I walked 30 mins to the station today – a brisk walk, running in parts (yes, I was late). I then worked all day, walking around a hospital that is on 3 floors. I had a Caesar salad (homemade – ish) for lunch. Then in the evening, a 30 min walk in the drizzle back from the station. I did rather spoil this healthiness with a very small creme egg at lunchtime, a huge dinner and half a easter egg for dessert. Tomorrow, I shall attempt a full day of health!

Day 1 of the rest of the year went well. Busy, and tiring, but well. From what I’ve heard from the filly, my next clinic after this one is a total and utter dos. We sense we’re building up to the biggies

I quite like the fact my blog is still on GMT time – it means I can write my blog at my normal time of after midnight yet it still lists it as today (it’s still Tuesday for me, although the clocks may disagree). I may invent my own time zone – Kai Standard Time (KST). It always coinscidentally runs 1 hour behind UK time…

Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of the year. That is to say, we begin a year of clinical rotations, and the anticipation is a little discomforting. So today was herein branded The Last Day of Freedom (a somewhat pessimistic outlook, I admit) and it was one of those days you remember for a long time.

It began somewhat disappointingly with a late start – 11.30am to be precise – and with severely aching muscles. Presumably I spent the night tense with worry of tomorrow, since I haven’t done anything else to warrant muscle ache. However the sun was shining, the birds singing and the garden issued a challenge. It said (for my garden can speak) “I challenge you to ignore your computer, who is restrained to your North facing bedroom by the ethernet connection and to come and sit in this lovely South facing garden with a book, breakfast outside, drinketh of the tea outside, and generally be not the cloistered hermit you are famed to be”. As I was feeling rather brave this morning I replied “I accept your challenge, Oh Garden, and I raise you – I shall do some washing!” And so I did. And as I did I was reminded of previous days of freedom. After my exams last April I “celebrated” by sitting in the sun reading Sharpe’s Havoc. Today I was reading Sharpe’s Devil in exactly the same place, and I suddenly realised that this blog is almost a year old.

It’s funny – being so computer oriented I find absolute joy in doing nothing and thinking nothing for extended periods of time. I don’t spend enough time doing nothing – I must make more time to do nothing.

The day was nicely rounded off with some telly, goats cheese bites (they were breakfast as well, and were so yummy I had more for dinner), a one and a half hour bath complete with incense. I have discovered that using 30-odd Lush products in the bath whilst reading the Lush Times, circling the next products you wish to buy is very relaxing. Now a cinnamon hot choc drink, get my stuff ready for tomorrow, check the train times, finish my hair and go to bed. I’m determined to post this before the day actually becomes tomorrow… EDIT I shouldn’t have worried – my blog is still on GMT…

* At time 4.12 in The Battle is the most emotive piece of music in the history of music. Listen to it loud, listen to it repeatedly.

 ,-    ()()
 ’.,–( °°>:
   \  , /
    ’-”’

ASCII art is back! Long Live ASCII Art!

http://www.hisessence.com/

“What a great way to spread the news about the second coming also.”

http://www.hisessence.com/category_s/22.htm
Candles seem to be a novelty in this area… I have candles that smell nice too. I probably wouldn’t contact the retailer to let them know… “Dear Tescos, I bought 2 of your Tesco Value Vanilla floating candle sets today. They smell just like vanilla! Thank you for bringing the smell of vanilla into my home, in the form of little floating bits of wax.”

* http://www.queenofwands.net/d/20020906.html

Had a bit of trouble with the old greymatter – seemed to have been upset by something. So I upgraded it. Hopefully this means it will email me when comments are posted now…

People keep asking me how my “time off” is going. Apparently running a large soon-to-be-php-driven club and trying to set up php-driven projects for various other demanding areas of my life is considered “fun” and “voluntary” and thus a valid constituent of “time off”, and in no way an acceptable cause of stress. And that my friend is bollocks. There is almost nothing more stressful than people expecting you to do something and you running out of time to produce it in. I would place end of year exams higher than this, but modular tests lower.

Also, my speakers (which are plugged into my computer and are on, although the computer volume is as low as it can go) are making a veeeery quiet clicky purr noise – much like the sound of a cat just starting to purr when it really doesn’t want to. Conclusion? Aliens are trying to contact me. And quite possibly they don’t really want to.

Found George dead yesterday evening. I was working at the vets last week so I took Eddie and Bonnie in for post mortems and I took George in for a checkup – nothing found on any of them. I didn’t bother getting a PM done on George – if there is gross pathology (i.e. something big enough to see with your eyes) I can’t do anything to save the rest, and if there isn’t anything to see, why do it? Plus my vet’s now away so a locum would have to do it.

So my guinea-pig population has halved in a week. Poppet is worrying us as she’s not as active, but at least she’s eating. Having tried vitamins, vets and baby food with Eddie and George, I’m now staying well out of it. I might give them all vitamin C in their water.

Plus to boot I have caught the lurgie off the vet and/or one of the nurses. Yerk. Lots of sleep and vit C requried.

Spammers keep spamming one of my posts. Pissing me off it is, especially since this thing no longer sends me emails to warn someone’s posted a reply.

Before leaving this morning Mum told me Eddie was looking rough. I was kinda asleep at the time and didn’t really register. So although I did do some piggy shopping today in order to clean them tomorrow I didn’t check on them. Mum found Eddie dead this evening, and as I’m adding straw to the others in case cold was a factor, I found Bonnie dead. I suspect Eddie’s “lumps” (abscesses) had spread, either into his lungs or similar, and Bonnie probably died from acute obstruction of the urethra by her tumour. Which is what I thought would kill her but I didn’t expect it so soon.

Seems like both died in crisis (i.e. fairly quick though not necessarily peaceful). Had I checked on them I would probably have either found Eddie looking ill or dying, and Bonnie looking normal or dying, in which case I either would have done nothing, or I would have had them put down. I still feel like I’ve let them down though.

George is looking better. Poppet thinks I stole/kill her companion.

We have the cats on a diet. Or rather, 3 diets. The Dense One is on an obesity diet to help her lose weight, the Tense One is on a selected diet as she’s allergic to everything, and the Immense One is eating the rest of our food stores since neither of the others can help him eat them now. All 3 are overweight but the second two have other problems.

Today however has been so far fairly effective in controlling their feed intake. A senile black Labrador wandered past the house and stood in the exhaust of Dad’s car as he was trying to pull out. So I took the chap in and stuck a note on our window – “Have you lost a dog?”. The two girl cats flew upstairs and hid and the boy cat got a fright later on when he came to the backdoor and was greeted by a huge black dog. Nice dog, but cat didn’t know that. About 2 hours later the owner knocked on the door – she’d seen the sign. Very grateful owner. It’s now 3 hours since the dog left and the cats are still in hiding – thus no one is eating! Fantastic.

Maybe I could market this as an amazing weight loss scheme… The Over-Friendly Senile Labrador Plan…

There exists File A. File A contains some code. The code is copied into File B. The code refuses to work. The Kai gets bloody irritated, laments her lack of tea and goes to bed.