Pages

I've been measuring progress on my thesis this week (and quite a few times in the past) based on the number of pages I do in a day. This may or may not be a good thing, as often as it comes to tidying things up and making small corrections the increase is quite small. Still, I've added about two pages to the thesis today, and made some alterations to some tables of results which needed doing, and while I feel pretty tired now I also feel pretty happy with what I've done today.

I lost six squash games in a row yesterday (the first three were enough to lose the match and keep me on sixteenth place in the ladder; the second three were just for practice), and then played football. Five-a-side felt great, just awesome to be playing again. I was really, really stiff by the end of yesterday evening, but felt quite good this morning. It's 4:30 in the afternoon now, and I'm starting to flag a bit...

I've just seen this news story and I'm amazed: the sheer pedantry, box-ticking, political-correctness-gone-mad-ness of it just blows me away.

So this evening I'm going to relax, kick back and play some Darwinia, which my officemates got me for my birthday. I'm hoping to read a couple of chapters of "Tales of the Dying Earth" (which I postponed reading before Christmas) too, and then tomorrow I have to finish this chapter I'm working on (was hoping to do it today but my mental energy is just gone) and then start another one. Woohoo!

Oh, and on my way home I am booking tickets to go and see this!

And in closing, because I was going to just do a Wordless Wednesday but didn't see this picture of Iron Man until I went and looked back on Empire; Iron Man is in the running for this year's second best superhero film.

That Friday Feeling

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Since when did the "Friday Feeling" become "meh"?

Maybe I just need to get out more, but I can remember when I used to really look forward to the weekend. Lately, as tiring and stressful as work can be I get to the weekend and think "What am I going to do?" or more usually, "What am I going to do to fill the time well?"

I have a kind of obsession lately with making good use of my time, which is probably why I spend so much time on Facebook or trawling through the archives of various webcomics or blogs. Some things that I am thinking about doing this weekend include: continuing to read the Amazing Spider-Man omnibus that I got a few weeks back; sketching out some ideas for future blog posts; thinking about some maths stuff; visiting Manchester; reading Altered Carbon; painting.

I haven't painted for a long time, I have this thing about not wanting to start something until I know what it is that I'm going to be doing. Does that make sense? For example, I want to be able to see the full painting in my mind's eye before I pick up the brush, even if (and really, there's no if about it) the reality is that I am not as good a painter as I would like to be. Similarly in maths, I don't like to try showing something unless I have some idea (usually a gut feeling) that it is true.

But anyway, I've got off topic. It used to be that the Friday feeling was this "Yes! I'm away from work for a few days!" sensation, but lately it's become this "Well, I'll be back in the office on Monday so what's the point?" feeling. I don't know when it changed or what it means, but there we go.

Actually, having typed all that I feel a bit more positive about the weekend, as if writing about the possibilities for what I could do have already made Saturday and Sunday feel like a more worthwhile proposition.

Blogging: informative and therapeutic.