So. I've lost most of my correspondence from the beginning of 2004 to the middle of 2005. I'm really very unhappy about this, especially since that period includes the second half of a very precious relationship that was conducted almost entirely by email. Not to mention several other interactions that would be called relationships if they weren't standing in opposition to the romantic kind in this particular sentence, boo English for being useless at naming such things.

( how I managed to be this stupid )

I only have myself to blame, but this really hurts.

Period pains + essay crisis = sad hermitty Liv.

If you were expecting communication from me in the next couple of days, I think it might not happen. At least the view is pretty when I have to resort to staring out of the window.

Cheering of the non timewasting kind would be appreciated.

Edit 30 Jan: I really like you guys. So sweet that you responded to this whinge with practical advice. The mood I'm in I appreciate that much more than e-hugs. And it's good advice too. Yay friends, thank you all!

We have another of the amazing Swedish four-day weekends when no-one works from mid-afternoon Friday until Wednesday morning. The trouble is, I am in a very poor position to take advantage of this holiday. My primary problem is that I have no money. I mean, literally none; I had to get a new bank account for annoying bureaucratic reasons, and of course the new card didn't arrive til Friday after the banks had shut early due to the holiday, and I can't activate it until places are open again at 10 o'clock Wednesday morning. I have food in the storecupboard, so I won't starve, and I have a season ticket for transport, so I don't have to stay at home. But the number of fun things I can actually do in a strange city with no money is rather limited!

The second problem is that my phone chose the extremely inconvenient time of Friday afternoon just before the holiday to die. So I can't phone my friends here and suggest hanging out together, nor can I occupy my time by phoning my friends in other countries, which is one thing I was hoping to do with the bonus free time. And of course I can't even start the process of getting it fixed until Wednesday...

However, in spite of these annoyances, the weekend started well. Some work colleagues invited me to a pubmeet held by a largely virtual group of English-speakers living in Sweden. I had a very enjoyable evening, because even though pubbing isn't really my scene, it was outdoors so not smoky and the background music was ignorable, and because I suddenly got to meet 70 new people at once. Social contact is very, very good, and they seem an extremely pleasant, and pleasingly mixed crowd.

The downside was paying over £7 for a shot and mixer (which I wouldn't have ordered if I'd known!) and over £5 for a beer. Apparently this is normal for Sweden, but eek! And that ate up my entire "budget" (the cash I happened to be carrying in my purse when I realized I was not going to be able to get any more late on Friday) for the weekend.

Spring is fine, nicer weather, lots of lovely things in bloom and in leaf, longer daylight (and this far north, you really notice it when the clocks go forward)... It's all good.

But come May, and a few days of consistently warm weather, and what happens? I'm waking up every night because I can't breathe. Blah. Hateful asthma. At least it waited until after my viva, and at least I have medicine which does a reasonable job of controlling it. It'll take a few days to build up a dose, but after that I should be ok more often than not. (It also has the useful side-effect of reducing my sneeziness, though it's evil medicine which one wouldn't take just for mild hay fever.)

Then of course I'm moving back to Cambridge where my asthma is always worse, and probably at this rate right in the height of summer.

Apologies for the whingeing...

Today is the 18^th day, making 2 complete weeks and 4 days of the Omer.

Now, imagine for a moment that you are the IT department supporting a sizeable medical faculty. You have several hundred medical and research students relying on your server. You decide to move everyone to a new server, implying quite a bit of downtime and a change in the login path. What do you do to minimize the consequent disruption?

A) Send a circular email informing people that they need to change their login in order to be able to check email

B) Wait until sufficient chaos ensues that angry students storm your office demanding to know why they can't check their email, access their files, or even access desktops on most computers in the department (because obviously it's really important for security reasons that no-one should be able to use computers at all when the network server is down). Then tell the angry students to "spread the word" about the changed login

C) Refuse to tell departmental sysadmins what's going on, because after all they're not directly employed by the university, so obviously they're the scum of the earth

D) Actually take some sensible steps to inform people what's going on. Like, maybe, print out a notice and display it in a prominent place

Guess which our lovely department chose? Oh yes, got it in one: a mixture of A, B and C. Grrr!