What time is it?

One of the last things I wanted to accomplish today was to nail down a time for Saturday for meeting KfW2 for dinner and drinks. Regular readers will know that this is always an issue when do manage top agree on a date. KfW2 has a blind spot for this and I always have to ask several times for her to tell me what time she's free. Like really force it out of her.

I'm single and free all weekend. She's married with kids, so has a husband and the kids to work around. It's not like I can simply book something and she can work round it. For all I know, she wants a mid-afternoon start and a mid-evening finish. And I'd be all for that. But it could be a lunchtime thing (I hope not) or an actual evening thing (very unlikely).

I've already asked her twice and I am just off the phone, having left a voicemail, to make three times in total over the last six days. So that's three times in total I've explicitly asked her for a time. Sigh. 

Great success!

The good news is that I accomplished most of what I wanted to do today. And the stuff that didn't get done was because I can't find the paperwork or I'm waiting for other stuff to be completed before I can move forwards.

I'm glad. I genuinely thought, at lunchtime, that this was going to be a wasted day of annual leave, but three phone calls, two emails, a bank transfer and two-and-a-bit hours later and I'm wrapping up.

I was supposed to be meeting Nerdy Girl this evening for a walk, but she's yet to confirm. It wouldn't bother me if she didn't confirm: I'm exhausted. Doing that stuff today was emotionally taxing. Though the weather's nice, so a walk would be pleasant.

Oh, and as I am typing this out, NG has rain checked this evening.

Shhhhh!

I did end up taking today off work, but I've not yet start the stuff I want to do. A builder has turned up to finish off the work that was started a few weeks back and he's creating a hell of a noise, so me being on the phone trying to sort stuff out isn't happening. 

I'm useless on the phone at the best of times, so having this distraction is something I could do without. Hopefully though the guy will be finished before lunch and I will have the afternoon to get the three or four phone calls (and other things) completed.

Who are you?

I didn't get the stuff done today that I was planning yesterday, but it wasn't due to laziness. Rather, I got sidetracked into doing some house stuff like prepping the garden for winter:, packing up the garden furniture, mowing and trimming the lawn etc.

It actually makes sense that I do the other stuff tomorrow because I might have to make some phone calls. The downside is that I might have to take tomorrow off, if I want to get everything done, because they're not the kind of tasks I can do in 5 mins if I get some quite time while working.

I did sleep well last night and woke refreshed this morning. I do recall a dream, or at least a bit of a dream that featured CAB. In the dream I was at a party, possibly at KfW2's house, and she introduced to me a friend. When I looked up, her friend was standing with his "plus one" who was CAB who, for some reason, didn't recognise me.

I don't remember a lot more about the dream than that, but it provoked a smile when I recalled it when I woke. And a little nostalgia about CAB, of course. 

Urgh.

I was quite drunk last night. I got a decent night's sleep, but struggled to get out of bed this morning. After indulging in some 'me time', I eventually got out of bed just before 11 AM. But I've been feeling muggy all day. I always do after a night out drinking.

I'm already looking forward to my bed tonight and having a clearer head tomorrow. I have stuff I need to do that requires concentration. 

Back chat.

I've posted before about my appreciation for women's backs and, by extension, women in backless dresses. So I was pleasantly surprised to see this picture of Desi Lydic around the recent Emmys. I think I've posted her before because when she does hosting duties on The Daily Show, she wears suits. And i love women in suits.

But this backless dress is doing things for me. I love the backless dresses that go all the way to the base of the spine - I think they're incredibly sexy.

 

 

Go me!

Years ago, one of my online hobbies (the one most frequently referenced on this blog), was writing consumer reviews. I got paid for it (pennies), but it was fun, there was a bit of a community (I 'met' A, F, K, USHW and others). Writing helped me order my thoughts and improved my written communication. At least, I believe the latter to be true. I guess only someone else can actually say whether it was good or not.

Regardless, it wasn't all consumer reviews. Sometimes it was creative writing (urgh) and sometimes it was opinion pieces. It's the latter that I want to talk about. I wrote a piece on artificial intelligence. It randomly popped into my head earlier, so off I went to find it. It's no longer available online, but most of my work was drafted in Microsoft Word and I still have copies of most of my pieces from then.

So the last edit date on the file is 11th October 2001. 25 years ago. And I have to say that it's fucking excellent. Well, maybe not excellent. My writing has improved a lot since then and I could be a lot more professional and clear if I were writing it today. But what is excellent are my predictions:

• Natural Language Processing
• Speech recognition
• Autonomous vehicles
• Image processing/recognition
• Chatbots
• Portable translators
• Programming assistance/debuggers 

That's not bad for 25 years ago, is it?

Safe to say that I am feeling quite chuffed with myself at this point. And I'm semi-disappointed that the websites in question no longer exist because I would be doing some serious gloating around now. There were a few members who claimed to be experts that were nowhere near as prescient as I was.

It's date time.

Today is an anniversary of sorts. It's the day I joined my current company. Well, it's not really. That was actually 2 weeks ago, but through some legal shit, they never counted the two weeks of training and I only signed my employment contract on this date. But this time twenty and a bit years ago, I was sent to the States to work for three months.

I remember telling F all about it - we were chatting regularly on MSN at the time. That was the trip where I met V. She was very excited for me.

I'd forgotten all about it until I got an email in work this morning from our HR system reminding me of the fact.

Oh, and it's also CC's birthday today. I sent her a message wishing her a happy birthday, but I am a little surprised she didn't suggest dinner.

Out and about.

I spoke with Ideas Girl today. She's part of our social committee, so she knows what's going on, what's being organised etc. Sadly, we're not having a Christmas party. We haven't had one since pre-Covid and I haven't been to one since, I dunno, 2016 maybe? But I quite liked the idea of getting dressed up again and putting on my suit.

And there's no work thing this month. Well, there is, but it's not our usual trip to the pub and it's on a Saturday night. Quiet Girl said she didn't know if she would go, but I'm already booked up. It's the same day that I'm taking KfW2 out for dinner.

Speaking of that, we've finally chosen a restaurant. It's one of KfW2's favourites, which I knew, but we try and go somewhere new and I couldn't think of anywhere. I might have posted before that KfW2 rarely makes decisions about these things.

All we need to do now is figure out a time. I'd prefer to meet late afternoon and maybe go to mid/late evening rather than an afternoon start and dinner time finish or a late start and late finish. But kfW2 is the one with commitments, so I've asked her. 

Feeling off.

I've been feeling off over the past 48 hours or so. I'm struggling a little to make sense of it. I'm definitely feeling overwhelmed, and that's being fed by the house stuff that I need to do and the logistics around that. 

The family stuff hasn't helped and it's ongoing - it'll take up some of my time today and tomorrow for sure. I took all last week as annual leave, but I don't feel recharged in the same way that I did with a week off at the start of July. There's other stuff going on as well, but I can't identify what it is or how to process it.

There might be an element of work stuff, but work's OK at the moment. It's just a general long-term worry that I have.

And the result, when I'm feeling this way, is that the loneliness kicks in. At least part of it is a need or desire to talk to someone. Someone close to me, but not family. Talking to my sister doesn't really scratch that itch. The night out with KfW2 will help, as long as there's no mucking about. And I haven't ruled that out and it's still 2 weeks away.

Not quite the Friday evening I had planned.

Sadly, I had yet another evening of indulging my appreciation of women in scrubs. Thankfully, it wasn't anything hugely urgent or life-threatening, but no-one wants to spend 5 hours sat around A&E waiting for a doctor to come "soon" to give you information about an elderly relatively illness.

And as cute as the nurse was who was attending to my relative, she was unable to offer anything concrete in terms of information or time scales. I left the hospital after midnight with no further information than I had when I first arrived at 7PM.

In fact, he wasn't actually seen until just before lunchtime today. That's over 12 hours lying in a bed in A&E before he was seen by a doctor. That gives you an idea of how serious the illness is but also how busy A&E was (or maybe how poor the A&E processes are that it took 15 hours for a 5-minute diagnosis).