Nik's Saga

I'm not going to do a review of the year - it would only make me depressed as things are certainly worse than they were this time last year. So instead, here's the day as it happened.

Morning: I got up, armed myself with coffee and fruit pancakes, then checked the Quatermass Meringue. Hmm... The meringue has, indeed, stuck to the rice paper, and the rice paper has, in turn, stuck to the tray. Drat. Still, it hasn't stuck as badly as last year.

Then there was shopping. Shopping for last-minute gifts, shopping for fruit to go with the Quatermass Meringue, and shopping for a new university polo shirt (unsuccessful, as for some reason BESS is closed until January 7th).

Afternoon: I made some Mars Bar Slice, then settled into an armchair with my brainless cross-stitch cushion and Classic FM. Ahhhhh..... relax....

Evening: Off to take J to a new year's party somewhere in Balmullo (I think it was a good excuse for J to see the satnav in action) and then dinner Chez Harris before returning to Wayside for the evening's festivities. As it turned out we missed the turn of the year by 90 seconds because we were sitting about relaxing and chatting.

Ah well, no problem. I'm not sad to see the year go. Hopefully the next one will be a bit better than the last two.
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oday I didn't make it up to Aberdeen.

The plan had been head up there to see A & R and finalise some stuff left over from my time up there. I'd planned this with R about a month ago but thought I'd phone before I left just to confirm everything. Unfortunately there was no reply - I hope there's nothing wrong.

Instead, then, I've had a fairly relaxed day here in St. Andrews. I got up, did some washing, had breakfast, then settled down with my embroidery to listen to Classic FM until folks arrived after Mass and other folks arrived to do Christmas (as it were). Lots of groups of folks turn up here to do that at this time and I thought I'd give them a bit of private time to do this so I wandered over to see A, T, K, little B and M for coffee.

It's so nice to be among old friends again. I really do miss being in St. Andrews when I'm away - I miss the people and the relaxed air. I miss KFB pizza (mmmm.... the smell last night brought back memories). I miss the smell of the sea and the sound of the waves.

I've now got all of the food and drink shopping done. As well as being out of caster sugar yesterday Asda was also out of Mumm's Cordon Rouge, a bottle of which I traditionally bring to see in the new year. That's now about to go into the fridge while I make the meringue so that I can allow it to dry overnight in the oven. That'll save a bit of time tomorrow - especially in case I manage to get through to R and end up dashing up north tomorrow morning.

This year I've borrowed an electric mixer from K to whisk the egg whites. Last year I swore that never again would I try to whisk a dozen egg whites to meringue stiffness with a manual balloon whisk. This year I'm prepared.

Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to meringue I go...!

Update - the meringue is now in the oven, growing like something out of Quatermass. It's going to be quite big...
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Now how am I going to sink the Bismark?

This was a comment which I made earlier this evening and got me a very funny look from a shelf-stacker in Asda. More of this anon.

Today was the big day for heading north - first to J&R's wedding blessing and ceilidh and then on up to St. Andrews for the new year celebrations. Of course, today was also the day that the weather turned wet and windy right the way through the Lake District and southern Scotland...

Dad's lent me the Saab rather than have me pay almost 200 quid to hire a car for the weekend, with the words don't come back if you dent it - he's quite fond of his new car. :) So of course I'm a little bit more paranoid than I would be in a hire car... Fortunately everything went well on the driving front. Apart from the weather, which had me hiding at Tebay for quite a while over lunch while what looked like a sea's worth of water poured from the sky.

This left me running late for getting to the ceilidh. Fortunately I happened to be test-driving the Navman I'd bought Dad for Christmas and indeed it took me straight to the centre of Edinburgh faster than I could have done it myself. Unfortunately Princes Street had already been closed off in preparation for Monday night's festivities. Fortunately the Navman has an extremely good recalculate function and managed to get me back where I wanted to be relatively quickly. Unfortunately the town centre was chockablock full of people and I couldn't find a parking space anywhere near the church. Fortunately I didn't hit anything whilst hyperventilating and dealing with the panic attack that followed the realisation that I couldn't park anywhere. Unfortunately I therefore ended up giving up and heading up north.

I do feel rather guilty about that. There I was, card written, gift wrapped and sitting on the passenger seat, and completely unable to find any way to give it to its recipients. It had also been quite a tiring drive, which didn't help.

So I stopped off at Asda in Dunfermline to pick up some supplies, which is where the Bismark comment occurred. I'm planning to make a fruit pavlova large enough to sink the Bismark for dessert, which requires copious amounts of caster sugar, something which Asda was sadly lacking. Naturally I was disappointed. Ah well, I'll be able to get it tomorrow.

By the time I got to St. Andrews it was getting late, so I stopped at the KFB for a fish supper. Ahhhh..... fish and chips.... As was my habit some years ago I then headed down to the castle to eat them gazing out over the bay at the surprisingly-clear skies. It's good to be back.
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The Apple Store in the Trafford Centre is a lot better than the one in Kringlan in Reykjavík. :)

One of the problems with PC World is that it is, on the whole, just that. PC. You can buy a Mac there but you're not going to get any of the accessories. I decided this morning, then, that it was time that I braved Manchester and went out to the Trafford Centre in search of a USB digital TV stick and the cable to allow me to connect my sexy black MacBook to an external monitor.

This was generally fine, but by the time I arrived at 11:00 I was only able to find a parking space in the (admittedly empty) extension to the overflow of the final car park. An hour later when I returned to the car even this was full and cars were queuing up to get into the car parks. Along the motorway. Yes, it was a bit busy there and next time I go I'll make sure it's not a couple of days into the winter sales.

All the same, I got what I was looking for and even picked up a couple of other things, although I only went into specific shops - maybe I'll have a wander when there are fewer people. The dolphin fountain in the middle is rather fun, particularly when it goes into geyser mode.

Now all I have to do is finish sorting out to head up north tomorrow. And maybe get some sleep before the drive.
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The grill here is a lot more powerful than the one at the caravan.

Christmas now being over, Dad has had enough of turkey. Dinner this evening, then, was bacon, sausage and eggs. Which I cooked. Except that the gas grill here is quite a bit hotter than I'm used to nowadays, and the bacon did come out a bit darker than I usually prefer it. This is not good, given my limited 'normal cooking' skills. So far while I've been here I've managed to undercook a piece of beef and a pan of cabbage and overcook bacon and sausages. Okay, so the bah-mee I cooked on Saturday worked, but that's about all.

Today's main tasks involved going back to PC World and fixing the problems with things bought in the sale. The printer cartridges were dry, and the hard drive had the wrong connector. The latter was partly my fault as it's been quite a while since I've played about with components and I didn't realise they've gone from the normal ribbon cable to a different ribbon cable - and renamed them while they're at it. Ah well, you live and learn. Once I'd swapped the SATA hard drive for a PATA one I managed to put the thing together, partition, format and set it up quite successfully, and the printer now produces beautiful colour printouts.

A completely different thing on my to-do list was to pop around the corner to see K. We almost always manage to meet up at some point over Christmas and this year I helped in the installation of her parental present - a new television with built-in Freeview. It was quite fun, and between four of us with an average number of science degrees greater than two we managed to get it set up in less than an hour, which was quite impressive. :)

I've even found the time to install Leopard. It took a little while - mainly to check that there were no errors on the install disc - but it's all up and running now. I haven't had time to play with it yet, as that'll come when I get back to Iceland. In the meantime it just seems a bit more technicolour and has given me extra icons in my dock. More comments once I find out what else it can do. :)
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Yes, we did the sales.

Okay, 'the sales' in this case involved a trip out to Maplin and then on to PC World, so it wasn't wildly exciting. I'd always assumed that Dad knew all about Maplin - it being his sort of shop, as it were - but I was mistaken. After I'd introduced him to the website and mentioned that I was planning to go there to pick up an AV sender sometime while I was here this morning we drove out to Edge Lane to go shopping. I didn't get much - the thing I wanted plus a copy of their catalogue for Dad to put in the traditional location for such things (in the company of the Machine Mart and Screwfix Direct catalogues) in the bathroom.

PC World was, unsurprisingly, quite full. Dad found himself a new printer/scanner/copier to take up to the caravan, a new hard drive to fit into the external case he'd got earlier in the year, and I got Leopard for my MacBook. :) No sign of the TV stick for the Mac though - I may have to look elsewhere for that.

While we drove between the two shops we got a phone call from Kayte - sadly Chris's mum had died unexpectedly overnight. That put something of a damper on things, as Kayte's now helping him sort things out. I'm very glad that he came for Christmas yesterday; next year's going to be hard for him and I hope that the whole 'being here' thing will help him feel part of this family instead of being on his own.
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And it wasn't too bad. For a Christmas. :)

I got up feeling surprisingly serene... which lasted a couple of hours in spite of things. Then folks arrived and everything went quite well for a few hours. I've finally met Kayte's partner, who seems quite a nice chap and took over in the kitchen (habit, he claimed, being a chef) to produce a lunch which was not only delicious but also on time. I'm impressed.

Eventually folks left and then it became a bit more stressful as Dad decided that we should completely tidy up there and then. Still, I suppose it means that there's nothing to do tomorrow.

Actually there was a breakthrough. Ever since Mum died I haven't felt able to do any embroidery in the house as he's so anti-anything that even faintly resembles handicrafts. Tonight, though, I determined to take a stand and, if challenged, point out that I feel very uncomfortable doing nothing while watching television. As it turned out he didn't even comment. I'll see how things go tomorrow, but I might have got that one sorted - which makes life a little less stressful for me here.

I hope that you folks all had a good day, however you celebrated it.
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The reading aloud of the Daily Telegraph at breakfast is a long-held tradition in the parental abode.

Not the whole thing, I should point out, just the things that Dad finds most interesting or most objectionably - normally the latter. It's one of those family times when I learned to keep my mouth shut, not generally sharing my father's rather right-wing views.

This morning (and for the last couple of mornings) the matter of Tony Blair's recent conversion to the Catholic faith has been high in the headlines. Given that TB has never been one of Dad's favourite people, and that Cherie rates (if possible) even lower on the table of respect, this newsworthy item has ruffled quite a few feathers. Then I made it worse, by commenting that I expect to see in the news in February that the entire Blair family has made the pilgrimage to Lourdes and has hence been handed a plenary indulgence under the conditions laid out recently by the current Pope to celebrate the Lourdes jubilee.

How convenient, I thought. It doesn't matter that he took the UK into what can be described at best as a war of dubious morality, that he voted for civil partnerships and abortions - he can now go to Lourdes and all will be forgiven. Now while I applaud his stance on the civil partnerships and abortions, I find my self thinking that yes, he is a bit of a nutter to have anything to do with this religion business. I certainly don't believe that any belief in bronze age (or even iron age) fairy tales is a valid basis for making political decisions.

Dad is incensed for other reasons. After I'd mentioned it his response was one of utter outrage. No-one can forgive TB - or anyone else for that matter - his sins other than God, and if the Pope thought that he could then it was disgusting and he was glad that he was an Anglican. Not that Dad goes to church for anything other than hatchings, matchings and dispatchings, but he was clearly well-brainwashed as a child.

Right. Ho-hum. I believe it's traditional to nail those sort of comments to church doors, isn't it? :)
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Okay, so he's right on most things but Spirograph was wonderful!

All it required was a little practice, a steady hand and the Force. Best of all there was the mega-set which allowed you to to do away with the limitations of the ring and the line and to make all sorts of other forms around which you could trace mathematically-fascinating spiral patterns.

There has been one positive discovery today. I spent some time installing Avast antivirus on the paternal PCs (Christmas being a time of peace, joy and computer maintenance) and discovered in passing that they now do a Mac version as well as a PC version - it came out about 3 days ago and, like the Windows version, is available free for home/non-commercial use.

Allow me, at this point, to completely change the subject and mention that I hate cooking roasts. I had to do roast beef tonight (it being Sunday and me being the female in the house) and it was a disaster. I like it far rarer than Dad does and not only do I refuse to cut the central spine out of every cabbage leaf but I also don't cook it to a paste. At least Kayte is cooking Christmas dinner so that all I have to do is follow orders and leave the complicated stuff to her. I really am far better at cakes and desserts.
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So when did Saabs become small?

Today I've been doing a variety of normal pre-Christmas-in-Liverpool stuff - shopping, cooking, wrapping gifts and so forth. Nothing even faintly exciting other than I borrowed the Saab to go shopping.

Dad got a new Saab 93 earlier in the year after having the 9000 and the 95, and I must say that I definitely prefer this one. It's feels much smaller than the others and is rather more responsive. I have a sneaking suspicion that the 93 is actually smaller than my Toyota Carina back in Iceland. It's certainly easier to park in supermarkets than the old Saabs were, even without the parking assistance bleeper (which is fun).

The gift-wrapping frenzy means that I've now identified what's left to buy. I suspect I'm not going to be able to get out shopping again until Monday, as no matter how much I keep trying to persuade him that it's really a bad idea to leave the final food shopping until then he's not budging. I just hope I'll be able to get the car early on Monday morning.
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In spite of an initial delay I've now made it to Keflaví airport.

I woke up this morning with my lower back screaming at me. Perfect timing, I thought, for my back to decide to play up on the day I would be wandering around airports with assorted piles of luggage. Oh joy. This did, I admit, slow me down a bit this morning but I got everything done that was on my mental to-do list. Pack, wash up after last night's A&S (which turned in to another shire Christmas party, which was jolly good fun, especially as we had B and S who live out on the east coast and seldom make it to meetings), write my final cards and so on.

As I type, Santa is helping himself to coffee at the stall nearby, singing as he does. He has a rather nice half-moon tambourine which jingles pleasantly as he moves.

M very kindly gave me a lift to the airport rather than leave the car there for a fortnight. There are several good reasons for this - I don't want to have to dig it out of a snowdrift, for instance, or have to spend half an hour scraping the ice off it when I get back. There's no lying snow at present but I've left the carkeys with J next door in case he has to move the car so the car park can be ploughed. That much snow can fall very quickly in Iceland.

Once at the airport I discovered that the flight had been delayed for about three-quarters of an hour for an unspecified reason which certainly wasn't weather. On top of which they were showing that we were due to leave at the same time as the next flight, and indeed they boarded the folks on the early flight first and then filled the gaps with people from the next flight. I'm so glad that my paranoia persuaded me to book onto the early flight. :)

Santa has disappeared down the escalator, but two police officers have just approached the children's play area to dissuade a group of five-year-olds from throwing the furniture from one side of the wall to the other and back.

What I didn't do, and only remembered when I got to the airport, was go to the post office to get this year's folder of stamps for Chris next door at home. I'm annoyed at myself for that, and I'll just have to send it once I get back in January. Ah well.

When I got onto the plane I began to wonder about the technical problems that had caused the delay. Our full-to-the-gunwhales little Fokker 50 was whining and vibrating rather more on take-off than is normal. All the same, we made it, only an hour behind schedule and in time for me to take the FlyBus to the international airport rather than having to take a very expensive taxi.

The security announcement here still says "Due to security reasons passengers are...", which has bugged me for several years. "For reasons of security, passengers are..." would be so much more pleasing to the ear.

So I'm here, drinking Kaffitar coffee and eating a late lunch of a ham and cheese croissant and a piece of chocolate cake. I've managed to get much of the last-minute Christmas shopping but found myself temporarily flummoxed by the problem of what to buy my sister's partner of about six years, who I'm finally going to meet over Christmas dinner. Buying gifts is difficult enough if you know the people - when it's someone whose only known interests are my sister, rock music and being a chef it's doubly so. I decided, in the end, to go into the Icelandic food store and buy as many different obscure Icelandic speciality foods as I could find in the hope that he won't have tried at least a couple of them.

My flight is due in just under an hour. It's nominally on time, but who knows how long that will last. I think I'll wander down to the gate past the remaining shops and see if there's anything else - like the folder of stamps - which leap out at me.
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I am mighty, for I shall have SAUSAGES!!!

Yes, after three and a half years with nothing more than a couple of bite-sized sausage rolls at the embassy Christmas party, I have finally taken steps to combat the dearth of real sausages here in the Frozen North. No more shall I yearn for bangers and mash. Never again shall I salivate in unfulfillable longing for a sausage butty. Sausage, chips and gravy will no longer be nothing more than a fond memory of Friday night at the caravan.

Ahem. What I mean to say is that I have ordered a sausage-making kit, complete with mincer, stuffer, skins and herb mixes (Welsh pork and leek and Lincolnshire) that should arrive in Liverpool by Christmas (or at the very least before I return in January). It's the smaller plastic one (lighter for flying) as I'm not actually going to be making industrial amounts of the things... for now. :)

Still on the subject of food, given that it was my final work-day before Christmas (hurrah!) my good friend and colleague Nikolai and I went out to lunch at Strikið. I had a rather good pasta with pepperoni and ham in a light cheese sauce while Nikolai had the grilled trout with vegetables, and then we both gave into temptation and had the superb French chocolate cake with vanilla ice-cream, garnished with strawberries for dessert. Mmm... mnom mnom mnom. I'm going to miss him next semester when he goes off on sabbatical to Heidelburg. Yes, I am jealous.

Now all I have to do is the recently-accumlated washing up, tidy up a bit before folks descend upon me for tonight's A&S meeting and pack. And maybe plan before I pack. Naaaa, who needs planning? I've got tomorrow morning for that, given that my flight isn't until 11:55. Mind you, the wind has got up again. I'm glad I've got an earlier internal flight than I strictly need - not that I'm paranoid about missing the international flight, you understand. No, no, not at all...
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I don't think there's anything quite like the combination of alcohol, a strange hotel bed and the requirement to get up to catch a red-eye flight to leave a person exhausted by mid-afternoon.

The reason for the early flight was to get back up north to hold our examiners meeting; as part of our quality control process we don't release all of the exam results immediately they are marked but rather pull them all together to see if they raise any issues that we need to look at. It's very seldom that they do, but it does sometimes throw up a surprise or two - for example there may be a student for whom a particular subject has just 'clicked', and if we all know this then we can encourage the student to build on these strengths in their project work. Once we're happy that there are no problems then we release all of the results together.

What did amuse me though was that as I chaired the meeting I kept getting flashbacks to the Cleese/Lindsey training film. It's clearly something that I'll have to file together with the crisis management session at Redemption as being one of my Important Management References. :)

With that done, then, the term is finally effectively over. I've got one more day in work before I fly out, and I suspect that there won't be too much done tomorrow other than gathering the stuff on the Java course that I need to take back to the UK to work on over the holiday and having lunch with one of my colleagues. Which is fine by me as it'll give me time to start packing and maybe do a little baking before tomorrow evening's A&S meeting.
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I need to drink a large amount of water.

At these embassy reception thingies the wine flows like water - like a waterfall, to be more accurate, as it flows from a height into your glass in a seemingly never-ending stream. It's also rather good wine. :) And indeed there were little mince pies, tiny sausage rolls and the singing of Christmas carols including O Come, All Ye Faithful (at the end of the sing-song so that the crazy sopranos had warmed up enough to sing the descant to the sing, choirs of angels verse. As I feared, my voice still isn't back to normal after this year's chest/throat infection.

I spent much of the evening talking to Gunnar, an elderly marine engineer whose wife's mother was British and who had been coming to these events for years. We discussed education, the social standing of engineers and scientists and the effects of building large dams on marine ecosystems. Fascinating stuff.

There were also several people I'd previously met last year, which was nice as it is a little daunting going to one of these functions when you don't really know anyone there. It's Alp and Elaine's final Christmas in post, and it seems that the new ambassador has been named but I've no idea who he is. So before Alp disappears off into retirement, this is him (and me):



I even managed to put my first aid skills to use later in the evening. One of the guests, Þ, who everyone was quite surprised to see as he was only just out of hospital after having some treatment for MS, fell on the steps down from the house. He was okay, but several of us helped him to his scooter before S (one of the diplomats and a terribly good chap) gave me a lift back to the hotel. I've been accused of many things before now but being an occupational therapist is a new one on me - maybe I'm just good at projecting an air of competence. :)

In spite of the flight issues earlier in the day I did manage to make it to Kaffitar in time to meet up with K, an occasional commenter on this blog, which was very nice. Of course I managed to pick a coffee shop that was about as far from my hotel and the hotel where she works as it possible to get and still be in the town centre - a 40 minute walk downhill along Borgatún and Laugarvegur down to Bankastræti. I was delayed for several seconds by the window of the jigsaw and games shop, but I was tough and controlled and walked on by.

This particular Kaffitar is known for its world-class baristas - they keep being well-placed in the world championships - but I don't know if that's why the queues are so long. Maybe they've elevated making a cup of coffee an artistic performance that we should just stand and watch in awe... In spite of this the coffee is pretty good, much better than Starbucks. There are rumours that Starbucks are going to open up a store in Reykjavík - I hope that's not true, as Kaffitar and the independent coffee shops are quite sufficient and far more colourful.

Hmm... time to fall asleep. I have one of those nasty early-morning flights to get back up north for a meeting tomorrow. I don't think it'll take too long for me to drop off tonight.
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Yet again, another battleplan fails to survive contact with the enemy. The enemy, in this case, being the weather.

As I mentioned yesterday, it got a bit windy again and flights were delayed until this morning. Well, I'm now at the airport awaiting my flight down to Reykjavík which is currently delayed by an hour. So it's coffee and muffin time.

This is a bit annoying, as I'm due to be meeting M in Reykjavík for coffee at 16:30 and it looks like the coffee's going to have to be a quick one because a) I won't have time to get to the hotel first to drop anything off and b) tonight's event starts at 19:00 not 19:30. Well, I can politely be 5 minutes late. This is Iceland - I can be half an hour late if necessary (I'm now aiming for 19:15). So much for the shopping idea. Ah well, there's always duty-free on Friday.

Clearly the news of the delayed flight hasn't been spread around, as the departure lounge (think open-plan coffee shop at a small regional railway station) is beginning to fill up. Normally the locals know that the flight's been delayed because they actually understand all of the nuances in the SMS that the airline sends to tell them that the plane is delayed. Unless the system isn't working today - I didn't receive a text (but then I may have forgotten to put the mobile number into the website).

Hmm... a gritter has just driven past the window, gritting the runway as it goes. At least the snowplough on the front of it wasn't needed, as the snow has mostly disappeared from the ground except where it's been ploughed into piles earlier on. I imagine it's just a precaution now that the sun has set.
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One week to Christmas.

That's what the television told me today while I was watching Heroes. Ah, I thought, one week to Christmas. Then another week to New Year. Then it starts all over again. Oh joy.

Meanwhile, it's a bit blowy up here again, with the result that tonight's internal flights have been cancelled... hopefully all will return to normal by tomorrow afternoon so that I can fly down to Reykjavík to go and socialise with the rest of the British ex-pat community. Mmm... the very thought of sausage rolls makes my mouth water. :) I'll also be able to cut at least a day off the posting time for my remaining Christmas cards by posting them from the capital rather than from up here. Tonight I finished the remaining cards - those that are due to go to exotic locations like Australia and Egilstaðir.

While I'm in the capital I'm going to try a little shopping. It appears that I'm finally going to meet my sister's partner over Christmas dinner, so I'm going to have to come up with a bright idea for what to buy him. Last year I bought a book on Icelandic cookery (he's a chef) so I've no clue what to buy him this year. Maybe a stroll down Laugarvegur will inspire me... assuming that I don't run screaming from the crowds, that it. Mind you, this isn't exactly Oxford Street so hopefully I'll be okay. Waah! Difficult thinking! I never was any good at coming up with presents for people.

Hmm... better go and take my valerian tablets - although my super alarm clock wakes me up relatively easily I still don't want to go to bed until two... which is no doubt why I'm so tired. Hot blackcurrant and a documentary and I will hopefully get to sleep at a sensible time.
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I've just watched one of the strangest videos I've ever seen.

Last week I discovered that the management side of the business department at work has several of the John Cleese business training films on video. Given that I've heard great things about these short films and their stellar casts, and that I'm also having to get to grips with the whole management thing myself, I borrowed one. The film in question was Think or Swim - Professional Team Decision Making.

The strange thing about it is that it has John Cleese and Robert Lindsey and should therefore be either a superb comedy or a tense political thriller and isn't either of these. Yes, there are certainly moments of humour - it wouldn't be a Cleese production otherwise - but it was something of a surprise to see how they handled it. In many ways the oddest thing was the acting; far more light comedy - think One Foot In The Grave - rather than anything more dramatic, but with a script which, while amusing at times, had such a light comedic touch that you could easily imagine sticking your head around an office door and seeing it happen in front of you. It has certainly increased my respect for both of their acting skills and explained why these short films enjoy such a reputation (believe me, if I've heard of them then they must be big).

I shall return this one tomorrow and grab another one. The whole management thing is still stressful and unpleasant and I will be glad to eventually get out of it, but at least it has given me the opportunity to see these. Although it might have been more useful to watch them as part of a management training scheme of some kind, except that the university doesn't do staff development.
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Tonight was the shire's end-of-year dinner.

It was a meal, rather than a feast, although we did wear garb for it. The term 'end-of-year dinner' is a bit vague, I know, but considering that it was a rather more a US Thanksgiving dinner (turkey, sweetcorn, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, two stuffings and chocolate gravy) than a Christmas meal, but it involved food, drink and games which was what really mattered.

I have finally worked out how to deal with the two schools of dessert thought in the shire. One school is of the 'death by chocolate' philosophy. The other is allergic to chocolate. This, as you can imagine, makes dessert a slightly tricky proposition. Today I avoided it by making two desserts - one a chocolate and pear gateau, the other a raspberry and peach trifle (hence the name 'melba trifle'). Classic British trifle - jelly with fruit, custard and cream - is something that folks here had never come across but went down extremely well, particularly with the non-chocolate section of the shire. I think that next time I'll introduce them to Eton Mess. :)

B also brought the mead which he'd brewed. I'm not generally a fan of mead but this was quite pleasant and highly alcoholic - about 15% - so I only had a taste given that I had the car with me. Having the car proved quite useful as it meant we had the designated driver. Now while I know where A lives it's a bit more complicated getting to B's house. Fortunately we have solved the left/right problem - instead of left and right (problematic at the best of times for me) we settled on 'sword' and 'dagger' as directions. This has worked well at fencing practices before because I have a mixed class of left and right handers so it's easier to explain things in terms of sword-side and dagger-side.

What's more, we didn't get lost, which, considering that B lives in the middle of a part of the town into which I'd never previously ventured, proves that this is clearly a workable new navigation system that I will recommend to all of my friends.
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Rest of world cut off.

It's been a little blowy up here today - sufficiently so that both Icelandair (international) and Air Iceland (internal) have cancelled all flights. This happens up here sometimes, and if there's a really good storm going we can be cut off for days at a time. So long as the storm is gone by this time next week (and hasn't been replaced by another one) I don't really mind.

The main effect on me has been that I've had to be exceedingly careful crossing the car park again. I'm not sure whether to describe it as an ice rink or a swimming pool at present, but whichever it is it's exceedingly wet and slippery so even with my spiky moonboots it's still quite treacherous. Particularly when your wind-catching surface is as large as mine. Thankfully the spikes are still effective - I hate to think how many times I'd have slipped otherwise... and it would have been rather unpleasant given the amount of water.

Compared to yesterday today has been distinctly lacking in little moments of happiness. I managed to get the cardboard and dead pizza boxes (only two of them, I hasten to add!) to the recycle point, which probably counts. And, of course, the fact that it's Friday and I'm home from work.

Perhaps, though, the highlight was finding Cadbury's Caramel bars in the supermarket. Definitely comfort food, that.
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Today I decided to focus on the little pleasures in life.

Things have been pretty miserable in many ways recently, so I decided that today I was going to spend time on the more uplifting little things I've managed to do instead of fretting that I can't focus on anything. Here, then, is my Little List Of Happiness:

1. I didn't fall over on my way across the ice rink that is currently the apartments' car park. It was touch and go a couple of times in spite of the spikes on my ever-so-unstylish-but-terribly-practical spiky moonboots, partly because there was a howling gale which turned my wool wrap into quite an effective sail.
   
   
2. Even with the nasty ice I managed to get two paper bags of paper to the recycling point.
   
   
3. I discovered another piece in 5/4 (or possibly 5/8). I like 5-time - it makes me want to boogie in my chair (or play the drums on my desk if Mars from Holst's Planets. This time it's Wahoo! by Duke Pearson, something else I can put down to the Jazz. This led directly to Little Happiness No. 4.
   
   
4. The joy of adding to the Net's fount of wisdom, Wikipedia. Wahoo! wasn't listed in the entry on pieces in unusual time-signatures. Unfortunately, this little pleasure was destroyed when I discovered that nowadays you don't seem to be able to put anything in Wikipedia without citing the source and I've just listened to it on the radio, it's obviously in either 5/4 or 5/8, you dummy! isn't enough.
   
   
5. This one's also related to WIkipedia. I found a stub that needed a redirection rather than an article so I wrote a one-line redirection. Once I found that the Wahoo! edit had been wiped I checked out the other one - that's marked for deletion as not being notable enough to be in Wikipedia. It's a redirect, for goodness sake, of course it's not notable, that's the whole point! Still, I suppose I should take joy from the fact that I have, in effect, brought to their notice an unnecessary page that they can now delete. 4 and 5 between them haven't really encouraged me to add anything to Wikipedia. in future - out from their attitude more than anything else.
   
   
6. I now know far more about token rings and ethernet than I did at this time yesterday. The effect of writing the network section of the computer architecture module (we had a visiting lecturer covering that bit last year).
   
   
7. I signed up for Discworld 2008. I must admit that Terry's diagnosis did prompt this a bit, but I had been pondering it since Eastercon this year. I didn't realise how much I was missing the con circuit until I got back to it and as Discworld and Redemption are alternating years it makes sense (to me) to attend both of them, giving me two conventions per year.
   
   
8. A new episode of How it Works. I so love this programme. Today it's carpets, drinking water, laser eye surgery and acoustic guitars. Even if the signal's lousy so I'll have to watch it on the late night repeat, it's a new one!

So although not all of these have produced, shall we say, long-term happiness they did make me feel good at the time. And that's the important thing right now - savouring the transient moments of joy.
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There are pieces of music which make you put down your pen and listen to them.

When I was listening to Classic FM in the office the two pieces of music that generally did that to me were Khatchaturian's Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia and Saint-Saens' The Swan from The Carnival of the Animals. The first one is the sea and tall ships (yes, too much Onedin Line whilst growing up), but the second one used to reduce me to tears as a child because it was so calm and serene. It can still do that on a bad day.

Recently, though, I've been listening to The Jazz instead, which provides an excellent ambient background that I doesn't make me worry too much about turning it down whenever someone comes into the office. A smaller dynamic range than the classical stuff, I suspect. It was only yesterday that I found the equivalent piece of music - Dave Brubeck's Take Five . Now there's a piece that makes me boogie in my chair. :) It's also a lot safer to sing along with Cleo Laine or Billie Holliday than with Montserrat Caballé or Kiri Te Kanawa - far less likely to get me strange looks in the corridor or whilst waiting for the kettle to boil.
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Tonight we had our final fencing practise of the year.

We're waiting for more masks and epées to arrive and until they do I can't really go any further in terms of new drills so I'm trying to come up with interesting tournaments for them to do in order to get some practice and work on their calibration.

As I have three gorgets (the gorget being the item that takes most time to change) I decided that tonight we'd do a round robin with the rapiers rather than the epées. I also made it a bridge battle, so the fencer's aim was not necessarily to kill his opponent but rather to touch the wall behind his opponent. The 'bridge' was one floor section wide and if they stepped over the edge then they were deemed to have fallen in the moat and drowned.

This proved to be quite effective - prior to this we've worked in the round so the fencers could move in any direction they liked, so this spatial limitation was a whole new concept. There was very little falling into the moat this time, but that will change when we do it as a proper melee. Being a non-melee melee scenario I also got them to die as required for in a melee rather than just acknowledging the blows. This caused some surprise as people discovered that a fencing mask is surprisingly heavy when you want to get up after lying on the ground.

We did two cycles of a round robin so everyone faced everyone else twice. It was interesting to see that for the first cycle everyone focussed on killing their opponent before touching the far wall. It was only in the second cycle that they realised that if they could force their opponent to the wall and then control his blade that they could gain the point without actually killing their opponent. Tactical thinking is clearly beginning to occur. :)

I think that everyone has gone away with either a bruise or a gorget bite - one measure of a good evening's fencing when everyone is of a similar standard. :)
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That's the first set of Christmas cards ready to go into the post.

20 handmade cards ready to go to all sorts of place, with not quite that many more to follow but I am going to have to do a second batch. Fortunately they're relatively straightforward as I've put the time into the artwork stuff and just have to print it out on the nice photo paper and do the construction. Time to go shopping for a few more components first though. Oh yes, and there are a couple of birthday cards to do as well. That'll give me something to do tomorrow between work and fencing.

Of course I've missed the official EU postal deadline, but they'll get there eventually. I've even discovered that a couple of the addresses I had were wrong. Useful, the combination of the post code lookup page and multimap - but I suppose it only works if you actually know how to get to the location in question and can recognise that XXX street (as you thought) as actually XXX road.

Oh well. That's another thing I can cross off the to-do list.
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No, not the sort you have with cream, the sort you have with lettuce.

Today I was supposed to make lots of Christmas cards, do a lot of tidying, sort out various other Christmas things, bake a cake and go out to dinner.

I managed two of those things by baking a chocolate fudge mandarin gateau which then proceeded to attempt to self-destruct all over the car as I drove to dinner. Apart from its suicidal tendencies (which I put down to bouncing about over icy roads and going up a rather steep hill) it turned out quite well and I may have to make it again for the shire pot-luck party next Saturday.

The evening was excellent - FB and H cooked lamb with mixed vegetables and the sort of salad I don't mind eating - more fruit than vegetables, but I even ate the lettuce (not a common occurrence). FB works just along the corridor from me so we sat and had a good grumble about work before getting onto other things - music, gender issues, international affairs, the lot. It was an extremely good evening.

The only problem is that I know I've drunk too much coffee again and there's no way I'm going to get to sleep before 3!
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But enjoyable nonetheless.

I'm just back from a concert of Christmas music given by the Sinfóníuhijomsveit Norðurlands (the Northern Symphony Orchestra) and a local choir (Söngfélagið Sálubót) accompanying the tenor Garðar Þór Cortes and the violinist Lára Sóley Jóhannsdóttir. Until Thursday I'd completely forgotten that I was due to attend this, as M had suggested it a while ago (she's a big fan of Cortes) and it seemed a good idea. The tickets were rather more expensive than a night at the Phil, and it was in the local sports hall, but it was live (-ish - I'll explain in a moment) so what the hell?

We'd been warned that the hall opened about 17:00 and the concert started at 18:00, but we'd be best arriving early to get a good seat. Sorry? None of the seats had been allocated so it was a first-come, first-seated approach... except that all of the seats in the central area were covered with stick-it notes where people had clearly been in earlier and 'reserved' their preferred locations. By 18:00 the cold sports hall was full of about 1000 people.

The programme was a mixture of traditional Christmas music (Icelandic and American) with a couple of classical pieces thrown it. This was a bit of a problem for poor Cortes in the first half because his voice is operatic rather than Bing Crosby. The highlight of the first half, for me, was the second piece - Jólasveinar ganga um gólf - by the 20th century Icelandic composer Friðrik Bjarnason. It's very atmospheric - sort of a yuletide party in Moria, with lots of double bass.

The second half started with Winter from Vivaldi's Four Seasons, which was pleasant but a little disjointed in places. It is one of those pieces, though, which really does require the strings to be precisely in time with each other and it must be incredibly difficult. The soloist was quite good though. We then had a little Mozart (Ave Verum Corpus), a little Respighi (L'Adorazione dei Magi) and a little Verdi, and it was now that Cortes was allowed to shine, particularly in the Verdi Ingemisco.

The highlight, though, was his encore of Franck's Panis Angelicus, in which he was finally allowed to show why he's touring with Lesley Garret. I'm not at all convinced by the current fad for operatic singers to release half-and-half albums of classical and popular music, as in those I've heard the operatic singer always sounds much better singing the operatic pieces. I'll probably buy one of his albums in future but I'll wait until he releases a truly classical album. Come to think of it, I'd quite like to hear him sing Cavaradossi in Tosca. It would be interesting to hear what he makes of the part.

One thing was rather strange about the entire concert - we had an orchestra on stage with an operatic tenor, and microphones everywhere. We weren't actually listening to 'live' music, but rather to music which had been picked up by all of the microphones, mixed, equalised and then fed back to speakers on poles about 4m above the stage. Now I appreciate that the acoustics of the local sports hall (one of those half-cylinder-laid-horizontal ones) were not exactly comparable with the Philharmonic Hall but this was exceedingly weird.

Another slightly curious thing was the announcer. She would pop up onto the stage between pieces to introduce them and remind the audience that there's no need to clap between the three movements of Vivaldi's Winter, but she was wearing what we thought were bright red glittery shoes (very Wizard of Oz) and what can only be described as a cropped ballgown, black with a tule underskirt that made it stick out rather a lot. As soon as I saw here I mentally labelled her 'the announcements fairy' - all she needed was the magic wand. In fact it turned out that the shoes were bright pink, as we saw as we all poured out of the building together.

I have a suspicion that it may be broadcast on local television at some point in the not-too-distant future as there was a video camera providing a live feed to two large projection screens on either side of the stage. It would at least explain the microphones.
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I've recently had a run-in with Windows Vista.

I do technical support for Johann, my wonderful next-door-neighbour, who bought a new desktop machine complete with Vista earlier in the year. I set it up and got everything sorted out for him - things like finding antivirus software, OpenOffice and the like - and now have a look at it if it seems to be misbehaving.

Which it is at present. It's set up to download and install Windows updates automatically - as, I presume, Microsoft intend its users to do - but one of the recent updates refuses to install successfully and keeps demanding that he installs and reboots the machine.

Fair enough, I had a look at it, identified the problem update and went in search of information related to the problem. There was an official Microsoft response to it that basically said er, we know that some of you can't install this update but we don't know why... if you're in the US or Canada try calling this toll-free number to log a problem... if you're anywhere else then, well, try talking to your local Microsoft representative. Not exactly impressive, is it?

So I did a bit more digging and found that some people had managed to fix it by using various configuration utilities as administrator. That's fine, the main account is an administrator account... Except that it isn't. It turns out that Vista's "Administrator" level is nothing of the sort. It is, in effect, a power user level. If you want the true administrator login then you have to start up in safe mode, run a network command from the command prompt and then restart the machine. And it doesn't prompt you to set a password when you activate the admin account, you have to do that manually afterwards.

In the end I still couldn't get the update to install properly so I've recommended that he contact the shop that sold it to him and see if they can get any joy out of Microsoft (he's a very wily chap who won't let them bullshit him, which is good).

Like I said, I love my Mac.
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Last night I saw a very interesting programme of Discovery Science which told me something completely new about something very familiar.

The programme was How Did They Build That?, a programme which looks at architecture from an engineering perspective and was, in this case, considering skyscrapers. It's not something that I watch every episode but it's one that doesn't cause me to leap for the remote control, as it were. As it happened I was going to switch back to Sky News until the presenter mentioned that he would be visiting Britain's first skyscraper, the Royal Liver Buildings in Liverpool.

That surprised me. The normal 'strange fact about the RLB' that gets touted by this type of programme is that the clock faces on the building are six feet (just under two metres) greater in diameter than those on the clock tower of the Palace of Westminster - and, as suspected, this fact was indeed rolled out. I had no idea that the RLB was actually the first UK building to use a steel-reinforced concrete framework for the main structure which was then clad in relatively light materials for the walls. I had always thought that the RLB was either stone-built or, quite possibly, brick-built with an external cladding.

The building was completed in 1911, taking only three years to construct and, by dint of its revolutionary construction method, allowed for large interior spaces impossible within other buildings of the period.

Not satisfied with providing me with one fascinating new piece of information, the programme then proceeded to surprise me with a second: the chimes of the clock towers are entirely electronic, dating from 1953. I had, erroneously again, assumed that the bells were a standard automated carillon.

This is why I'm a documentary addict. There are things out there that I don't know yet, and some of them are really rather interesting.
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Oh dear. The geek in me escaped again.

I'm currently doing some research into RSS - the way you do - and as part of this I today wondered just how difficult it is to set up an RSS feed on a website. And the answer is... it isn't. Even if you're not an XML coder there are inexpensive (and no doubt free) wizard-style programs that'll do the job for you. I'm using FeedForAll which, once I realised that you have to save the feed before publishing it (there's no automatic save) it worked very nicely thank you. Sufficiently so that the Klakavirki website now has a news page with an RSS feed.

Hmm... I might change that so there's a news feed and an events feed. I'm sure that the results of this week's fencing trainer tournament are less than thrilling to anyone who wasn't involved, whereas the event-based stuff is probably of more general interest. The feed is available here.
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Fencing tonight proved to be an excellent distraction.

I arrived on time (I admit that I've been a little late the last couple of times so folks may have been later assuming that I'd be late too - not that it matters) and sat and read for a while until M arrived. At which point we sat and bitched a bit about the fact that no matter what information you send to the Powers Than Be in the SCA you very seldom seem to get a response. Having said that, I know that I've let things slide myself in the past - I've decided that taking on any offices is a bad idea when you have any form of depression, particularly if you happen to live 1000 miles from the rest of the society. It can be difficult enough to get up and go into work, never mind doing anything else.

But folks arrived not long afterwards and we discussed our plans for Thursday's A&S meeting. Given that we're about to have 10 epées at practices, 9 of which are likely to be identical, we need some way to differentiate between them. As a result we're going to make braided lanyards to tell them apart. I did three example pieces so that the others could decide which style they wanted and therefore work out how much ribbon they will need. I was quite surprised to realise the difference in lengths required between a simple kumihimo-style square braid and a round braid.

Once that was out of the way we started work with the swords. Tonight was Italian night so we did a bit of tip work, mainly with moving targets. Imagine a ball on a piece of string being batted about by five cats at the same time. Got the image? Now replace the cats with five fencers and imagine me dangling two tennis balls on a piece of string from the end of a dagger and you've got the general idea. It worked very well and I suspect it'll be done again.

I then ran a bear pit - one person is designated the 'bear' and fights all comers until s/he is killed at which point the victor takes over as the 'bear'; only the 'bear' can score points for winning. There were many, many double kills but we did have a clear winner in the end and for the first time my fencers admitted that they were probably going to have bruises tomorrow as a result of this. I think this counts as progress.

By the time we'd finished I felt rather more cheery than when I arrived - clearly the fencing was sufficiently distracting. Now if only I can maintain this degree of distraction though five hours of meetings tomorrow...
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... You have to clear four inches of snow off the car in the morning. And three of those inches have frozen into a crust on the top. :(

This is the first serious snow; it might well be the one that stays all winter. In some ways it's preferable to the stuff we've had recently because the earlier stuff just tends to create a layer of ice upon which the car slides. This stuff is sufficiently lumpy that you still get reasonably good traction upon it. If it stays like this I promise not to complain too much.

The downside of the weather is that it's now sufficiently cold that my hands have hurt all day even in the tropical heat of my office. The joints have swollen slightly, making the phalanges themselves feel 'thin' - last year I wondered if there was something wrong with them until I realised that the problem wasn't them but rather the joints between them. It's arthritis - the downside of having inherited my Nana's hands is that I appear to have inherited the arthritis to go with them. Ah well, ibuprofen is my friend. Ibuprofen and those nice thermal fingerless gloves I bought last year.

I've actually spent almost the entire day doing research work. It's quite a rare occurrence that - although it's entirely because lecturing has finished. Today I visited the websites of every single company listed in the FTSE 100. And what a lot of mining companies there are! It was interesting to see how it differed from the Dow Jones Industrial (whose 65 websites I visited on Friday) in that the DJ has far more utilities and transport companies than the FT, while mining is almost non-existant. No, I'm not developing an unhealthy interest in business, I am merely noting things I've seen doing computer-related research. Some of them have pretty awful websites, for that matter, and could do with someone explaining that graphic design does not equal usability.

Tomorrow is the list of 100 top-grossing IT companies and the database exam (I need to be there for the start of the exam and then I can escape back to the office). Then I will have more graphs (I have one already!) and will be able to start on the words to go with the diagrams. How exiting! :)

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I started reading the book on management today. I got two chapters into it before putting it down as too depressing.

So instead I just threw myself into more work on the webpages. I've added another device (and have almost finished a second) and have added a page on former members of the Shire. I think it's time to have another A&S heraldry session to get the remaining folks to come up with devices. After all, we need to be able to decorate the hall for Troll Hunt with our own banners - and interest has been expressed in doing silk-painted personal banners at some point in the mid-future. Hmm... I must put silk paints on my list of things to acquire sometime soon. I might pick up the fabric in the UK at Christmas (Aberkan sells it; I've noticed that before now).
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I've recently rediscovered beans on toast.

It's one of those things that I tend to forget for a while and then come back to, like a lot of simple foods. I've recently gone through a cheese toastie phase. Before that I went through a bacon roll phase, and a tortilla wrap with cream cheese and ham phase. They don't take much effort and can be easily rustled up when I come in from work shattered, or at the weekend when I'm determined that I'm actually going to have lunch.

Beans on toast is definitely a late-evening meal - the sort that I'll make when I realise it's past 9pm and I haven't had anything to eat since the panic snack as soon as I get in from work. Yes, I know I should have lunch, but I just don't seem to have time for it - I do, however, make sure that I have a bowl of cereal before I go into work in the morning.

So when it came to 10pm and I realised that I'd finished of the remains of last night's pizza mid-afternoon and just hadn't really noticed because I've spent the day working on a new page for the shire website, it was certainly time for something like beans on toast, accompanied by a large gin. For the hell of it.

The new web page is the populace page. I've put off doing this page for a while for a number of reasons - it was always going to take a bit of time and effort and I'd originally hoped that we'd move over onto the new system fairly quickly, but the creation of the new site is actually quite a large project in its own right. So this morning I sat down and started on collecting together all of the necessary photos, icons and descriptions of devices that people have produced and put them all into the appropriate form.

One of the devices has no chance of passing, but that belongs to a gently who's not likely to do anything more than attend the occasional event here in Iceland so it's not a major problem. I've done an initial check on the others and they seem fairly clear so I'm going to try to persuade their owners to go ahead and register them (these are folks who are rather more likely to venture off the Rock to events). Creating the graphics did require quite a lot of faffing about - I've become quite fond of the idea of creating something in one size by cutting and pasting, converting the thing to a vector graphic before resizing it to cut and past again so that it's to scale with the other bits of the design. The end results are not perfect but they'll do for now.
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