:: whoops

Another hiatus while I get busy with other things. I've actually spent a ridiculous amount of time finessing the comments (see below). Ridiculous considering how few comments are left, that is. But it was interesting tinkering with them.

I wrote to blogger about the intermittent problem getting this blog to show, and they said they're working on it. In the meantime, if you get a message about the page not being available, click on the refresh button on the browser and it should show all right.

I had a whole weekend off and managed to squander most of it faffing around with mp3s and reading books (I'm reading Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson; Last Act In Palmyra, a Falco mystery, by Lindsey Davis; and The Tattooed Girl by Joyce Carol Oates). I did get in a few good walks, though, and Andrew swung by for lunch and to collect the furniture from Anthea's old flat: a double bed and a chest of drawers. He brought the main farm car, a big Astra, and it swallowed everything up no trouble. He's just e-mailed to say that his aunt had an awful accident the other day: one of her excitable dogs pulled her over while she was walking in the woods and she broke her ankle badly in two places. She managed to crawl home and from there phoned Andrew, who rushed over and rode shotgun in the ambulance, guiding the driver through the country roads. They've been minding the three dogs since then, though they're going into kennels shortly.

I also went to see a fantastic film, which I've been meaning to see for ages: Touching the Void. It's the true story of Simon Yates and Joe Simpson, who climbed a mountain in Peru. Simpson fell and broke his leg in a fairly gruesome way, so Yates one tried to get him down by lowering him on a rope, section by section. At one point, though, he went over the edge of a cliff, so he couldn't take the slack off the rope so his Yates could come down to lower him down the next bit. So Yates had to cut the rope, letting him fall into a crevasse. When he saw the crevasse he assumed Simpson was dead. But he wasn't (obviously, since he wrote a book about it all) -- he'd landed on a ledge. He managed to crawl off the mountain and across a glacier and rocky moraine to the campsite. It's not all grim: there's quite a bit of humour. The photography is stunning too, and the narration has the kind of matter-of-fact, undramatic feel that is so true of mountain-mad men. A colleague who's a climber came in to work with a gash on his face once, and it turned out he'd fallen 300ft while roped up. "I would have been fine, but my ice-axe bounced off into my face." We were all going, "three hundred feet!!!!", but to him it was nothing.

We've been pretty busy at work, one way or another. Tonight's drama was a computer glitch that had the whole IT department running around feverishly. Once it was sorted we caught up pretty quickly though, and still hit the deadline.

Did I mention my long service award? I'm getting £200 of vouchers and an extra day's holiday for hitting the ten-year mark as a permanent employee (on 3 January). No sign of the vouchers yet, though the boss's secretary offered to let me look at them. The boss is apparently writing me a letter. Jolly good. Must be a long one ....