a little drained

Feeling pretty run down this week, there has been a cold going run down, so by simply feeling run down, I have probably got off lightly.

At work I have decided to simply concentrate on putting in the hours, rather than getting distracted by lunch-time trips, or heading home early. So I've shifted my default train home to a later one, which along with the feeling a bit run down, means that I've not been out in the garden in the evening, though truth be told, the weather has been pretty dismal.

An interesting week at work, I've had a meeting a day for the past week, and they have all be interesting and useful in their own way. Working through ad hoc meetings, seems a very productive way to progress things, fortunately someone else organised all the meetings this week, so I simply turned up to them, which is a lot less effort. The downside is of course that you still need to prepare for meetings, and follow up on actions arising from them, so simply committing to attend a lot of meetings, is simply avoiding the office, unless you actually do the work before and after. I also seem to be averaging twenty emails a day, many needing a fair bit of work, so I've been playing catch up when I get back to the office. Working longer hours has helped with this though.

Overall I am rather impatient with things, by nature I am an inpatient person, but I figure that God needs impatient people, or nothing would ever get done. I do feel that while other folk are making grand progress with things, I am not making enough progress on the things that I am directly responsible for, but then I exacerbate the problem, by wanting to start on even more new strands of work whenever I create any free time.

All that said, I seem to be getting good feedback, and things are going well, so I suppose I am doing the right stuff, and doing it well.


I also bought another pair of new shoes, in the shoe-shop sale, so in addition to feeling a bit run down, I have mighty tired feet, trying to break in my new shoes. Until the heels get a bit rounded, and the soles lose their slippiness it is heavy going with new shoes, like wearing diving boots. Exacerbated of course, by all the walking to these meetings!

My wife has started college, so we will soon be returning to the world of queues around the computer, while she does her essays, so I suppose I really will need to order a new computer. I think I have more of less decided on a model, but I'm currently swithering on just waiting until OS Leopard comes out in October. However I do wonder what spec of machine it will require to run. From early reports it currently sounds buggy, slow and memory hungry. Obviously TimeMachine is going to use up a lot of hard disk space, and I am bound to need more than a gig of ram to run it, I would have thought.

One option is to just buy now, and get a family pack upgrade to Leopard, but I don't like upgrading the OS on a Mac, as I generally buy with the basic amount of RAM, and upgrading the OS, without upgrading the RAM seems a recipe for problems.

Of course, passing on the currently computer to my girls, still means that I won't be improving my access at all, as I will still have to queue up behind my essay writing wife, to get at the computer in the evening. That said, I don't really see a strong case for buying a laptop at the moment. If I am buying a new computer every year or two, that will just have to suffice.


Autumn is upon us, time to tidy up the garden, the paperwork is also stacking up, and I need to rejig the stuff that I have just dumped up the loft. I would also like to get started on some serious cleaning and maintenance around the house. And of course I really need to make a wardrobe for our bedroom, after last week's trip to IKEA, I have starting to work out some ideas in my head for this, and I might document these as a woodwork project, from concept to design, to final build, over in the Making/Furniture pages.