The lesser mabinogion

I got back from Mum and Dad’s on Wednesday. Since then I’ve been more or less trying to find things to do to fill in my time.
I finished the Bitterbynde trillogy by Celia Dart-Thornton which was well worth the read – a very folky, high fantasy adventure type series, with some wonderful imagery….but just a few too many adjectives I’d never heard of before – enough to make me feel decidedly ignorant, and I’ve always though I had a pretty reasonable vocabulary – but it did kind of add to the poetic style of the writing. Even if it did remind me of the Blackadder episode “Ink and Incapability” where Blackadder is anaspeptic, phrasmotic, and compunctious to have caused Doctor Johnson periconbobulations by offering him contrafibularatories. or something…..heh.

I went for a walk yesterday…I’ve decided that maybe I should start getting fit too. It was a 45 minute walk around Charnwood…and some of it’s really not too bad to look at. I went for another one today…this time Flynn way, but was only able to manage 25 minutes or so, due to stiffness from the previous day, and the disturbing tendancy on the part of the weather to hurl water from the sky at me.

Hopefully it’ll be dry enough tomorrow to get a decent one in.

Currently, I’m up in Queensland visiting my parents…..filling in time, trying to make my book last long enough so that I have something to read on the way home. I don’t think I’m going to succeed. It’s been a pretty good break, lots of doing not much…a bit of a walk on the beach, a trip to Eumundi and Noosa to fill in a day, which was pretty nice too.
We had a couple of fairly impressive storms too, one of which took out the power for an hour or so, which is nothing really remarkable up here.
Tessa’s away in Florida for another week or so, she’s been in New Orleans for the last few days visiting friends, and is staying with another friend in St. Augustine in Florida. I haven’t heard much from her, except that she’s having fun, and all is well, but I expect once she’s settled back in florida again that I’ll be able to actually talk to her for a bit.

I should have bought another book.

Today was kinda difficult.
I worked from home, as I usually do on Tuesdays, and Tessa worked all day. Somehow I just couldn’t find any motivation to do anything. I would poke at the configuration stuff I’m working on for a bit – maybe write a few lines of code, maybe tidy something up – then I would find myself getting up and wandering round the room as if i were looking for something, but I don’t know what. I’d usually end up getting something to eat, or making a cup of tea.
I managed to get something done in the end though…as usual on those sorts of days, I finally got into it by about 4:00.

I spent some time this evening working on Wraith. I didn’t achieve much, but I did manage to come up with a really nice guitar tone for lead stuff, and gave the vocals for the verse another go. I’m a bit happier with it now, though it’ll still require a few more takes, since there’s some wobbliness in parts, and too much accent in others. (though I’m not quite sure how to fix that – I wasn’t even really aware I _had_ an accent untill I heard myself singing “foi -nol” for “final”). The chorus still seriously needs redoing – but that’s for tomorrow.

I also did some more work on the site – fixed the archive pages to be the same style as the rest – and discovered to my horror, that the boxes containing the posts (and the comment entry form) stretch all the way to the right of the page. I’ll have to reoorganize a few things to fix that, and possibly introduce another CSS class. (Though I’ll try to avoid that if I can, since there’s already far to many of them). CSS really needs reusable styles – or class inheritance – I could probably do that by cascading, but it’d probably be a pain, and it wouldn’t be as easy to use multiple stylesheets any more.

Ok, this is only my second ever attempt at a personal blog, so it will be interesting to see how long I remain motivated enough to keep it updated. My last attempt consisted of a total of 15 posts, over nearly the same number of months – despite a commitment to myself to make an update at least once a week – so it will be interesting to see how I go this time.
I guess I’m really not a writing sort of person, so it never really occurs to me to commit my thoughts to any sort of tangible medium.
Anyway, on with the stuff…
Working on this site has been occupying most of my time for the last few days. It’s rather satisfying to finally have something here, after having the domain registered for nearly 3 years.
It may take me a while, but I get round to things eventually.

I’m typing this on my new Microsoft Natural Multimedia keyboard, supplied by work to help with the problems I’ve been having with my wrists. So far, I don’t mind it at all, the split takes a bit of getting used to though, since it forces you to use the left hand for everything left of and including 6, t, g and b, and the right for evrything right of and including 7,y,h and n, and it appears my typing style tends to be more about alternating hands rather than hovering around home keys so I keep finding myself reaching across the division. But I exect I’ll get used to it pretty quick.
Whether or now it improves my wrist situation is hard to tell. I suspect that if it does, I’ll just end up working longer ’till my wrists hurt again anyway ;)