the year in which I learnt things I didn't know I needed to learn...

it has been an odd year - some highs, lots of lows - I won't be sorry to see it end.

it's been a year where I've had a lot of things thrown sharply into focus, particularly in regard to areas of my life I thought I'd dealt with and lessons I assumed I'd already learnt. The main things are:

1) I need to stop being too self-reliant, both in my professional and personal life. I have amazing friends and if I don't go to them when I need to, I'm belittling my relationship with them. I've learnt the hard way over the past couple of months that asking for help in a work environment is not a bad thing either - I need to make sure I do that more.

2) I still have a lot of body issues. I have a negative loop that runs like this: I am anxious - I am fat - I am anxious - I am fat. The loop can start at either of the points and circle from there. I'm much better than I used to be (I no longer act on the emotion), but I still have a way to go.

3) I need to spend time on my mental health. If I ignore it when I'm in a good place, I don't realise when it gets bad. This is a thing I thought I'd learnt already but 2009 has shown me that it's still a work in progress.

4) I have no work/life balance. I generally love my work, spend my time doing what I'm great at, and focusing on it energises me. When I do work that I don't have a natural affinity for (and therefore don't enjoy), it drains me completely. Implementation projects fit in the latter category and I should not do them.

5) Contrary to popular belief, I'm quite an introvert. I enjoy spending time on my own, in my own space and not communicating with the outside world. When things get tough or stressful I use my own, safe world as a place to hide. I need to recognise this as there are times when I need to push myself to be more sociable and make connections with other people. That can be quite scary sometimes and the more time I spend on my own, the scarier the outside world seems.

I'm looking forward to next year. The things I've learnt along the way will stand me in good stead (If I can remember them...).

fangirl woot...

... just read on AFP's blog that she and himself will be doing signings of the "Who Killed Amanda Palmer?" book at the Union Chapel gig in September, for which I have tickets!

a long day...

...arrive safely in San Francisco after a very long day and many, many security checks (I got nabbed 3 times in Heathrow and had to not only unpack all my handluggage, but also turn on and then remove the battery from every piece of tech I had on me...).

after getting to hotel, I showered and changed, and headed out. First to Bluebottle Cafe courtesy of Ms Persky, where I met a couple of cool people - one cute and the other with a consultant friend in Chicago! I then had dinner down in SOMA and wandered back.

I'm pretty much ready to crash right now as I think that I've now been up for over 22 hours and my body has decided that enough is enough.

tomorrow I've got the day to myself and then going to a baseball game in the evening as part of the wedding celebrations.

more updates when I have a brain.

a scientific experiment to prove the existence of L-Space

... well, quasi-scientific, anyway!

my landlord announced yesterday that he was in London and that he'd be coming the flat on Wednesday. Queue panic and lots of 'oh my god, I have to sort out the spare room and make the place look like it's tidy, but not just tidied - as in , I live like this all the time'. I've had the door to the spare room closed for about two months and in my head it was six foot high with crap... I went in last night and found that it wasn't actually that bad, and after an hour or two, it was pretty much done.

next on the list of things to do was to fix the fact that there were 11 boxes of books taking up most of the hallway (the ones from my Grandma - all very exciting). I'd had a plan to go through each box, catalogue them, and then rearrange my entire collection. This obviously wasn't going to be finished by first thing tomorrow so I decided on a quick fix. I rearranged the bookshelves in the library to get maximum bookage (the one big shelf that doesn't have a back is now positioned to be able to put books on both sides!) and then started just putting books on shelves wherever they would fit.

then something strange happened. All my books fit. There is even SPARE space. This shouldn't happen. As Nanila pointed out to me a while ago, there is a natural law which states that there are always more books than shelf space. I then figured out what had happened.

when my books aren't organised, they take up less space than when sorted by category, alphabetically. Over the next couple of weeks I shall now prove this by sorting out my books properly. When they don't fit on the shelves, I will have proven for the first time, that L-Space is blocked by organisation!

must go now - need to call Swiral back and find out about halloween costumes for pets...

the day started off so well...

...had a lovely lie-in this morning and got up at about 9.30. Did various bits of tidying in the flat and some work - all was good. Then the inevitable happened (well, it's been inevitable for the past 2 months or so) I started looking at my books and realising how many of them aren't in my spreadsheet. I'm now about half way through putting all the missing ones into the spreadsheet. This is the First Stage of sorting books... the madness has begun.

I also realise that I don't own enough bookshelves...

something had to give...

...I've officially made the decision to pull out of the second-year course I was enrolled in through OU. It's a shame, as it was really interesting, but I had a deadline for my course coincide with a deadline for work, and work won. I may still continue with the first-year course (although it's incredibly dull), will need to decide in the next couple of weeks.

I'm not beating myself up about it though - but if I try and study whilst working again, I'll have to recognise that I go through periods of having to do 14-hour days semi-regularly, and so I'll try to do more work at the start of the course than necessary to give myself some flexibility.

In other (old) news, this is such a great April Fool's from a couple of years ago. Love it!

the benefits of an iced mocha...

... it can hold as many shots of espresso as you need. My one this evening had four shots and has done the job of keeping me awake through the work I've had to do quite well! Reckon I have about another half hour of work left tonight and then home. Will have to do about the same tomorrow and then report will pretty much be done (which is good, as the deadline is close of play Wed, so just enough time to do lots of proofing!).

had a lovely weekend away for Jane's 30th - an amazing house on an island in Essex which you can only get to at low tide. I'd definitely recommend and am thinking of excuses to get a group of people together to go there for a weekend in June. The house sleeps 10 so if anyone fancies, let me know!

anyway - back to work now and then home to bed. Think I may try and do a cycle or swim in the morning to counter the long-day-sitting-at-desk thing.