Livre d'Or

The major good thing in my life at the moment is long conversations with friends. I've managed to speak on the phone to darcydodo for the first time since the wedding, and to hatam_soferet this week. At the weekend I went to London purely for the purpose of spending time with khalinche and doseybat; I didn't have any plans and I wasn't bothered when the weather was too miserable for much sight-seeing, I just enjoyed some really good conversations and catching up.

I introduced khalinche to the ever-wonderful Diwana, since she was kind enough to meet me at the station and it was lunchtime and raining. But then we went back to her place and just talked and drank tea for the entire afternoon. At that point I joined up with doseybat who had been gaming with khalinche's housemate timeplease, and went out for some nice Thai food and more conversation with her and as bonus, pfy and fluffymark. Then I spent basically the entire day on Sunday chatting to doseybat and pplfichi and drinking even more tea. That was a seriously wonderful weekend, I should do that kind of thing more often.

The mixed but generally positive thing in my life at the moment is work. I'm very busy, I'm doing lots and lots of interesting and enjoyable things. Interesting teaching, interesting pastoral work, interesting organizing and running stuff (primarily the disability bits of the course and my mentoring programme), and very interesting scientific project with my ever-wonderful minion.

The biggest problem in my life at the moment is that it has more good things in it than there are hours in the week. I want to have more conversations with friends, I owe dozens of emails including some that involve making arrangements to meet up or speak on the phone. And I would like to get deeper into various DW and LJ conversations, and just, it's a little overwhelming. And work too, I'm at that stage where pretty much everything is urgent or high priority, but I can't actually do all of it. The thing that's tending to slip is handling email, I have about 150 mails in my work inbox (having already triaged out the ones that don't need any replies or actions). This isn't actually a clever strategy because it means that my to-do list, while over-full, is also incomplete and unreliable.

I've never been quite this type of busy before, because I've never had the kind of job that requires me to juggle this many different things and people who need stuff from me. I think what I'm experiencing is making the transition to a new skill level, rather than things being imminently about to fall apart, but still, I have a bit of a sense that I'm running to stay in place. Two more teaching weeks before the Xmas break, though.

It's hard to top last year, when jack and I announced our engagement just after midnight, but the end of 2011 and beginning of 2012 have been lovely so far.

( white rabbits )

So it's been reasonably quiet, but a chance to spend time with people I'm fond of, which I think makes it a successful new year. This afternoon was the first time I've been online properly since 23^rd December, so I'm working backwards by writing up New Year first. I'll hopefully get to the Zwischenjahr, Christmas and Chanukah soonish. But I have just about caught up with my DW reading list. Lucky that the site tends to be fairly quiet at this time of year, so it was only ?skip=200! Still way behind on LJ, though, so if you posted something important there in the past 10 days, please do link me to it.

I'm around in Cambridge until next weekend, working from "home", so I may be available for evening socializing. The best way to see me is probably to come to the party on Saturday (details in a locked post).

The week before last was one of the most stressful I can remember in a long time, and last week was one of the most relaxing. Neither of them involved much time for cherishing my connections with online friends, though!

( blessings )

So yes, a week of good food and good conversation and sunshine and time in the same place as friends was just what I needed, I must say.

In unrelated, but very exciting news, my dear friend MK announced the birth of his daughter today! His son, just about the first baby to be born to my social circle, will turn 12 in a few weeks, and now he has a little tiny sister. Yay!

I've had a lot of niggling annoyances this weekend, but I don't want to whine about them. It mostly boils down to geography being evil, and the fact that I'm sleep-deprived enough to blow small setbacks out of proportion. Also, the setbacks completely failed to prevent my weekend from being wonderful!

( too tired to squee )

I have a difficult and somewhat stressful week coming up, beginning with a very early morning tomorrow. So I'll do the sensible thing and deal with the tiredness by getting to bed, instead of whining on the internet about things I probably won't care about in the morning. I'll still miss my friends, though.

doseybat and pplfichi came to visit this weekend, and we had a brilliant time.

( yay friends )

So all in all that was about the perfect weekend, even with the annoying furniture wrangling bits. More people should come and visit and spend hours and hours chatting to me and drinking tea (or other beverages if you don't like tea).

lethargic_man and aviva_m came to visit for the weekend, which was a real treat.

( yay friends )

Anyway, I'm planning a very brief flying visit to Cambridge this weekend, and after that it's heads down until Christmas I think, the term is about to get seriously busy.

So the students have finished their exams and gone home for the summer, meaning that work has been a lot less frantic for the last couple of weeks. I decided it was a good time to take a long weekend off, and I'm very glad I did so.

( yay lovely people )

So yes, that's why I've not been around online very much. I'm planning to be in Oxford this coming weekend, this time for a college reunion. And the weekend after that (evening of Saturday 3^rd and most of the 4^th July) in London. Would anyone like to get together for either of those, or possibly offer crash space Saturday night?

Last week I wasn't on DW much, cos I was busy having soul-nourishing conversations with some of my favourite people, in person.

( social doings )

I must admit I am getting a little fed up with green sorts being smug about the volcano blocking air travel. Yes, yes, you are very virtuous in foregoing flying, good for you. But really, people who are trapped in the wrong country, spending more than they can afford and being powerless to deal with urgent problems at home or missing important family occasions don't deserve your schadenfreude. I'm sure I'm not the only one who knows several people directly affected by this. And even if aeroplanes are evil, at least they don't interfere with my breathing.

Two much nicer creative responses to the volcano:
papersky wrote poetry (the comments have a bonus awesome ash-cloud dragon animation).
redaloud wrote prose.

Happy New Year, peeps. I have had a month with a lot of intense activity and very little internet access. Now I'm at my parents so I'll make a start on catching up.

( late, even for white rabbits )

We came back to Cambridge for NYE which we spent at a very convivial party at Relativity. Then jack drove me to the parents' for a belated celebration of my grandmother's 90^th. This was only partly successful because although we did get all the sibs together in one place, there was only about a three hour overlap. Now I'm having a nice relaxing weekend hanging out, chatting to parents and catching up a bit on the internet.

Friday was really horrible, running round town trying to do an errand which I thought would be simple but ended up being a long drawn-out, fruitless and very damp quest for an object which essentially isn't for sale (a replacement power adapter for my Eee netbook). So I got home and I was cold and tired and grumpy, and I decided I couldn't face going back out into the rain to go to shul. So I had a really relaxed evening at home, eating pasta with tasty mushroom sauce, and writing some backlogged posts, and drinking tea and getting myself into a more shabbat-like mood.

( then came the fun bit )

But yes, that was very well worth the slightly excessive trip to London. And now I know that I can do London over a weekend, if there's a good enough motivation, I hope to get back into seeing some of my circle there more regularly.