Sometimes, the only way to get over my urge to smash people's heads together is to play Peggle Deluxe while listening to the News Quiz.

What are your strategies?

grumble grumble

Two hours of sleep earlier, filled with tedious and restless dreams where I live a work day over and over without a single interesting or even dreamlike event in the whole thing. I would much prefer nightmares.

Now I'm wide awake, given up on getting any more sleep. Wondering about the bizarre decision I heard about in work yesterday.

Why would you appoint a database administrator as lead of a team of testers (with one SCM expert)? Why would you then call that team "Transition"?

ETA I didn't want the position, this isn't sour grapes at being passed over

Okay, not much content, but whatever.

Seen on somebody's jacket on the train this morning:
"Born to be wild - Except at home"

Seen on a driving school car:
"Make your driving licence here"

The second one is fine in Finnish, so maybe they should have written it in Finnish instead of badly translating it into English and suggesting something completely different from what they meant.

Via pgmcc

( Books meme )

I blame being too busy at work, and not being thrilled at the idea of going online when at home.

But at the moment, I am waiting for an email to rescue me from my current blocking situation, and don't feel like doing anything useful while I wait.

a few seconds later

Must bear in mind that if waiting for an email, starting an LJ entry is a good way to make it arrive... but I'm still blocked, so still typing.

Anyway, nothing in particular to talk about. Next week I'm off to Åcon - hurray! - and am slated in for the Great Forgettable Reads panel, which suits me to a T, and applies to nearly everything that I have ever read, except for the Crap Forgettable Reads, and The Keeper by Gareth O'Callaghan which is unfortunately seared into my memory as the Worst Book I Will Ever Read.

In maybe the stupidest thing I have done since I got stranded in Isafjordur when the roads closed for the winter, I will be flying to Ahvenanmaa instead of taking trains and boats. Actually, maybe it is stupider than getting stranded in Isafjordur, because that time I had no choice but to get into a tiny plane and get religion again. I don't know what I was thinking when I booked my tickets on Air Aland, but it wasn't straight. In addition, as if that isn't dumb enough, I'm arriving a day earlier than everybody else. In fact, a day earlier than the hotel even opens.

I must be getting old. Next thing I'll be forgetting how to use Reply to all and whether it is okay to delete shortcuts from the desktop, and then it will be a rapid slide into complaining about where the power switch is hidden and spamming my family with virus-ridden emails. My dad turned seventy last week and broke his hard drive.

********************************

Still no sign of a rescuing email.

********************************

I was going to use my LJ to write a book diary this year - okay, I was going to do that last year as well, but this year I think my intentions were better. Obviously, I can barely remember anything that I read more than a couple of weeks ago (titles and authors are written down, impressions are just gone), so I'll just dive in in the middle.

27. The Woods by Harlan Coben. Reviews elsewhere have said that this is his best, but I didn't think it was. Twists and turns and enough plotting to make you paranoid, as usual with his books, but there weren't as many "oh my GAWD" moments as in others. I can't say anything about the plot beyond what the blurb says, or else it is spoiled, but a not-his-best from Harlan Coben is still a mind-bendingly good thriller, so - recommended.

28. The Intruders by Michael Marshall. A great book, with horribly creepy bits. It may be a cliché, but evil nine-year-old girls get me every time, and this one isn't evil in the way you expect either. Minor criticisms about the narrative voice (a bit too stock) and the ending (which I hope is actually just a red herring for a sequel) don't detract much from a very enjoyable read.

29. Dreamsongs by George R.R. Martin. I was surprised to find that I had read only a couple of the stories in this collection before, and even more surprised to find that those couple did not include Sandkings (I could have sworn I had read it, hasn't everybody read it??) I didn't like the stories in the first section, his very earliest work written for comics fandom, but I've never been a comics fan so I wouldn't like to say that they were bad. Especially since almost every other story in the collection bowled me over - seriously, pick any of those stories, compare to something from a recent-ish Interzone, and you'll cancel your subscription. I can't even pick a favourite, so I'll just mention that I screamed a girly scream when finnbear unexpectedly came home while I was in the middle of reading "The Pear-Shaped Man".

Ongoing reading: The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross (good so far, but I prefer The Jennifer Morgue) and audiobook The Sleeping Doll by Jeffrey Deaver (pants, but maybe because I don't like the reader's voice).

So far this week, Tesla has destroyed the following:

• three sticks of lipbalm
• one pen
• two bottles of contact lense solution
• one phone, Nokia E70 (my phone!!! How could she??)
• one light bulb
• one book (mostly unread)

She is also in heat for the first time, and bleeding like a stuck pig.

To put it another way:

I have chapped lips, I can't open my eyes properly because my lenses are gluey, and I'm sitting in the dark. Here in the dark, I can't call my friends and family, I can't write bad poetry about my predicament. On the bright side, my book has been destroyed so I wouldn't be able to read it, and the splashes of blood about the place are a lot less disturbing.

ETA Just caught her investigating my hot water bottle (imported to Finland at great expense (not my expense)). If that had been destroyed, I couldn't have been held responsible for my behaviour.

There are only two ways, in my opinion, that I differ from most people.

The first way, and this really only applies to "most people on the internet", is that I don't think I'm very different from most people.

The second way is that I smell things that aren't there.

I used to hear things that weren't there as well, but I grew out of that in my teens. Now I just have phantom smells.

I know what they are not. They are not synaesthesia - I am not smelling sounds, sights, or tactile sensations. They are also not a symptom of Petit Mal - I show many symptoms of Petit Mal, so for a long time I thought that the smells were part of it, but apparently the phantom smells of both Petit and Grand Mal are either burnt toast or an unidentified smell, and neither of those fit my smells. The most common hit I get when Googling "phantom smells" is for "olfactory hallucinations" and when I follow those links they are all to do with both forms of Mal.

By the way, though I show some symptoms for Petit Mal (and also some, but fewer, for Grand Mal), I am glad to say that I have been diagnosed as not having it.

I just smell things that aren't there. I am about 95% sure that they are related to my mental health, and so I am only prepared to discuss one particular phantom smell in public.

When I am depressed I smell over-ripe or slightly rotten oranges. In the past I have torn (metaphorically) my home apart searching for these oranges and found nothing vaguely resembling a citrus fruit, over-ripe or otherwise, so nowadays I make do with checking the most likely spaces and then moving straight on to combating the depression itself.

I won't go into why I get depressed, and this entry is only being written because I don't smell oranges right now.

I have some theories about why I smell oranges when I'm depressed, and why I smell phantom smells at all. These theories are only semi-scientific, in that I 1) do only sporadic research on the whole phenomenon, 2) don't get keep strict records of my depression, and 3) am very unwilling to experiment on myself. Yes, I can, and do, think of a hundreds of ways of qualifying and quantifying my phantoms (I'm a tester, for fuck's sake, I do this for a living), but right now, I'm just going to tell you my current conclusions.

Conclusions are: I am smelling my own pheromones, and putting my own interpretation on top of what I smell. With much handwaving around the word "pheromones", since I don't know what else to call the smell given off by the chemicals in my brain. Oranges, because of when the smell of oranges became important in my life, which was right about the time that I first became depressed. Why a smell and not a sound? There's a lot of literature about how the sense of smell is the most primeval of senses, and how it is the most likely to trigger memories, but if that explained why I got phantom smells during depression surely there would be more documented cases of others having the same experience, right? Partly, I think that it is because I have a good sense of smell - in fact, the best sense of smell in my family, so when a child I could smell things that the rest of the family couldn't, and therefore dismissed as only in my mind*. Maybe I am just scent-dominant (from a theory by ozarque), and so few other people are that we are just ignored.

Whichever or whatever, this is still a very real phenomenon for me. Only last week I could smell the oranges everywhere, and my other, undiscussed, phantom smells are still around. And I wanted to share, in case people find it interesting, or have ideas of where I can look next time I am motivated enough to research it.

* About it being in my mind - I get really pissed off when people dismiss things as being "only" in the mind. There are huge numbers of things that we take as reality that only exist in our collective understanding, our collective minds agreeing that something is so - this is behind a lot of cultural misunderstanding, for instance, where the Irish collective understanding of what constitutes good manners clashes with the Finnish understanding of good manners (to take a trivial example). But that rant can be left for another time.

I am almost in the middle of taking a year's retirement from the Finn-Brit Players (May 2007 - May 2008 at least, and Z. has a signed contract to wave at me if I get tempted). I was really looking forward to all the extra time I would have, to do all those things that I dreamt of doing while I was at rehearsals.

Now I remember that much of the time at rehearsals I dreamt about having time to do the laundry and getting to bed early.

What I didn't dream about was working like a lunatic. Don't get me wrong, my current job is the best job I've ever had, I'm more motivated than I have ever been, and the project that I'm on at the moment is practically designed to keep me interested. As lostcarpark put it when describing his ideal job, I don't have to work late but I want to.

But I'm doing stupid hours these days. My sick leave hasn't helped matters, as my work just piled up while I was away and I was behind anyway. I keep saying that when I finally catch up, things will be okay, and I'll be able to work my hours and go home and forget about it all. I have roped in two other people this week to help me out, so surely that means the end of the tunnel is near - right?

I'm just too optimistic about how much I can get done, at work or outside of work. And then I feel like crap, especially compared to some of my friends, who must not sleep at all.

Which is a long winded way of saying that I don't really have anything to say, and that I must get to bed.

Literally.

Just one of things I would never have thought of doing before I got a dog.

The Dog Expert Book* recommends encouraging your dog to chew the right things by coating acceptable chew toys with something the dog really likes, like peanut butter.

Well, we haven't tried Tesla with peanut butter yet, but she does love lip-balm. She cracks open the casing and eats up the entire stick (I guess it is her equivalent of a soft-centred chocolate), when we leave it about. One way to get her undivided attention is to apply the lip-balm to your own lips, and a special reward for her is to apply it to her nose.

So, now I am trying it on her chew toys. If it works, I'll switch to the cheapest vaseline I can find, but I suspect she will just lick off the lip-balm, and then go on a crazed quest to find more.

* There are hundreds and thousands of Dog Expert Books. Most of them contradict each other, and some of them even contradict themselves. I'm thinking of writing my own.

Not according to plan, I've been on sick leave since Tuesday. I'm trying not to think of how far behind in my work I am, and how ridiculous my estimates and commitments are going to look - yesterday was deadline day, I am the only tester on the project so I couldn't even delegate. I even left a test running on Monday evening when I left the office, so I have to go in there today or tomorrow to check the result, and pick up my laptop for a trip to Oslo on Monday.

Anyway. finnbear was sick as well, so the dog has been going mad with neither of us being well enough to take her for more than the shortest walk. When I finally took her (name of Tesla, by the way) out yesterday afternoon (ill-advised on my part, I felt horrible when I got home) she dragged me down to our usual meadow, and ran around in circles without pausing for about twenty minutes.

That's about the most exciting thing that has happened all week. I can't wait for life to start up again.

I'm in Copenhagen for the day, at an intensive meeting for one of the projects I'm on. I hate these one day business trips, getting up early, seeing a city through taxi windows on the way from the airport to the office, and then back again.

Still, it's nice to be in Denmark for a change. Most of my business trips are to Riga, flying AirBaltic in a Fokker 50, bouncing over the Baltic Sea in a deafening roar of engines and what I can never forget is outdated engineering. By comparison, the flight this morning felt like we were hardly moving, and extraordinarily quiet.

My eyeballs are rolling only because of the early morning I had. There was a half hour conversation about "variable enclosures" that got merged into a CSI influenced dream I was having, and I only just stopped myself from adding a comment, half-asleep, about my new insights. Luckily, my colleagues either didn't notice, or are kind enough not to embarrass me.

****************

We're on a break now, hence the update.

****************

Once upon a time, taking a plane was a Huge Deal, involving much preparation the night before, weeks of panic over lost passports and tickets. Now, what with the ease of checking in over the net, just taking a laptop bag, it's similar to an ordinary commute to the office, with a stricter schedule. A couple of months ago I was in the taxi on the way to the airport for a Riga trip when I realised that I had forgotten my passport - since then, I just keep it in the laptop bag.

I also no longer have maps, or even the faintest clue of where I am actually heading to. I usually travel with a very organised project manager and one or two architects, and us techy types just rely on the PM to have the details, pay for everything, and shepherd us about the place. In that sense, it is even easier than my usual commute (although my usual commute is sometimes beyond me, it must be said, and I end up on the wrong bus or train due to stupidity or absent mindedness).

But anyway. Back to work we go. Can I make the rest of the day without quoting Hamlet? I doubt it.

Has it really been a year? And is it really October already??

That's disingenuous of me, I think regularly about making an entry, but when you get out of a habit it is difficult to get back into it again.

I was going to make an entry with a list of all the net-related projects I have started and then abandoned - but I abandoned that idea.

I was going to use this as a book blog, but it's October now and I have read about 70 books (which is amateur level compared to some on my friends list, but still more than I thought I read) and I couldn't be bothered to try and write something about all of them.

I was going to do an update on all the things that have happened since my last entry, so that everybody is up to date and I can start regular entries again, but that would be a huge entry, and I might slip out of the habit before I could finish the entry.

I was going to start making quick entries with just a couple of lines about amusing / interesting /strange things that have happened, but the problem with that is as soon as I start writing about them they seem a lot less amusing / interesting / strange, and the entry gets abandoned.

I have never and will never make this is a meme-result only journal - even I'm not very interested in what precious metal / Sopranos character / etc I am, and I know that nobody else is either. Own up, as soon as you see a meme result, the only thing you think about is what your own results would be.

So given that all those plans are off, does that mean I'm giving up on this journal entirely?

I hope not. I don't want to, but I can't promise anything regular, unless and until the LJ habit comes back. One factor making my return more difficult is that I no longer have the time at work to do anything other than work, or rather I am motivated enough at work to not seek distraction on the net. The reason I'm here today is that I have some work to do this morning, and I'm waiting for some tests to finish running.

But let's see! Is this entry my swan song, or the herald of a glorious comeback?

200 pages read, 1030 still to go. Yep, Peter F. Hamilton book on the go, Judas Unchained. It's actually quite okay, for a bloated monstrosity, and much better than the Night's Dawn books (of which I only read The Reality Dysfunction before deciding I had had enough.) The sequel to Pandora's Star, the story is relatively gripping (and, oh joy, finished in this volume), most of the characters are differentiated enough so that I know who they are when they show up again. The prose is a bit plodding, but after reading two Tim Powers books back to back, I really needed something plodding to stop the peculiar dreams.

In other news, I finally got around to looking at LibraryThing, and have immediately bought a lifetime membership: they get much kudos by having my name free, too. I will be slowly adding my books to it, although people who know me of old may be startled by how few books I now own.

The most interesting part of LT for me is the Shared information - I like the idea of having books that hardly anybody else does, and though my aim is to list a book that nobody else owns, I'm feeling kind of pleased for being only one of seven people for my rarest book. Yes, I have been cheating by making guesses about which books LT users would not enter or have. Don't burst my bubble.

Work is pretty insane at the moment, although I enjoy most of it, and don't actively hate anything I have to do. There are some challenges, too, stuff that I have never had to do before, and that I find quite difficult. Mainly managerial stuff that I have to take responsibility for, because my manager is a very busy person, so I've been asking for price quotes from tools vendors and hiring consultants and making budget estimates. It's good stuff, although I would start protesting if it began to take over much more of my time than it already does.

And: autumn weather has finally arrived. I have been giving serious thought to bringing the gloves and hat out - wussy perhaps, but I have some very inhospitable bus and train stops on my commute these days.

(Before I forget, happy birthday to liadnan, who is still not so old as he thinks he is...)

So I know this girl, Amanda. She has floated around the edges of the Players for a few years, heavily involved in what could be called our sister group, Thespians Anonymous. We've known each other to say hello for at least two years, probably longer, but tonight was the first night I was in the pub having a conversation with her.

Z. started it all, talking about a job she was vaguely interested in, that she turned down, that Amanda then got. "Yes," said Amanda, "but it's nothing like the freaky connection I have with you" and she literally swung around on me, while I was mid-sip of my beer.

"I used to go out with someone who had a thing with your half-sister Jane."

Yeesss. A big poke with a sharp stick to thalinoviel for not giving me any hint about that.

I'm particularly freaked about the specificity of it. Had it beed phrased just with "your sister", I'd probably be okay. The full detail of "your half-sister Jane", however, completely threw me.

I will be twitching, convinced somebody is watching me, for days now.

Moral: the world is much smaller than you know.

The short version: oh my dear god.

The slightly longer version: it should really have been called a Vodka Extravaganza. Why did it seem like a such good idea to carry on in the pub? Residents of Töölö, if you were awoken by drunken singing at around half three this morning, I can state categorically that it wasn't me. Or, rather, that it wasn't only me. Oh my head.

Also, in my book those were prawns, not crayfish. This could be me being wrong.

Yet again, somebody (blonde222 this time) has had to send me a virtual poke to get me to write something here. See, after I stop updating for a while, any kind of entry with small details of my life feels like it will be inadequate - and a great big long catch up becomes a tedious list of incidents.

So! I'll do what I often do in moments of confusion, and have a beer. And then talk about books I've been reading, with perhaps bits of my life peeking in round the edges.

---

The third and final book in Lynn Flewelling's Tamír Triad has been out and read (by me) for at least a month now. (Lynn also has an LJ at otterdance, I just discovered while Googling a link for this bit.) Oracle's Queen finishes off the story pretty well, although I found that the ending dragged out a little bit. Still, even with that one of the best fantasy series written in recent memory.

What isn't closed in Oracle's Queen is the plotline about the mysterious bowl Arkoniel is guarding. A helpful Author's Note at the end said that that particular plotline was tied up in Luck in the Shadows and Stalking Darkness, which sent me stumbling out to the bookshop to buy both. I am a marketer's dream, I tell you.

Anyway, LitS and SD are the first two books in the Nightrunner Series, and arguably are stand alone novels in their own right*. They are set about six hundred years after the events in the Tamír Triad, although were published beforehand. As far as I know, LitS was Flewelling's first novel, and though you would be hard pressed to call it either clumsy or amateurish, it has nowhere near the impact of Bone Doll's Twin. But its story, and the story of SD, really sucked me in, and the third book in the series, Traitor's Moon, is close to the top of my inpile.

Before I read that, Three Days to Never by Tim Powers arrived yesterday and is being, well, devoured. The same delivery brought me a reprint of Powers' On Stranger Tides, which I've read before but haven't owned. It's like a feast! I suspect my world view is going to get considerably skewed and weird before I'm done.

---

Hmm. Books, yet still no life peeking in. My most exciting news is that I have coughed up money for flights and a hotel, and am going to Swecon! It is, by a loose definition, my first foreign con, and an event I've wanted to go to for a while. Guests of Honour are Joe Haldeman (who was also at Octocon 1997), Geoff Ryman (I will be at the surely inevitable Mundane SF panel), and Martin Andreasson, a fan in the Swedish parliament (to simplify).

Otherwise? The Finnbrit Players tick on, as do the seasons. Rehearsals started early for the Autumn production, at the beginning of August, and summer seems to be dragging on late into the year (we are the North, and this is Very Late in the year for temperatures in the 20s).

Yet otherwise, I've actually taken up creative writing again, after a gap of a decade or so (not counting a couple of short plays or sketches, thrown together in haste and under deadlines). This is thanks to a creative writing group that Joel the Younger has set up, and to be honest my main output is the timed exercises we do, when I show up, but I feel pleased nonetheless.

* By which I mean that they have complete storylines in themselves, but should probably be read in order to get a good idea of the characters and what has happened already. Reading them back to back, I wasn't irritated with lots of back story being filled in, which probably means that they would be incomprehensible read out of order. Or not, if the reader was much brighter than me, which is entirely possible.

A few people have been prodding me to make sure I haven't fallen off the face of the internet. So just to reassure everybody who worried, and as a bonus reassure everybody who didn't even notice, here's me being visible on the internet.

A quick roundup:

• The new job is really great, especially compared to the old one, but even in its own right. I've (almost) got over my excitement at finding design documentation ("60 pages of use cases! Must have a cold shower!"), but I'm still enjoying what I do.


• My commute, however, is longer and more awkward than it used to be. What with public transport being on summer timetables, the awkwardness is such that I try and cycle it a few times a week, but various appointments downtown after work in the evenings make even that awkward.


• Cutting down on activities continues, however. I have swapped committee roles with Z. (who can now be found online), so she gets to faff about with receipts and invoices and budgets, and I get to organise parties.


• Perhaps having a proposal to direct being accepted doesn't count as "cutting down". Jean Genet's The Maids, May next year, as part of a triple bill. Will be interesting.


• I'll be paying a flying visit to Ireland at the end of this month. Not much time for seeing anybody, but if you'll be around let me know.


• I can't believe I ever used to have trouble with insomnia. These days, sitting still for twenty minutes will have me nodding off - which is another reason I try and avoid public transport when commuting to work.

So there's part of my life updated. Who knows when the next chance will be...

A late spring means that the birch trees are pollinating all in a rush. Six floors up, my office windows are coated with it, and my head feels like it has even more of the stuff in there.

Last night, an investigation of a troublesome contact lense revealed that there was pollen smeared across the top of it, which proved impossible to remove. Which leads me to resolve, once again, that my next haul of goods back from Ireland must include an aerosol of saline solution for cleaning my contact lenses.

It's all very admirable, the lack of aerosols for most things in Finland, but dribbling saline solution from a squeeze bottle into the palm of my hand just does not get rid of any dirt on my contact lenses. Apart from hoping that the pieces of fluff will float away and that I can rescue the lense before they float back again, I just can't figure out how I am supposed to clean them. I'm using monthly disposable lenses at the moment, which I'm supposed to take out once a week. However, if I do that then I cannot get them back in again. I get through them at a rate of knots, and almost always have some sort of irritant in one or both of my eyes.

Fresh lenses in yesterday, and it looks like for the next month (or until I cannot bear it any longer) my left eye will have something trapped in it. Joy.

Disco inferno
Originally uploaded by charnel doze.

This is the kind of image you don't normally expect to see in downtown Helsinki. Photo by Z., my witnessing was done from the top of the hill in Malminkartano.

And a conversation in the pub the following day:

The Fool: That photo reminds me of the siege of Ennis!
Me: Um... the Siege of Ennis is a dance.
The Fool: Yeah! But it's a really happening dance!

I'm not sure that I've ever been this stressed before in my whole life. You'd think it would be easier, now that I've handed in my notice, that I can kick back and relax at work for a month before starting in my new job. But no, I like my current colleagues (some of them) too much to do that. The Baby Tester in my team was almost in tears this morning at the prospect of being the only person to test a sub-project I was assigned to, and if there is one thing that gets me anxious it is making baby testers cry.

Outside of work, a recent conversation with my parents made me tally up my commitments: maybe being on six different committees and teams is a bit too much for anybody. Or if it isn't, then it is too much for me. So I've started a program of cut-backs.

The results so far are that I am now longer writing and directing three linked plays for the Players Sekrit Summer Production. I'm just directing uglychicken's Stuck again, and Stage Managing the production.

I don't like making cut-backs, you see.

So now I've come up with another plan, and I've made some resolutions:

• I will say 'no' more often. I've done this already, in a small way, and feel confident that I can take Autumn 2007 off from the Players altogether.


• I will not run for the Players committee next year. If things don't get done because I'm not there to do them, so be it, but I urgently need to abdicate responsibility to others. They are adults and probably more capable than I am.


• As I finish projects, I will not take on any more. It may seem like having more than one night a week free means that I will be bored, but I should use the opportunity to pursue interests outside the Players, without making any commitments. Like, you know, watching TV or something.


• I will try and accomplish at least one task a week before somebody has to nag me to complete it. So far this week, I've done that for four or five tasks. Last week I got two tasks done. But it is a start.

Small steps. I'm only capable of small steps. If I can get done what I've committed to do, then I'll be proud.