, bit of shopping maybe. I know I need to get a headlight for the car which decided to go out coming home last night (they are on all the time since the car has daylight running lights) but other than that I don't think it matters. Just being together is incredibly comforting and calming for both of us.

  I know now more than ever that she is the one person in the whole world for me. I hope I am that for her since that is what I want to be for her more than anything.

  I realised this morning that I didn't do my weekly picture post. I think I was a little distracted yesterday to even think about it let alone do it :| . I know who it is this time though so I'll do it at some point soon.

The world is better now

Just got home with my wife and now everything is all better. I feel so much calmer and we are all happy and giggly being back together again. We will be all better in the long run given time.

Waiting

  I seem to be doing a lot of waiting today. At the moment I'm waiting until 3 when I can next see my wife and hopefully bring her home afterward. I want her to be able to talk to people, I know she likes being more of a solitary person like me but having an ability to talk to people she likes, of which there are very few, is vital to her. Where she is at the moment she is separated from those she loves and cares for and I know she hates it.

  As part of waiting I am busy watching the clock on my desk. More bonus geek points if anybody can tell me what the time is when I took this picture of said clock.

Lost

  Feeling very lost at the moment. Here at work waiting for something to happen and not doing much of anything. I try to find something to occupy my mind and end up just staring off in to space not doing anything at all. It doesn't help that I got about 4 hours of on/off sleep last night and that is making me more dopey.

  I just want to go get my wife, take her home and fuss all over her and hold her all day and night.

  On a happier note the cats were so happy to see me this morning 3 of them crowded around me when I got up. Lucy spent almost 2 hours lying cuddled up with me last night before I finally went to bed to try to sleep. She wedged herself between me and the edge of the sofa.

End of the day

  Just got back home after seeing my wife. Talk about fucking depressing in that place, being in there is the worst thing for her. They really had to stretch the meaning of things to get her to stay and she better be able to come home tomorrow otherwise I'm going to throw an absolute hissy fit.

  I doubt I'm going to get any sleep tonight but I shall try in a bit. My mind is still too all over the place at the moment to settle. I'll be in the office tomorrow early as usual trying to pass the time, I really won't be doing any work though.

  We will get through this, I know we will, I will do anything to help my wife through this. I love her so much it hurts.

Can't do anything

I'm a mess right now. I'm away from my wife and I can't see her or talk to her. Nothing calms my mind and I can't stop crying. We need to be together away from where she is, I know she doesn't want to be there. I wish I could take away all her sadness and hurt. If they don't let her out I won't see her other than a brief hour this evening. She needs to be home with me.

Redecorating

My wife came with me to work today since we have to go somewhere that is near the office this morning. As a result my cubicle is being redecorated. I moved cube last year to a slightly bigger one and most of my stuff was still sitting in boxes in the corner of the cube. Now however the best stuff is all out and making my barren cube slightly less sparse. I even have my picture of our cat TipTup back out and on display, one of the few pictures we have of him.

  I even have a Zippy now stuck to my wall as seen here

  He really is very very clever even if he is being pinned to the wall in a sort of tortured crucifix position.