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I’m convinced that my IQ is about 50 in the first 15 minutes or so after I’ve woken up. I think that it’s partly to do with getting up before 6am (I’m less dopey if I get up an hour or more later), but whatever the reason, I’m a bit of a danger to myself and others until I’ve had time to give my brain a bit of choke and start up properly without spluttering and backfiring.

This morning’s piece of ‘Idiocy Upon Waking’ concerned an invisible plaster—-the type with a transparent sticky part, and a flesh coloured antiseptic pad. I’d put it on a huge blister the previous night (the result of a mosquito bite gone bad), but when I woke up, I could see blood where the blister was. Thinking that the blood had seeped through the antiseptic pad, I tried to peel the plaster off, poking the wound clumsily a couple of times. It took a good few minutes for the realisation to dawn (painfully slowly) that there wasn’t in fact an incredibly effective invisible plaster on my ankle, but no plaster at all. Not wanting Mr. Bsag to wake up and find a manky used plaster in the bed, I then had to rummage around under the bedclothes—-trying not to wake him—-to retrieve the invisible blighter.

I’ve had it with invisible plasters—-next time I’m going to get some of those blue catering plasters and avoid this kind of shenanigans.

For about a week now, I’ve had a dodgy right foot for some unknown reason. My ankle is swollen and the ball of my heel is very sore when pressure is applied, which obviously happens very time I take a step.

Now that the sun has come out, I’ve moved to wearing my very well worn-in sandals (with no socks, naturally). Perhaps it’s because my gait has changed a bit because of my right foot, but I seem to have worn a huge patch of skin off the balls of both feet. The two mile walk home was pretty painful. Stupid feet—-I need an upgrade.

My parents came up this weekend to pick up our feline house guest, and the house suddenly seems empty and a bit lifeless without that little furry monster. I miss her jumping in my lap and head-butting my book as a not-so-subtle cue that I should be getting her dinner ready, I miss the way she wound herself around my legs, purring furiously when I was trying to get my jeans on in the morning, and I miss her suddenly curling herself into the tightest possible ball, paw over her eyes on the sofa in the evening.

On the plus side, our battered, scarred and heavily repaired fridge magnets are probably now safe.

In common with many large institutions, the University tends to turn off the central heating system in its buildings on a given date each year, rather than in response to the weather warming. Inevitably—-as this year—-this coincides with a cold snap, so that everyone spends a couple of weeks shivering in their suddenly-cold offices.

Note to self: wear a warm jumper tomorrow.

I went to buy a birthday card for my cousin’s one year old daughter at lunchtime today. There were a few cheery looking cards, but a particularly bright design with a “1 Today!” banner along the bottom caught my eye. It had a little board picture book inserted into the top of the card, and I thought it would be a lot more exciting for her than just a card. Then I looked on the back and saw a little sticker which read:

Not suitable for children under 36 months

Really.

We got the survey back on the house we’re hoping to buy, and it’s generally good news—-we think. The whole business of buying a house is fraught with panic anyway (particularly if you’re first time buyers as we are), but the survey is written in language designed to maximise back-covering rather than practical information, so it’s very easy to read far too much into it. They never use phrases like “the structure of the house is sound”, but say things like “as far as we were able to investigate it, the structure of the house seems to be acceptable”, which immediately makes you think that there’s something they’re not telling you. What does acceptable mean? What’s wrong with it?

“The internal staircase has 13 steps”. OK. Is that good? Or bad? Why do we need to know how many steps there are? “Some of the steps squeak.” It’s cursed! It’s a cursed house! Oh my Bod!¹

And breathe…

¹ A little tribute to Nebulous ↑

Sometimes it’s funny how many thoughts can pass through your head in a very short period of time.

Last Friday, I had a very busy day, but was feeling really ill so I came back to work from home for the afternoon. I was later than I expected to be, and hungry because I hadn’t had time for lunch. So I started making a sandwich, feeling a bit shaky and dizzy as I did so. I’d just finished the preparation and was about to fill my glass with some fruit juice when I felt it slip out of my hand.

We have a tiled kitchen floor, so almost anything breakable dropped on it tends to do just that. As the glass headed towards the floor I thought, “Oh no, not again” in a bowl of petunias falling towards a planet through space kind of way. To my astonishment, the glass actually bounced off the tiles without breaking. As it headed back up, I was thinking “Cool! It’s like that scene in Mon Oncle where Monsieur Hulot bounces the futuristic glass on the floor of the kitchen…”. That thought was swiftly followed by, “…Hey, but I’d better catch the glass right now, because it’s not going to bounce a second… OK. Too late”. The glass shattered into a million tiny, shards on the floor.

If only I spent less time thinking and more time doing, I might have one more glass in the cupboard today.

(This is one for the Firefly fans—-I got the entire run on DVD for Christmas, and am enjoying the episodes enormously)

I was working at home the other day, and my lovely husband made some wonderful, thick, home-made minestrone soup for lunch. From scratch! With beans and macaroni and loads of vegetables and everything.

I walked into the kitchen and smelt the delicious smells rising from the saucepan, grinned like a cat who has got the cream and said:

Mmm… Husband soup.

I’m finding it so hard to concentrate at the moment. The problem seems to seep into every part of my life, but it’s particularly acute at work. I did at least manage to finish preparing a talk for a conference this afternoon, but only by forcing myself to concentrate every five minutes by setting a timer to beep annoyingly at me. It’s partly because we’re caught up in the whole ‘Oh no, where are we going to live’ thing. We went to see a couple of houses last night, and I was awake until about 2am mentally arranging furniture, comparing commuting distances, generally weighing up pros and cons. It’s not even as if we’re mad keen on that particular house—-we just have way too many unknown variables at the moment. To make matters worse, the variables that we do know about (for example, how much money we have to spend) don’t allow us to solve the equation. Stupid maths.

Sometimes I could really curse my natural, idiotic honesty. Today I bought a cup of coffee in a coffee shop and handed over a £5 note in payment. However, the barrista behind the counter gave me change for a £10 note. Before I could stop myself, I’d blurted out, “But I gave you five pounds—-you’ve given me change for ten.”

D’oh! Damn you, stupid Honest Brain—-why can’t you just keep your do-gooding trap shut? We could have been a fiver up.

We sometimes listen to ‘Private Passions’ a programme on Radio 3 in which generally erudite people talk to Michael Berkeley about their favourite pieces of music. It’s a bit like an upmarket version of Desert Island Discs, but without the restrictions on numbers of pieces, and they actually play the whole piece rather than snippets.

So when Mr. Bsag was looking at the Radio Times yesterday and said, “Anna Nicole Smith is on Private Passions tomorrow”, I did a bit of a mental double-take.

Me: Anna Nicole Smith? She of the surgical enhancement and the ancient, super-rich late husband? Mr. B. (rolling eyes and enunciating clearly): No. Alexander McCall Smith.

Ah, OK. The world makes sense again.

I love discovering obscure words that are new to me. The following word arrived via an article about Proust that a reader of this blog sent me:

abecedarian: (adjective) 1 arranged alphabetically : in abecedarian sequence. 2 rudimentary; elementary : abecedarian technology. noun a person who is just learning; a novice. ORIGIN mid 17th cent.: from late Latin abecedarius ‘alphabetical’ (from the names of the letters a, b, c, d).

It’s a great replacement for ‘newbie’, though somewhat harder to spell.

In homage to Douglas Adams’ and John Lloyd’s excellent The Deeper Meaning of Liff:

dorking (verb trans.): the practice of expressing the curious and contradictory mixture of irritation, secret pride and frustration felt by a geek when a Google search for some vital piece of information leads to his/her own blog post on a superficially related topic. Tends to provoke thoughts similar to “if I already knew the answer, I wouldn’t be Googling for it, now would I?”

I blame it on being very busy at both work and home recently, but lately I’ve been waking at 2 or 3 am most mornings, having just come out of a dream about getting an angry email from a colleague or from a reader of this blog, lambasting me for something or other. In a sleepy, confused state, I know very well that it was just a dream, but for some reason I can’t shake off the feeling that should go and check my email on the computer, as if I’ve got an IMAP connection on a secret dream port, and might have actually divined the content of a genuine email in my sleep. Ridiculous. But I lie awake for half an hour or so, telling myself that I’m being a complete muppet, and trying to resist the urge to lift the lid of my PowerBook.

Of course, in the morning, it’s instantly obvious to me that it was all ludicrous, and I was worrying about nothing. I think that it’s a good indication that I should never try to make an important decision at about 3 am, because my ability to distinguish reality from fiction is obviously seriously impaired at that hour. It’s lucky that I don’t have to do night shifts.

There was an excellent quote on Hyperdrive last night, which might well become my favoured expression of mindless enthusiasm: “Set lasers to patriotic”. I like it despite the fact that I’m not in the least patriotic.