Saddle sore

Well I suppose I should get back to this blogging lark. Trouble is, over the past couple of weeks, there's been a decided shortage of blog fodder and, perhaps more important, enthusiasm. My urge to commit thoughts to the ether tends to come in waves, with an amplitude of about - well - two weeks. I can tune to a different frequency if there's a lot of material about, or if something spurs me to a rant, but otherwise I'll just let it drift.

My main sources of inspiration haven't been of much help during the most recent hiatus. The Large Decorating Project is at the preparation stage, and as it is... Large... this stage is taking a long time. And, being preparation, it doesn't lend itself to much in the way of excitement, visible progress, or anything much worth writing about. My small (but dedicated!) audience wouldn't thank me, I'm sure, for endless posts about sanding, filling, more sanding, priming, and the long and tedious task (which occupied several hours this last weekend) of cleaning the plaster, PVA, and primer splashes off the floor. A task which, with the current state of my knees, I can only attack in sessions of about two hours at a time.

The Main Writing Project is still stalled, waiting for one of my many queries to bear fruit. It's probably about time to send out a fresh crop, and also long past time to pick up another project, but distractions and displacement activities have had the upper hand for months and the notional "garret studio" is starting to look rather cobwebby and abandoned.

Such distractions as there have been, have proved very entertaining. With my birthday imminent, Nikki presented me with the Collector's Edition BluRay disk of Avatar yesterday, which we sat down all together to watch during the afternoon - all 170 extended minutes of it. Fabulous. Saturday night saw us in town (an extremely rare occurrence) to celebrate a friend's birthday in the beautifully salubrious setting of The English Lounge. A perfect choice for a relaxing few pints in the company of friends, some of whom we haven't seen for way too long, and catch up with news.

It's a slight overstatement to say that the past two weeks have been entirely devoid of bloggable stuff, and indeed notes have been taken for future posts which might be coming your way over the next few days, but in the main it is all sanding, filling and painting for the foreseeable, so if you were waiting for nuggets you'll have to wait a while longer I'm afraid. And what's more my enthusiasm for anything in particular is likely to take a hard knock tomorrow, when for the first time in I don't know how long I'll be taking the early road to Slough (a 5am start is traditional, to be sure of getting into the office by about 9) to help out with testing on our current project. I've been lucky this last year or so, to avoid travel. After several years of making the Slough journey up to 3 times a week, followed by a couple of years taking the train to Croydon, I've somehow managed to wangle an entire year of working at home. But as there's no remote access to the test rigs, and there are small pockets of the current system that only I know anything about, my presence has been demanded and I must answer the call. Doesn't mean I have to like it.