Silver Lining

Sissy came to stay, bringing the nibling with her!  Hurrah! 

It's the first time I've spent a significant amount of time with a baby who isn't my own; where I don't have to get up in the night to feed and change nappies; or change nappies at any time of day.  It could catch on, I have to say!  Sissy must be encouraged to breed more!

The nibling is a love, of course.  Nearly the sweetest baby that ever there was in the whole world, ever.  If I hadn't had any of my own, he would hold the undisputed crown.  Even Dan and Daisy loved him.

We went to a farm park, where mostly the nibling screamed.  To be fair, it isn't the very best farm park in the world.  And he had a belly ache, as it turns out.  A combination sufficient to make the most laid back amongst us scream, you have to admit.  Dan and Daisy thought it was pretty cool, though.  Dan lay in a long line of children on the damp grass, and a European Eagle Owl swooped low over his head; low enough to ruffle the curls.  I thought that was pretty cool, too.  They both panned for 'gold', but were forced out of the medal line when I spotted them bickering and jostling the other miner 49ers.

I finished the Easter quilt - it is truly beautiful.  I suppose I should add some photos to somewhere....Ok, here it is.  Oh, and I made me a website, too :-)

It was good to share some time with Sissy.  We haven't spent a significant chunk of time just the two of us in ages.  It's nice to be around someone you don't have to explain stuff too, and you can just relax.  And she has even worse wind than I do, too, which is always good!

Ack.  There are special circles of hell designed for people who believe they can make Apple stuff work on Windows platforms.  Ack.

Not sure what's happened to this week; the data warehouse is growing.  It's a bit like watching a baby take its first steps.  I've spent today in London at a User Group - my name's Silver and I'm a data monkey.

No kids this week, which means late nights working.  That's what they mean by work/life balance, isn't it??

Still, Prime Suspect excellent; Torchwood slightly disappointing.  Who says I'm out of touch with reality???

Night...

My stepsister has quit her shitty London teaching job, and gone travelling around Latin America.  She sends round robin emails home, but before she left made us all sign up to WAYN.com (or possibly .co.uk, I dunno) which is some bizarre little website that lets you plan trips abroad and send round robin emails when you get there.

WAYN keep sending me lists of people planning to visit my home location.  So now I have an inbox full of lists of 19 year old people planning to come to Warwickshire to study.  I KNOW, ALREADY!  LEAVE ME ALONE!  Somebody make it stop...

 

I have added a kitten to the domestic mix.  Smudge.  He turned out to be a she, so the neutering will be more expensive than I might have liked - but even more essential.  Though Daisy has plans to the contrary... "If Smudge has babies, there can be one for Dan, one for Moo and one for me!"...  So that's a massive maternal vote for the neutering, then.

Smudge's role in life is twofold.  Primarily, she is for keeping down the rats that everyone tells me will live under the decking.  I have a lot of decking.  Secondarily, she is for giving Jip some grief.  Jip is only marginally convinced Smudge isn't dinner.  Smudge isn't at all convinced Jip isn't dinner.  In fact, so convinced is Smudge that Jip and dinner are somehow linked, that she defies the conventional wisdom that cats are picky eaters, and steals Jip's dinner. This is funny.  Jip is a dog with an attitude problem.  In brief, cross her and she bites.  Hard.  Jip is one bite (of me) away from a one way trip to the vet's.  The vet agrees.  That is how much of an attitude problem Jip has.  Yet you could almost swear she's afraid of this small, grey and white bundle of 6 week old mischief.  Smudge will fearlessly put her tiny, crushable head alongside Jip's in Jip's bowl, and steal the tastiest morsels of food.  And Jip's lips go back and she snarls and snickers and snaps, but Smudge carries on regardless.  If Jip's teeth get too close to Smudge's head for comfort, Smudge removes herself from the foodbowl, walks round the back of the dog, wraps herself round Jip's back leg and chews on her hock.  It's a very effective lesson, and I wonder why I didn't think of it first!

A Friday 13th disaster at work, involving messed around joins in an Access query resulting in reports excluding about 60% of their subject meant that I had a thoroughly stressed and sleepless night on Friday, and spent Saturday in the office fixing the problem (I hope).  Which means I'm slightly anticipatory about going into work, tomorrow.  The big cheeses may be unhappy.  I hope I've done enough to put it right, but we will see, I guess... 

I discovered last night that the husband of a dear friend died suddenly last week.  His funeral was yesterday, and I knew nothing about it.  It has been a weepy day.

I'm stalled at work, too.  I seem to have grasped the logic of the Data Warehouse project, without having retained any of the technical know-how.  I am struggling to build basic blocks of my D-Cubes, and can't even remember how to define parent/child relationships in a D-List.  Not helped by the fact that I left my training manual at home.... the tribulations of working in both home and office!

Lovely boss made her first foray into work from maternity leave today, so the professional regime is a-changing.  Didn't stop them turning down my request for a holiday, though...

I brought my recalcitrant D-Links home to work on; I have queried the student records database through an ODBC link, so I know I have the correct dataset - but how to set it up correctly?  And am I re-inventing the wheel?  I want the warehouse to map the relationship between courses and departments; but the student records database already does that.  Why am I worrying about remembering parent and child rules?

Because tomorrow I have to spend time with the tech who has been assigned to me.  They can't like the poor guy very much, to want to try his patience like that!  It's about time I pulled my weight on this project by doing more than refining the spec. of it... frankly.

Mum gave me a Victorian dolls' dinner service at the weekend.  I looked it up on the interweb.  Turns out it's quite special.  Now I need to find something in which to display it.  Favourite online furniture shopping sites, anyone?

18.....6......9......14

18......6........niiiinnnne......14

My remote desktop connection has frozen, and I'm in the middle of inputting enrolment numbers.

18, 6, 9, 14

Today, we had 4 cohorts of 2+2 students; students who study two years in a college in their community, and join us for the second year of their degree programme.  If I had a penny for every woman who sat at a PC today and said "I can't use a computer.  I've spent the last 10 years being a Mum...".  Now, I know what they meant, don't get me wrong. But I've spent the last 17 years being a Mum, and I don't see that it's a particular obstacle to using computers.

18, 6, 9, 14.

Except, of course, when the kids are playing rambunctious games with the kitten while I'm trying to work out continuation rates for the forward projection of student populations in the 5 year plan.

Eighteen.

Six.

Nine.

Fourteen.

Bugger.  Connection timed out.  And I had to change my password the other day, because a colleague read it over my shoulder while I was typing it (supposedly an IT liaison colleague, too, so should have bloody known better!).  The new one is fiendishly difficult to remember.

EIGHTeen.   6.  9.  FOURteen.

It won't let me back in.... I wonder if the whole interweb is broken.  If only I hadn't had to spend so long today being a Mum, then I'd have done this earlier.

18 sixnine 14

Bought some fab clothes while Mumming, though.  So I'll look good tomorrow, while demonstrating my computer illiteracy, at least.

8teen  six 9  fourteen

I wonder what would happen if I clicked 'open saved connection'.  Does the connection autosave?

186914

The remote connection has timed out.  Please try again later.

Bugger.

searching

One of the things I love about Statcounter is that it tells me what search terms people have used to stumble across this site.  Here are a few of the searches that led some of the last 100 visitors here:

(from Germany) "blog shirt tits"
(from USA) "KIDS WHO WANT TO BE BREASTFED AT AGE TEN PICTURE"
(from Germany) "empty tits"
(from USA) "small tits in sports bra"
(from USA) "tits tits tits" (indeed!)
(from Canada) "MY TITS"
(from USA) "how to paint a front door"  (lord.  They must have been disappointed!  Sorry, folks!)
(from USA) "my tits"
(from USA) "how are my tits"
(from USA) "Tits Tits Tits"
(from UK) "tits tits tits"

It makes you wonder, doesn't it?
Am I obsessed with my tits?  Do I mention them *so* often?  (if you're new here, I should probably explain that the answer is no.  I did one post about bras here.  And that's it!)
Or is t' interweb so short on proper titty sites that this is in the top ten returns if you search for tits?

Ah well, tits to the lot of you today, then!

Incidentally, it's damn cold here this morning, but all things considered I think it's probably best if we steer clear of that topic in this post, don't you?

In which the goddess of geek is clueless

When I was at Mum's the other week, I noticed that my spoddy show-off brother <smiles and waves at C> had given them Mozilla Thunderbird as their email client. Nothing particularly remarkable, I thought.  I've been happily married to Eudora for years.

And then I noticed that Thunderbird has an RSS reader.

Well, that was it.  I was wooed, bedded, and divorced from my ex-beloved Eudora in less than a trice.  Narry a nano-trice.  It was old.  It was sad.  It was *so* last century.

So I've had Thunderbird for a week or so now.  And I loves it, preciousssss.  It is this: aces!

But here's a thing.  Sometimes, I click on my main email account (for yes, I am a geek and yes, I have several), and it goes all shimmy shimmy searchy search and a little alert pops up and says "you have 3 new messages".  So I click on download messages, and off it goes.... shimmy shimmy searchy search.  Downloading messages from the server...........message 1..........message 2.......... message 3.   And then nothing.  Nothing appears in my inbox.  Nothing works its way through my sophisticated system of mail filters to appear in any of my other trays, either.  Just nothing.

So I click on download messages again, and off it goes......shimmy shimmy searchy search....... there are no new messages on the server.

How does that work then?  There *were* 3 and now there are none?  And the 3 that there were have just disappeared into hyperspace and you'll never know if they were swoony love messages from Jude Law dying to meet you for a coffee in Harvey Nicks, or demands from Egg for some payment *now*, please. What?  Where did they go? 

I mean, the RSS thing is great and everything (only more of you need to RSS your blogs, please).  But I want my mystery emails back!

Oh, and if you see Jude Law looking disconsolate and alone over a latte in Harvey Nicks, tell him I'll be along in a trice.  Will you?  Please?

The goddess of geek strikes again!

I've just spent an hour trying to get my Palm to behave.  It synchronised beautifully at work, but for some reason I've been entering stuff into Outlook here, synchronising, and nothing happens.  Hmmm....

Still, one updated PocketMirror and a lot of fiddling about later, it works beautifully again!

Hurrah for me.

One of these days, I'll work out how to get it to talk to my phone....

And it's damn cold.  I've an hour to comb through the paper looking for jobs, and then it's running time.

Must be more structured.  Must use mornings for applications/homework for interviews etc.  Afternoons for running/DIY/gardening.  After school for kids' stuff. 

Sounds good, doesn't it?!!

Red Nose Boogie

Mike, at Troubled Diva, is hosting a Red Nose Day disco.  Follow the link, and join in why don't you? I've suggested Tub Thumping by Chumbawumba as a suitably bouncy ditty.  But mostly cos my first ten ideas had already been taken, and then I went cross-eyed.

Well!

That was traumatic!  And cold!  And here I am, still in my pyjamas on a Saturday!  Oh, the scandal...

I think I've finished unpacking boxes and moving stuff in.  All the old posts are here, some new pictures, a different layout, similar colour scheme - hope you recognise the place!  I have left some posts out, though...

So, what brought all that on??  Well, Sitemeter last night showed me that I'd been read, extensively, by an IP address who had found the old site by searching on yet another online identity I have.  PH has a history of cyberstalking me, and while the chances are still *fairly* remote that it was him, whoever it was had used two computers (different IP addresses, same search terms, same search engine) and had gone to some lengths to hide their identity. 

So I figured that it was sensible to completely divorce the blog from all other usernames.  Which I think I have done, now.  New email address, new links, new everything.  I'm happy to take the risk that he stumbles across this site too.  It's anonymous, now - insofar as if you don't know me, you won't be able to work out who I am from here.  But not if it's linked to that particular username, it isn't.

Anyhoo, this host is much more comprehensive than the last - so it should be!  I'm paying for it!  I can continue to tinker around with my design ideas if I want to - though might do that completely separately again.

Note to self: must put the make poverty history banner back... hmmm... that could be difficult!

Just to bolster my sense of techie mastery.  Ok, geekgirl, if you insist.  I managed to instal the printer onto the wireless network last night, too!!  Hurrah for me!  So now Moo can print documents from her laptop, anywhere in the house.  The only slight problem is that the printer is here, at my feet.  I'll take bets on how long it'll be before she causes my first heart attack!

Sissy should be coming today.  As might A, who is ill *again* - every weekend!  I could get quite a complex - and told him so...  Ho hum.  So I suppose I really ought to go and get dressed!  Or go running.  Or something.