"The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise Wisden and instruction."[1]

Last night I got home very, very tired and was in bed at 12.30, which for me is almost unheard of. I’d been to the pub after work and had a few pints with pax_draconis. jfs showed up very briefly before going back to Ilford to provide moral support to westernind in her continuing struggle with evil property developer^tm at a planning meeting of the Borough Council. Hopefully that went well; maybe we’ll get the skinny on that when jfs comes along to the athenaeum club tonight for the games session.

We briefly discussed the latest arrangements for NWO, and agreed a couple of contingencies should certain potential players fail to respond to invites. We also looked at ways of accommodating other character needs in line with player availability; we’re a little less convinced of the reasons we’re doing that, but let it not be said that we do not at least try to accommodate everyone!

I fear that I am losing my tolerance for beer. I am rather hoping that it has more to do with the hot weather than anything else. Unlike when I was in my twenties, when I would go out four or five times a week, these days I can go weeks without visiting a pub, certainly in the summer. In the winter, of course, we have the quiz league, so Tuesday nights are beer night, but it is rare that I drink more than four pints, and almost never more than five, even at my thirstiest (I have never been able to process huge quantities of liquid, and I no longer touch spirits).

Whatever the cause, for the second week in succession, I found myself in a pub after work, and returning home feeling – and my powers of description fail me here - bleh.

The upshot of going to bed comparatively early, was that I woke up at five this morning, but managed to force myself back to sleep for a couple of hours. What’s the point of turning in early if you get no extra rest?

In the meantime, I have discovered another disadvantage of working in a steel and glass building. I have a portable radio here at the moment, complete with earphone (one of those old fashioned earplug stylee earphones that you shove in one ear and get glorious mono. Sadly, I can barely get a signal on medium wave, and Radio 5 Live does not transmit on FM. This means that my enjoyment of the third Ashes Test is limited to keeping track of the score on a pop-up on my PC, which fails to update automatically as it is supposed to, on account of the arthritic behaviour of the server today. I strongly suspect that someone somewhere is downloading the entirety of the Encyclopaedia Britannica or maybe using the network printers to create multiple copies of the unabridged Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

I am tempted to look into the prospects of acquiring a cheap digital radio at lunchtime, but I suspect that the words cheap, digital and radio do not sit easily in the same sentence when arranged consecutively. We shall see. A colleague of mine opines that they work best by a window (as do I), so it might be a pointless endeavour anyway.

As I have to go to the bank and pay over my monthly tribute to the Great God Barclaycard (one of the more awesome and terrible of the credit deities), I may well investigate the mysteries of digital radio anyway.

It gets me out of the office.

To mark this entry precisely in time, England are 93-1 as I type. That remarkable bell-end, Strauss being the wicket to fall for a mighty six runs. Will he still be an opener in the fourth test? I hope not, unless he does something clever in the second innings.

Must awa’. More later, perhaps.

Edit Typing in word and then cutting and pasting into LJ really scews the LJ Tags over.

¹Proverbs 1:7; the cricketing edition.

"The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise Wisden and instruction."[1]

Last night I got home very, very tired and was in bed at 12.30, which for me is almost unheard of. I’d been to the pub after work and had a few pints with pax_draconis. jfs showed up very briefly before going back to Ilford to provide moral support to westernind in her continuing struggle with evil property developer^tm at a planning meeting of the Borough Council. Hopefully that went well; maybe we’ll get the skinny on that when jfs comes along to the athenaeum club tonight for the games session.

We briefly discussed the latest arrangements for NWO, and agreed a couple of contingencies should certain potential players fail to respond to invites. We also looked at ways of accommodating other character needs in line with player availability; we’re a little less convinced of the reasons we’re doing that, but let it not be said that we do not at least try to accommodate everyone!

I fear that I am losing my tolerance for beer. I am rather hoping that it has more to do with the hot weather than anything else. Unlike when I was in my twenties, when I would go out four or five times a week, these days I can go weeks without visiting a pub, certainly in the summer. In the winter, of course, we have the quiz league, so Tuesday nights are beer night, but it is rare that I drink more than four pints, and almost never more than five, even at my thirstiest (I have never been able to process huge quantities of liquid, and I no longer touch spirits).

Whatever the cause, for the second week in succession, I found myself in a pub after work, and returning home feeling – and my powers of description fail me here - bleh.

The upshot of going to bed comparatively early, was that I woke up at five this morning, but managed to force myself back to sleep for a couple of hours. What’s the point of turning in early if you get no extra rest?

In the meantime, I have discovered another disadvantage of working in a steel and glass building. I have a portable radio here at the moment, complete with earphone (one of those old fashioned earplug stylee earphones that you shove in one ear and get glorious mono. Sadly, I can barely get a signal on medium wave, and Radio 5 Live does not transmit on FM. This means that my enjoyment of the third Ashes Test is limited to keeping track of the score on a pop-up on my PC, which fails to update automatically as it is supposed to, on account of the arthritic behaviour of the server today. I strongly suspect that someone somewhere is downloading the entirety of the Encyclopaedia Britannica or maybe using the network printers to create multiple copies of the unabridged Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

I am tempted to look into the prospects of acquiring a cheap digital radio at lunchtime, but I suspect that the words cheap, digital and radio do not sit easily in the same sentence when arranged consecutively. We shall see. A colleague of mine opines that they work best by a window (as do I), so it might be a pointless endeavour anyway.

As I have to go to the bank and pay over my monthly tribute to the Great God Barclaycard (one of the more awesome and terrible of the credit deities), I may well investigate the mysteries of digital radio anyway.

It gets me out of the office.

To mark this entry precisely in time, England are 93-1 as I type. That remarkable bell-end, Strauss being the wicket to fall for a mighty six runs. Will he still be an opener in the fourth test? I hope not, unless he does something clever in the second innings.

Must awa’. More later, perhaps.

Edit Typing in word and then cutting and pasting into LJ really scews the LJ Tags over.

¹Proverbs 1:7; the cricketing edition.