Category: Journal

Work has been crazy over the last week, really crazy. After ending up with stress about three years ago (it’s true, you don’t even know you have it) from the amount of work I was doing (designing, coding and running 17 websites at the same time, singlehandedly), I promised myself I’d watch out for it happening again.

Since then I’ve been pretty careful, whenever things were starting to get too much I’d get a grip and take a step back from it. Work is work, but it is never worth losing your health over (Are you reading this Jess Unwin?).

The strange thing is, as mad as things are at the moment, with looming deadlines, I appear to be getting a kick out of it. Don’t know why – I have a whole load of stuff to be finished by the end of the week and it will be seat of the pants stuff to get it finished on time. But at the same time, I’m doing some great stuff – I’m looking at a hundred lines of code or more that I’ve churned out two days before and I’m thinking “Hey – that was clever, passing that to a function there so I can re-use it… well done!”, yet at the time I don’t remember making conscious decisions to plan ahead like that.

I think I’m in the zone. Oh yes, that’s what it is. You know when you’re there, and you don’t think too much about it because you might snap out of it. But it’s a great feeling – you’re flying along and everything is clicking. Most of the time it happens on the pool table down the pub – you can own the table for the whole night, pulling off everything you try. Then the following week you’re back to shanking the cue ball into some bikers’ pint!

I’m going to love it while it lasts – if I make the deadlines and get the job done I don’t mind being mortal again next week. For now, I’m in the zone!

There. I’ve said it. Four days I’ve had a sore throat now, and I haven’t enjoyed one moment of it. When I was little I’d get to stay at home, wrapped up in a blanket on the sofa watching terrible daytime TV. No matter how crap the TV was or how ill I was, I would secretly revel in the fact that I was at home, seeing life that would normally go by while I was stuck in a class room.

Then at around six pm my mother would come home from the various jobs she seemed to have when I was little, always with a bottle of Lucosade or Fergusade (?) for me. That was the hallmark of being ill for me. Well, it was the hallmark of having my mother convinced anyway – I noticed she wouldn’t turn up with any if she had any doubt about the reality of my illness. If I was lucky and ill enough, she’d present me with one of the orange bottles that went sticky the second you removed the cap. You didn’t even have to pour any before your hand would be glued to the bottle and the see through orange wrapper that surrounded the bottles in those days.

I haven’t had any Lucosade or similar in ages – maybe that’s why it’s taken longer to shake off this sore throat/cough combination that looks like it’s going to get worse before it gets better. Or maybe it’s not the lack of the sickly fizzy potion. Maybe it’s because I went to work instead of staying at home on the sofa wrapped in a blanket watching terrible daytime TV?

If I’m being honest, I have to admit that I didn’t have the best sickie record in my first 20 years on the planet. If I had so much as a runny nose I would turn it into full scale black death with some clever acting that would have made Ferris Beuller doff his cap. Now I seem to be a different animal – I’ll usually keep working in the hope that it goes away without too much worry, thinking that if I ignore it it might just go away.

Anyway – I’m trying my best to do just that, by surfing the good web developers pages and converting this site to XHTML. Hopefully the distractions will work – I never have liked lemsip and having had a grand total of four in two days I’ve realised I’m never likely to endorse it either. Yeauch!

You know that they never made a Carry on Moving, right? Well I have an entire script based on the events of the last week. The moving firm chosen to transport our furniture the four hour (for a removal van) drive from London to Liverpool took six days to do it. They couldn’t even narrow it down to an exact day, no matter how many times they were called.

Add to this the fact that when they turned up they had made the most unexplainable pooch screw going, in forgetting the matress for our bed. This will be here on Saturday, we are promised. By that time it will have taken the matress nine days to take a four hour trip. The mind boggles.

Fortunately, everything else is going rather well – Wipeout Fusion launched in Europe this week and it’s been quite an exciting time at work. The best bit was the fact that I got a limited edition copy of the game, which is nice! Sadly I’ve been playing a pre-release version in the office, so I’ve completed quite a bit of it already. I’ll have to unpack over the weekend instead of playing it from the comfort of my new home, too. The best things come to those who wait… if the advertising is to be believed.

As Fridays go, this one started off great – we got a free preview screening of Monsters Inc. this morning and it’s a really great movie. Pixar just seem to get better and better – try and catch it if you can.