Oh dear, here I am again. Anyone would think I was bored. Actually, I’m enjoying the Labyrinth soundtrack. :-)

Tomorrow I get to sort out granddad’s computer. He moved some folders around in attempting to “tidy up” (specifically, he moved ~/Library/ into ~/Documents/ ) which meant he returned most applications to their default state, including “losing” all his mail, and mail account settings. Dad spent a few difficult hours on the phone to him last week, but Granddad’s grasp of the concepts and terms is a bit shaky so it was a lot of fun, apparently. He seems pretty astonished that I say I’ll easily have it all sorted in 20 minutes or so, which I’m sure will be true: he’s not actually deleted anything, just moved it to the wrong place.

Am thinking of buying Pirate’s Cove. It is supposed to be a lot of fun. Not overly keen on the apparent level of randomness of combat, but the theme will surely serve to smother all such minor concerns.

I’m tired. Sleep time now. And I shall try not to have evil dreams that, when I awake, confuse me into thinking that I have just got a girlfriend, until I reach full wakefulness and—as I was never allowed to write in stories at primary school—realise it was all a dream. It’s just disappointing, frankly. Bad dream, playing tricks on me like that. Bad dream!

Right, yes, sleep would be a good idea, before I start rambling on about all sorts of stuff.

“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a goodnight!”

After a delicious roast-beef Christmas dinner at about 2pm, presents were opened. Highlights included giving my parents a gorgeous carved olivewood bowl I found in a Weihnachtsmarkt in Berlin; and, on the receiving side, a set of pieces by Richard Rodney Bennett called “Partridge Pie” (which I have tried; they are really rather charming), Bill Bailey’s “Cosmic Jam” DVD (which also includes “Bewilderness”) and a marvellously geeky Star Trek: Borg DVD set (14 Borg episodes, selected as the best by real Trekkies) which I am thoroughly looking forward to watching. :-)

However, having (somehow) failed to set the digi-box to record Doctor Who earlier this evening, and having (with some relief, because my sister was very pissed off) ascertained that it’s being repeated on Wednesday and set the digi-box (definitely, this time) to record it, it’s reached that point of the evening where people want to do different things. Having grandparents here means that there’s quite a few films/DVDs we can’t watch because they’d be either bored or offended. Unfortunately my lovely big-screened iMac is not in front of a sofa, but I think I will endure a dining chair for a while now, to watch some of the Bill Bailey.

May well blog again later. I don’t know why I’ve started writing on here again, and I don’t suppose I’ll keep it up for long.

I don’t sing in the shower but this morning, for some reason, a few songs came to mind as possible candidates for rewrites:

• Alan Titchmarch joins the Bee Gees for “You should be gardening”:

I plant my bulbs at midnight,
Water them at dawn.
My sunflowers will grow higher,
I’ve got the neatest lawn.

What you doin with that hoe?
What you doin with that hoe?
You should be gardening, yeah
Gardening, yeah.

• Toto’s “Rosanna” as a worship song: “Hosanna”. Fill in the rest as desired.
• Men at Work’s “Land Down Under”, chorus:

Do you come from a land of panto?
Makes more sense in Esperanto.
It’s quite rare for our songs to scan, so
You better cheer, you better sing louder.

I couldn’t think of many rhymes for “panto”. But the last line isn’t supposed to rhyme anyway: the original has “under”, “plunder”, “thunder”, and “take cover”.

I know, I know. They’re all a bit pants. But it kept me occupied for the duration of the shower, which wasn’t particularly long.

In other news: yesterday, I discovered Google’s Calculator feature. You type into Google something like:
9.8 metres per second per second * 80 kg
and it comes back with the answer, with the right units:
(9.8 ((meters per second) per second)) * 80 kg = 784 newtons

I suppose I’d better go and see if I can be helpful in preparing Christmas dinner. Though it’s quite possible that my offer will be refused on the grounds that I’ll just get in the way… which would suit me fine! ;-)

My parents invited friends for drinks. It was a nice evening but a little tiring having to talk to people all the time. (Hence going to bed before midnight.) Got a game of Zèrtz in with a son of one of the families attending—on his first game he got within one marble of beating me! I think I am too reckless with my sacrifices. And I did point out one capture he could make.

I am not going to church tomorrow. This (I think) will be the first Christmas I haven’t been to church. It is surprisingly liberating. Increasingly I feel like a fraud whenever I attend a church service: I simply don’t believe any of it. For several years I was director of music there and having to sit through so many repetitions of mostly the same words while just listening out for my “cue” could have been what eroded my faith (which was kind of pantheistic to start with). At present I strongly doubt that I shall ever have any religious faith again. But it doesn’t bother me: I simply don’t feel the need to believe in something “other” than the physical universe (or multiverse, if you prefer). I know people say “there must be a purpose to all this”… but why? That’s like a photon saying “there must be a reason I was scattered in this direction rather than another”. It just is… in my mind, anyway.

Er… I’m not sure where all that came from. It’s just turning midnight now, so I wish any readers a very happy Christmas and New Year. And to any who don’t celebrate Christmas, I wish you a very happy Christmas Bank Holiday, because you can hardly complain about having a day or two off work for a festival you don’t even celebrate! ;-)

…a party was held in Herne Hill, and it was joyous! Having had to show my face at an aunt’s birthday party yesterday afternoon (because pretty much all the family was there), I managed to get to the Midwinter party just before 9pm. I was given some mulled wine (yum!) and I went out into the garden, where there was a huge and impressive fire and, more importantly, lots of lovely people. When I went back into the house I made the mistake of deciding that port would be my drink of the evening. We had a jolly sing-song round the piano, with songs by Tom Lehrer, Flanders & Swann, Alan Menken (Aladdin) and some songs from musicals. It was most excellent (well, I thought so).

Later I witnessed a game of Strip Chess (is there anything for which Wikipedia doesn’t have an entry!?). A dangerous game: even counting pawns as half-items (as were the players last night), that’s a potential eleven items of clothing to lose. One rarely has all non-king pieces taken by the time a game is ended, so let’s say one might expect to have a knight and a bishop left, and maybe three pawns. That’s still 7.5 items of clothing. Right now I am wearing 8 items, including glasses and watch. If I were to take off my glasses I’d have extreme difficulty continuing the game (note to self, in case I ever end up playing Strip <game>: could this be used to force a draw at a time of my choosing?) so, in short, I don’t recommend this game to anyone who wants to retain some modicum of modesty!

I don’t know what time I went to sleep, or what time I awoke. As usual I left before necessary, which is always a painful thing, but I think it’s just that I can’t cope with being with lots of people for long periods of time. I need my private time, and my own space, if only for a short interval.

The mistletoe was surprisingly under-used, I thought; I did get a kiss but not, I hasten to add, by hanging around underneath it! At least, I don’t think so. I did drink too much port, and my recall of some parts of the evening is a bit hazy. Need more mistletoe anyway. Need to find girlies to meet under said plant.

Yesterday morning, I bought Zèrtz, which is a 2-player abstract strategy game. It’s really good! I’ve only played it once so far, but it will take some time to get used to the tactics. I might well look to acquire some of the other Gipf Project games in the not-too-distant future. Meanwhile, need to persuade my dad to play, as I’m certain he’ll like it.

I don’t have to go to work now until 2nd January. Yay! I’m determined to catch up on sleep, though, as I’m suffering from general winter malady heightened by the fact I’ve been so busy recently, I’m a bit run-down.

Diploma exam happened. Definitely the worst music exam I’ve ever had. It wasn’t a total disaster, but was pretty disappointing. I now have 2–3 months to wait to find out if I passed. Not sure if I’ll retake if I failed.

I have written 16 Christmas cards so far this weekend. It seems like I’ve spent a vast amount of time on them, but actually a fair bit of time was taken up trying to find out where to send half of them, what with me being rather late in sending them and this being the first year I’ve tried to do this properly so didn’t have addresses for quite a few friends. In addition, I’ve been trying to write individual messages in each card, but frankly this is taking a long time and at this rate people would get the cards rather late in the 12 days, so I will probably stop trying to do this now. A final thought on card-sending: I have addressed 3 cards to “Mr & Mrs …”, with another couple still to be done. This seems terribly scary and grown-up.

Played a few Tom Lehrer songs at an informal concert last night, at my local church (where I used to be director of music). “The Vatican Rag” went down particularly well (the church is C of E), as did “I hold your hand in mine”. The others I sang were “The Elements” and “A Christmas Carol”. I think I will transcribe/learn “New Math” and “Lobachevsky” some time soon, although admittedly they are less appealing to a generalist audience. Also maybe “Oedipus Rex”.

I’m really looking forward to my week off work between Christmas and New Year. I shall try to catch up on sleep, and drink lots of port.

Right, back to the cards. Lots still to write. Next year I will start this earlier!

Thanks for all the hugs and messages of concern, both here and on Facebook. As I said before, I am fine, and not as shocked by it as many other people seem to be!

The social committee at work has arranged another theatre trip. This one is to see Little Shop of Horrors at the Menier Chocolate Factory and I am very excited already (the date is end of January). Yay!

One week till my DipABRSM piano exam. Have now written programme notes for 3 of the 4 pieces. However, I hadn’t played them all week so my lesson this evening was a bit worrying. I need to play through the whole programme at least once, preferably twice, a day till the exam.

Dentist tomorrow morning. I’m really hoping he’ll tell me that the brown marks on my front teeth are just tea stains (my teeth have always been prone to acquiring funny colouring—when I was young it was orange juice, now it’s tea) rather than decay…

I was writing a post to explain about how I got mugged this evening, then hit some weird key combination that took my browser back to the home page, and lost what I’d been writing.

Anyway, I got mugged by two guys at about a quarter past midnight, whilst I was on my way home from the station. No injuries other than bruises, and they just took some cash. Not a pleasant experience, but (i) could have been a lot worse, and (ii) I’m surprised I’ve managed 23 years without it happening already.

First things first: followup to last time.

• New team at work is going reasonably well. However, I’ve been having to learn the data model used in the scripting layer of this PIM package largely by trial and error. Mostly error. The documentation is, at best, incomplete, and in many cases simply wrong.
• The conducting course was excellent. I might be attending another weekend in February, and then I hope to be allowed to go to the 9-day Summer School on the Intermediate level, which should mean some meatier repertoire to work with.
• Spamalot was fab – Tim Curry was excellent as King Arthur. There was a large John Lewis contingent in the audience so when it was announced that “We are now no longer the Knights Who Say ‘Ni’. We are now the Knights Who Say ‘Ecky-ecky-ecky-ecky-pikang-zoop-boing-goodem-zoo-owli-zhiv-Never-Knowingly-Undersold’…” it brought the house down and half the actors corpsed.

So, what else have I been doing? Lots!

Two weekends ago: gave a piano recital for some family and friends, as a practice run for my DipABRSM exam which is now less than 3 weeks away. Argh! Gave the same recital at work a few days later; seemed to be well-received.

Last weekend: went to Saf’s masked ball. It was wonderful. Good food, wine and company, a ceilidh (yay! spelt it right first time) of much joy, and general merriment going on till about 3am. The following day I saw Julia and Robin and played a card game called Wizard which was fun, though it turned out about halfway through I’d had an unfair advantage due to playing whilst unaware of an important rule. It hadn’t prevented me from doing pretty badly up till that point, though!

Yesterday: went to a friend’s housewarming party in Woking, and caught up with a number of school friends whom I had not seen for over a year. Generally very jolly indeed.

Today: Went to see the CULES pantos in dress rehearsal, as I can’t make it up for the proper performances next weekend. They were Of Joy, for many reasons that I won’t detail here. Suffice to say that they are both very much worth seeing.

Time for me to sleep.

A mixed post this evening. First of all, I have finally joined a new team at work. I’ll be working on the new Product Information Management (PIM) tool that John Lewis is going to be using to replace some fairly old in-house-written screens and things, and will introduce totally new functionality as well. It’s a third-party product with its own terminology, concepts and scripting language, so I have quite a lot to learn! But it’s very exciting and I know I’m going to be doing a fair bit of scripting, so I’ll be away from the mainframe for at least a while, which will make a nice change. I’ve some experience of some of the systems we’ll be connecting to, including the tables and data model for the existing product information system, which should prove useful.

I’ve just found out how to enable authentication on the RSS (actually, Atom) feeds I get from friends’ Livejournals, so I can read friends-only posts without having to go to Livejournal itself. This is a good thing, as I have a very nice RSS/Atom reader and it’s nice having everything syndicated to one place.

Finally, tomorrow evening I am travelling up to Bolton (where?) for a Sing for Pleasure conducting course. It should be fun and I’m hoping to improve both confidence and technique – in particular making more eye contact with the choir, and some more expressive gestures. As I’m travelling straight from work, I’d better pack my case now.

Finally, I’m going to see Spamlot on Monday. Tickets were booked through the Social Events office at work, and they got some kind of huge group booking. We’re in the second row of the stalls! Not bad for £15, I reckon. ;-)

And that reminds me, I need to get some nice emoticons and get WordPress to use those instead of its defaults, which are so ugly I’ve turned them off.