Livre d'Or

darcydodo, whom I hadn't seen in far far too long, had a work reason to come to Scotland. International conferences are definitely one of the major perks of academia. So anyway, I went up to Edinburgh to meet her, and we travelled back to Cambridge together, and it was brilliant.

( diary )

Wow, spending extended time with darcydodo is so very, very good for me. We caught up properly on eachother's lives and gossipped about all our mutual friends and debated religion and politics and hugged and it was just amazingly wonderful.

I've had a couple of weeks of eating lots of tasty food, doing particularly well with Chinese, and in the company of excellent people.

( diary stuff )

swaldman made a very good point about Clovember:

I'm not especially interested in what my friends are wearing either. However, the idea has encouraged a number of my friends, some of whom had nearly-dormant blogs, to actually post frequently. Most are talking not just about what they are wearing, but about their daily life. And I like this!

I haven't been participating in Clovember, partly because I haven't actually figured out how to take selfies, and partly because I'm nervous about the cutting edge of facial recognition technology and worry that having photos of me here would help search engines to link my DW to my offline identity. But I am definitely appreciating seeing posts about people's daily lives, the kind of stuff that's mostly moved to FB these days. Which in turn encouraged me that it's worth making this post, even though it's mostly about how I've been spending my weekends lately.

I don't know how many times in the last 10 years I've titled posts something with the theme of my friends being awesome, but it's still true.

( social whirl )

And you know another reason why my friends are wonderful? I've not only been too busy to be online for most of the past week, but I've had technical problems with internet at home so haven't even briefly checked in. (Turns out that my router had somehow reset itself, not to factory defaults but to some other combination of settings, so nothing could find the wireless at all and I assumed the internet was out. Even after I'd figured that out troubleshooting was fiddly, but anyway, I am back online.) So while I was completely ignoring the internet, everybody went on having highly civilized discussions about contentious topics like death, disability rights and sex even without me being around to moderate, so thank you all. I will try to get back to your cogent comments over the next few days.

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?