A year of Covid-19

A year ago today the WHO declared Covid-19 a global pandemic, we had just returned from Belgium and planned to go to Florida the following week for Mark's nephew's wedding but our travel plans were cancelled (obviously). At the time it was exciting but abstract, the actual threat didn't seem real, and I suppose we thought it would be like our SARs experience in Singapore and that life would largely go on as usual, and it would all blow over in a few months. 

Now, a year later I'm wondering if we'll every fully return to normal. We've been extremely fortunate throughout this, but it's still been hard. I'm so ready to get back into the world, but know it's likely to feel strange, and scary. I've had my first vaccination (Astra Zeneca) and have the 2nd scheduled for early April. Mark hasn't had his yet (hopefully he'll get a call this month), and we will feel much better 14 days post his first vaccination. I hope we'll be able to travel this summer! It's nice here, but it feels like a tease having the rest of Europe on our doorstep but not being able to go there. 

We've taken lock-down very seriously and haven't gone anywhere in months (including grocery stores - deliveries and click and collect almost exclusively). I miss restaurants/pubs, but, I've definitely become a better cook this year. I was an okay cook pre-pandemic, but as we haven't even had take away in months I've become more adventurous and tried more laborious recipes that I would have previously not felt I had time for. Can't use that excuse now :^)! This month we're having a 'meat-free' March, if only to do something different. It's going well, and I don't think either of us have missed meat as much as we thought we would (but still 20 days to go). Vegan would be hard though, don't think we're ready to give up eggs or milk anytime soon. 

In other news, I finish my current job in two weeks and start a new job in April. The new role is better paying and a permanent position, and hopefully a role I'll enjoy. It's taken 4 years to get back to a position and wage that feels more commiserate with my work experience - the real downside of having to start over again (at least partly) every time we move. 

Sick puppy

Hamish celebrated his ~11th birthday last Sunday. We spoiled him all week beforehand, making him better meals than usual (which is saying something because I cook for him anyway). On the actual day we took him on a long walk to Fen Ditton and gave him a lamb casserole dinner. He was smiley all day and seemed to be loving life. 

The next day however, he was very, very unwell. I woke up before 5am to the noise of Mark escorting Hamish outside after he'd already vomited repeatedly in the house. I was initially worried he might have an abdominal blockage because he ate an entire beef rib on Saturday (it was thinly cut, but I would normally not allow him to have the whole thing in one sitting and he ate the thing in less than 3 minutes so couldn't have chewed it much). I made an emergency vet appt for him and he spent the next 36 hours at the vet having blood tests and x-rays to try to figure out what was making him so unwell. Luckily he didn't have a blockage, and didn't require surgery, but his liver enzymes were elevated, and he was clearly very unwell. Best guess is that he ate something that made him unwell (he eats random crap when we go out on walkies so who knows what it was). The whole situation was incredibly upsetting and I spent most of Monday ugly crying in between work calls. 

He's home now and seems to be improving but he's still very picky about what he eats, which is not normal for our boy (he's a pig). The vet sent him home with sensitive stomach canned food, but he won't touch it so I've been making chicken rice for him. He's eating the chicken and keeping it down, which is reassuring. Day by day he seems to be improving and slowly getting back to his normal self. 

Long way to say it's been a stressful week, but things seem to be mostly okay now. 

Springwatch aka things we love about the UK

One of the things we love the most about living in the UK is the national love of nature, including birdwatching. When we lived in Australia, a nation full of parrots and other amazing wildlife, we were gently ridiculed for being 'twitchers' and didn't know many people who shared our enthusiasm. Here everyone we know is a bird watcher. It's a national obsession - Britons spend more money (per population) on bird feed than any other nation. There is also a quarterly BBC TV program to celebrate British wildlife (especially birds) called Springwatch (Winterwatch, Summerwatch, Autumnwatch) that runs for a few weeks every season. The show is an hour of footage from hidden cameras into nests and woodlands. It's fab and one of the primary reasons we're very happy to pay our TV license fee. Australia needs a Springwatch. 

Four Years Already

As of 18 January we've lived in Cambridge for four years! It's incredible that it's gone so fast. 

Even with the awfulness of the pandemic, and acknowledging that Melbourne might be a better/safer place to be right now,  we're both happy we made the move. England is interesting, and while we loved and still love Melbourne, we were in a bit of rut and it's been good to shake things up again. 

Speaking of which, I have a new job offer. I won't say too much about it until it's official, but it's been interesting proving my right to work when all our bills/bank correspondence are received electronically (like most people in this century). A friend of ours rightly pointed out that this difficulty is part of the Home Office Hostile Environment Policy to make it difficult for people without the legal right to remain in the UK. It also makes it difficult for those with the right to remain, but it would definitely make things nigh impossible if you weren't here legally (or being supported by someone who is). 

Onto other subjects - this time of year the (very short) days start getting longer dramatically and from here to March we gain 3 to 4+ minutes of light every day (compare this to Atlanta where the biggest change is an increase of 2 mins a day). It's quite dramatic and by the end of March it feels very much like the sky lights have been fully turned on. Of course in October/November you have the reverse and the feeling of the light being turned off  and being plunged into darkness for several months. In the dark of December all the Christmas lights/food/festivity feel very necessary (and much more connected to winter solstice than anything religious). I do enjoy a winter Christmas and this was something that I missed every year in Singapore and Melbourne. And it's great to be back to a country that enjoys Christmas music, and not just the same Michael Bublé songs every year . The primary reason I made an Xmas mix every year we were in Melbs is that Australia does not embrace Christmas music (and fair enough - the songs don't really work in summer), but that is definitely not the case in the UK. I may stop putting the mixes together - the only friends that seem particularly grateful for the mixes are our friends in Oz (unsurprisingly really).

The pic attached was taken on one of early morning walks - the sun is finally starting to rise before 8am and the sunrise was gorgeous this day. 

Christmas update

We are trying to enjoy the holiday season in spite of the pandemic, and are doing well enough. Our neighbours have definitely put up more Christmas lights/decorations this year which makes evening walkies more enjoyable. There are a few areas that are almost up to American levels of festive. 

And like every year, I've made another xmas music mix to share: 2020 Xmas mix

We're eating well too. No reason not to make multiple festive meals so we're having another turkey dinner this weekend and will do more baking. It's amazing we haven't gained weight but fast days are working for me, and Mark seems to get away with just running every once in a while. Hamish eats well too, but also gets 3 walks a day on average at the moment so.....

Nothing exciting to report. We're fine, but bored. Vaccines coming and we intend to shelter until we have it. It would be foolish to risk catching the virus now. 

I'm back bitches!

I forgot my password (and login) a long while back and then just didn't have any real interest in blogging. It now seems more and more necessary to quit facebook though, so I've spent the last 10 days in a security spiral with Google trying to get this account reopened as it was linked to my Australian (now defunct) phone number. 

Nothing much to blog about though - other than dystopian elections and pandemics. The UK is about to go back into a second national lockdown starting this Thursday. Hopefully there will be good news from the US by then. I fear for the world if the fascist is re-elected. 

Pandemic 2

Thought I would expand on the whole coping with the pandemic thing.  Plus, I'm pondering doing a move back here and dropping Facebook.  FB has given me contact with many long lost friends but they have been sh*tty lately about facilitating propaganda, and I just don't feel like I'm keeping a record of my life there.

We really we could be back in the US to help and support and hell, just see family.  But family members who are in the States can't do much to support each other these days anyway, so the times are what they are.

Our work situations settled really quickly -- Marjorie was already working from home for much of the time when the call to settle in place came down, and my company, while they had been resistant to the idea of people working from home during the previous year I've worked there, were able to adapt quickly to everyone WFH.  Since we do a massively multiplayer online game, business has been booming since the lockdown, and having everyone work from home hasn't been much of an impact at all.  I do miss working in our nice office, but working at home has its perks too.

Marjorie has taken over the upstairs bedroom that we converted into an office, and is on video conference calls much of the day, doing admin work for the NHS.  I'm downstairs at the dining room table, where I have my work MacBook (gah) and monitor set up, and spend a lot of time conference calling as well.  This lets me man the back door so Hamish can come and go as he pleases, between his morning and evening walks.  He doesn't quite get everything that's going on, but he's mostly happy to have us home.  He doesn't quite understand why we aren't going to the pub anymore though.

Thursday evenings at 8 pm is the Clap For Carers time, when everyone goes out and applauds for a few moments, then basically catches up with each other (from an appropriate distance).  Hamish thinks it's Clap For Hamish.  We let him come out with us without a lead, perhaps foolhardily, but the clapping probably scares off the cats, and he always just ends up sitting on the end of the driveway and sniffing the air.

Weekends we've been trying to do a bigger family outing.  We've gone through town a couple of times, once on bike and once with the dog on foot, but mostly stay confined to our village.

I have a new hobby!  I had dabbled in it before, but probably thanks to the lockdown, now it's serious.  I've started using my exercise outings to visit area cemeteries (we have a dozen or so easily reachable) to take pictures, which I then upload to findagrave.com and transcribe, for the benefit of genealogists and historians around the world.  I've done 217 graves as of now, and it feels like I'm just getting started.  It's a perfect mixture of intellectual and aesthetic stimulation for me -- the churchyards and cemeteries are historically interesting, but I think consistently beautiful as well.  The graves are of course poignant reminders of mortality, but I'm also learning so many random things about British history, and from the ground up.  There are historical records for some of these sites already, but they are grossly incomplete and spotty, and almost no pictures.  So it feels like any effort that's made helps.  So much of this history is just fading before our eyes, and I mean that literally -- many graves feel like they are on the brink of readability, and to record them now is to rescue them from obscurity!

Pandemic

Reading the memoirs of others is always best when they are talking about historical events that the author lived through.  The current coronavirus pandemic certainly seems to qualify, so here I am back blogging again.  (I also hope to be able to look back and remind myself what it was like, many years down the line.)

Marjorie and I have now been working from home for about six weeks, and are (for the most part) following social distancing guidelines laid down by the scientists (which is a much sounder way to go than the ones laid down by the government).  Local businesses are mostly shut down, except for groceries, food deliveries, and the post office.  Currently we're allowed an outing per day, for exercise, and as Hamish gets two walks a day, that means we walk him in shifts.  As I also want to go for runs, I grab him at the end of my runs for a cool down walk (he's too slow and distracted to take with me).  We have a beautiful local park (Milton Country Park) that we frequent, though we try to time it to avoid the crowds.  Most people are good about using it, but there are still too many people wanting to picnic, socialize, linger on park benches, etc., and there is little enforcement of the lockdown rules.

We're trying to do just a big grocery shop every couple of weeks to minimize exposure, and have only gotten food delivered a couple of times (leaving good tips).  We're probably doing a bit much online shopping, but we're at least trying to buy from independent businesses and put a little something back into the economy.  We know we're lucky that we could both keep our jobs and work from home.

So trips and plans have all been put on hold, but things are fine mostly -- just a bit boring, at least as long as we're not thinking about what could happen.  We're worried about everybody we know and love, and how tragic things could become.  We're worried about getting it ourselves -- it's such a weird virus and no one seems safe from it.

It's kind of hard to imagine how we're going to come out of this, barring some sort of vaccine.  Things will open up again at some point but Marjorie and I and most people we talk to have no plans to go rushing back to the pub the day the government says we can.  We at least aren't seeing the sort of idiotic protests that are happening in the States about it all being a hoax or conspiracy to take away rights.  And we're happy to have a national health service and coordinated response from the government, even if they've been bled dry in recent years.  We're just hoping we won't need it.

Brexit

"May you live in interesting times" goes the old curse, but man, it is fascinating having a front row seat to the whole Brexit thing.  I was reading today's development (Boris losing his majority in parliament after another Conservative defection) at work and had a thought that I would be remiss to not blog about this all while I'm living through it.

Knowing little about parliamentary procedure, it's been highly educational, but still a lot of the big events just blindside me (the PM can dissolve parliament?  Really?) and can only fully admit that I have no idea how it's all going to play out.

Obviously I'm on the Remain side, even more so than Marjorie who still wants to give Brexit supporters a fair shake.  I think even a "soft" Brexit (i.e. with a deal) would be painful for so many in Britain and add fuel to the whole sickening anti-immigrant crusade.  A hard Brexit could be devastating.  And I'm sick of speciousness of the Brexit arguments, which argue that the referendum (where the people voted for what was sold to them (dishonestly) as a soft Brexit, in a non-binding vote) now three years later means that the people want Brexit by any means.  Brexit supporters (we do know a few, though most friends and coworkers here are Remainers) seem to take every occasion to casually refer to Brexit as "the will of the people" based on this at every opportunity; this is the point where I've taken to stopping and correcting them before they have a chance to move on.

Our visa, by the way, is in no danger that I can see.  As we aren't here as EU citizens, we won't be kicked out as a result of any form of Brexit.  There is some danger that if the economy tanks, companies might leave the UK -- some already have, but it's not at all likely for my company, and if they did there should still be plenty of other jobs that I could probably land, as a result of shortages of skilled labor.  (The real effect on us here, though, will probably be because of the pound taking a beating.)

We watched some of the debate this evening in the House of Commons(?), which was fascinating.  Most American politicians wouldn't last a minute in this forum, as politicians on all sides engaged in a battle of wits, trying to rhetorically pin their opponents; failing in large degree, but even Jacob Rees-Mogg (the key Brexit supporting MP) responded directly and eloquently to questions that were coming thick and fast.  He was oily and evasive, but his answers at least sounded like they were formed in response to the questions put to him, and not just the prepared statements American politicians regurgitate when a particular subject is touched on.

Boris's losses today seem like the first good news in a long while, and I'm hoping for more in the coming days.  There's no denying it's history in the making, and it will be fascinating to watch.

Parkrun

After blowing out my knee almost two years ago, I've taken up parkruns as my soccer substitute.  It's probably one of those things like Crossfit that should have the same first two rules as Fight Club.  I've already talked about it enough on Facebook, but as no one reads this blog anyway, I'm free to ramble on!

On my occasional jogs previously, I thought I was running about as fast as I was capable of, but I surprised myself on my first parkrun with how well I did on a 5K run.  Now, only twelve runs into it, I've managed to knock another three whole minutes off that first timed run!  I don't know what it is about these things, but it's clear they push me to try harder.  My rebuilt knee doesn't seem to be an issue whatsoever.

I look forward to them every week beforehand, and am proud of myself afterwards... it's just the "during" that I hate life.  Strangely, it doesn't feel like I'm running any faster -- it's just that my times have been dropping.  If I have any reputation on the course, it's probably as a loud breather.  This is probably because I'm always trying to stay focused and push myself, so I'm always at the brink of what feels possible for me.  The other thing I do is to pick out one of the other runners as my pacesetter, and try to keep up with them.  I almost always have to change pacesetters at some point, either when I pass them or (more likely) they pull away and I can't keep up.  It's supposed to be a non-competitive sport (or at least, you're only competing against yourself), but I just have to pretend that everyone around me is my competitor.  This especially applies at the finish, where I always hope I have something left to either pass one more person or hold off someone trying to pass me.  Only on maybe one run in four do I feel like I have anything left to give towards the end though, so I'm almost always the one getting passed.

My local parkrun, Cambridge (technically in Milton, my home village) I think is one of the larger ones in the country, with over 500 runners at the last race I did, and is very well organised (I have yet to volunteer, but I owe them a time or two).  But I like that they have them worldwide.  As you are registered internationally when you sign up, you can track all your runs on their website.  And they have stupid little challenges you can try for -- I'm accidentally well on my way to completing the Pirate challenge: run seven parkruns starting with a C ("seven seas") and one starting with an R ("Arrrr...").  So far the three I've done (Cambridge, Coldham's Common, and Canterbury) are all Cs!  This extension is recommended for tracking these things.

Dogs aren't allowed at my local parkrun, but I did take Hamish once to the other one in town at Coldham's Common...  He enjoyed it I think, but he's nine years old now, so I had drag him pretty much the whole way, and it certainly didn't help my time.

On today's parkrun I pushed on through a stitch (note to self: no more bananas beforehand) and the results are in -- I knocked two seconds off my best!  I think I'm probably in the zone where future gains will be modest like this.  Would love to get my time under twenty minutes, but that will be a ways off I think.  But there's always some new target that seems in reach...  I'm very close to beating a seven-minute mile average, and a 70% age grading appears to be in reach.

Vintage game

Right back into it, as if I haven't been away from it for almost two years.

Previously I think I talked about vintage games I remember from my youth.  But this evening while watching a show featuring a guy traveling through various locations on England's southern coast, I was reminded of a sailing game that I hadn't thought about in decades, that I remember playing a lot.  It wasn't hard to track down the name (Regatta) via Google, and this video review was immediately and deeply evocative.  Amazing that these things stay stored in our brains.

Euro check-in

So much has happened.  Still, I'm posting here more for the sake of historical record than because I'm inspired to write.  You take what you can get I guess.

• We've found a house (in Milton) and moved in, and are mostly settled.  We have a car (Volkswagen Golf) and have taken a few excursions in it.
• We've already had two getaways by plane -- to Toulouse in France, and to Tenerife.  Both were lovely.
• We've been going to international meetups -- and just out to the pubs with the dog -- and have made some tentative friends already, much quicker than we did in Australia.
• All three of us seem to really like it here.  Hamish likes all the animals (horses, cows, sheep, rabbits, cats...  Even a hedgehog and a stoat).  Plus he can go in taxis, on buses, and into pubs.  He's even been in Oliver Cromwell's house in Ely (they said it was okay) and inside the nearby historical site Denny Abbey (rather against the rules).  We don't have to leave him at home for much at all.  However, our summer plan for long country walks with him is out, because...
• Mark went to play soccer (football) for the first time ever in the UK -- just a meetup.com five-a-side pickup game -- and blew out his knee twenty minutes in.  Ruptured patella tendon, which required surgery.  Recovery will be long and slow.  And it might be a soccer career-ender.  Which I'm sad about, but I'm fifty, and had a pretty good run.
• Marjorie has a job lined up but is waiting for final approval.
• The weather has been unseasonably warm but we've been really enjoying the changing of seasons.  New kinds of blooming flowers seem to pop up every other week.

See you again in... six months?  Who knows.

Settling in

So much to report.

• We've arrived -- all of us, including Hamish.  As we hoped, and maybe expected, but were apprehensive about, Hamish got off the flight with an attitude like "That was weird.  Oh, hey guys!"  He seems to like it here; he's a bit hyper-vigilant on walks, I assume because the sights and smells are all new, but he's started giving us "zingers" (smiling looks at us, like "isn't this great?") during walks again.  And he's seen his first squirrel!  It was exciting for him, definitely, but I was a little worried that he'd become obsessed.  Luckily he was interested, but it was not much more of a reaction than he'd have for an Australian possum.
• Job is going well so far, despite a bit of drifting since my boss being sick the last couple of days.  A lot less rigorous as far as process, which means we'll be getting a lot more done than my last job I think.  My second day there started with a new-starters breakfast with the CEO (some of the other "new-starters" have been waiting a year for this, so good timing for me).  He's an impressive guy -- Rhodes Scholar at Oxford with a PhD in physics, Canadian, but speaks fluent French and conversational Czech.
• We're getting on fine in our furnished apartment; Marjorie's been taking care of all the financials and logistics, which is pretty much a full time job.  She deserves a break but feels the pressure of things that need to be done: primarily, now, finding us a place to live.  We need a car too.
• Cambridge is really nice.  We're still trying to figure out neighborhoods neighbourhoods, but the one we're in (Chesterton) is very nice with a couple of nice pubs.  There doesn't seem to be a concentration of anything, anywhere though -- just random stores and restaurants stuck randomly in the middle of rows of homes.  It's like, houses, houses, houses, dry cleaner; houses, houses, houses, Bangladeshi restaurant.  You have to walk most places, which is okay (even in the cold) because it's charming and pretty.  We are gradually figuring out the buses and such though.

Last day

Our last day in Melbourne and we are strangely subdued.  Last night we went out to our favorite dumpling place (Hu Tong) and tooled around the city a bit.  Today we went to our favorite lunch place and all around favorite restaurant, Moroccan Deli-cacy.  Both were good, but we're not feeling as anxious, upset, or sentimental as I was expecting.  I guess it must be time to leave.

The whole thing has been such a slow burn that maybe it still hasn't sunk in.  We got everything done rather efficiently, on time, and mostly without incident.  Even now, we're sitting around with not much to do, and we're (surreally) two days into a work week that will have us in England by the end of it.  Is this all real?

I also got my (hopefully) last call from a Melbourne recruiter.  This is the second one who heard it through the grapevine that the company I just quit has been laying people off.  I've yet to hear it first hand though.  What's going on over there?

Home stretch

When we first decided to do this UK move last 30th of January, we anticipated it would take a year.  Looks like we'll be coming in just under the wire.  We're now in the home stretch.

The car's been sold.  That's a HUGE relief -- when time is running out, it's tempting to take a lousy offer just to be done, but we stuck it out and got a decent offer just before it started getting seriously time-critical.  Nerve-wracking to be sure.

Today the movers came and packed all our things (at least, the things we have left after four carloads taken to the tip, multiple items sold on eBay, and lots of other stuff freecycled or given away to friends or passing strangers) into 112 boxes.  That still feels like too much stuff, and there's every chance our UK home will be smaller.  We did a lot of the house cleaning after the movers left, and tomorrow we go back and hopefully finish the job.

After that, there's a bunch of small tasks to take care of (it never stops), plus we'll be trying to meet up with friends to say our goodbyes.

We're now staying at a friend's place; it's our friend that we trade dog-sitting duties with, and she's out of town, so it works out well.  Getting on a plane in a week's time.  We've been so busy that I've hardly had time to fret about life and work on the other side.  Guess I can start that now!

Complications

So, back on the 9th, I was playing hallway fetch with Hamish, as I often do.  Suddenly he just sat down and started whimpering.  We had to take him to the emergency vet, who gave him pain relief and kept him overnight, and referred us to a specialist.  Turns out it was a herniated disk in his back.  No surgery required unless it recurs or gets worse, but he is now on strict rest, which he is not happy about.  He seems mostly fine now, which makes it worse, but we know we have to be tough.  Only short walks, and no jumping up on the couch or beds.  And we now have a crate we've locked him in while we're away at work, which he hates the most of course.

We'll do what we have to do, but the expense part of it really sucks.  Seems we can't go a week without some or other unexpected multi-hundred or -thousand dollar expense.  Just found our front bumper has been mysteriously crunched and broken underneath (neither of us remember an incident that would have caused it).  So I'll be getting that, and the side ding, and (Uber driver-caused) rear bumper fixed, so we can sell it.  This comes right on the heels of the repairs we had to do after someone tried to steal our car (smashed steering column, broken door lock, and door frame dings from where they pried the window open.

Official

It's official, or at least closer to: we're going.  We've both put in notice at our jobs, and we have appointments at the UK consulate on Monday to get our visas.  (We won't know a date to fly over until we get the visas processed -- as the consulate is closed over Christmas, this could be variable.)  Since it's general knowledge now, I've restored all the earlier posts that I had hidden.

So now it's all about getting ready in earnest.  Today was mostly about listing things on Ebay and getting rid of junk.  I disassembled a dog house, an Ikea cabinet, a CD rack, and a wooden table.  Our trash can is full, and I'm taking a carload to the tip tomorrow.  I think we might have another load or two to follow.  It's a shame it takes moving to take care of this stuff, but being able to pare down excess stuff is a decided advantage of a big move like this.

We also took passport photos for the visa, which both look about as good as you'd expect.  Now we'll always remember how bedraggled we were on this day.

Election

Obviously we were disappointed by the election results.  I haven't even been able to write about it until now.

But it goes deeper than mere disappointment that my candidate lost.  I can only see it as the most grossly stupid thing that America has ever done.  I'm horrified at the result, and terrified for the future.  I find myself frequently just staring off into space, slowly shaking my head.

I can't get my head around how anyone could have voted for this blatantly dishonest, dangerously idiotic, horrifyingly sexist, substance-free huckster.  Whatever problems you might be experiencing, Donald Trump is NOT the solution.  I don't buy the "At least he's not Hillary" argument.  The Republicans had a whole host of candidates who were not Hillary.

I keep coming back to this chart, and coming away terrified that we elected a leader who thinks it's all a big hoax.

More than the national disgrace and international embarrassment.  More than the effects of his science- and reason-defying policies.  More than his already-demonstrated propensity for diplomatic blundering.  This result will echo down the centuries: America will always be remembered as the country that elected him.

Comments blocked on this post, because I want to keep liking the people that I like.

Pictures

I'm generally a fairly messy person, but I do love organising a bunch of data.  So I've been kind of ashamed of how I've had my digital photos organised down through the years.

My pictures are all safe -- I did subscribe to the pay version of a web-based file hosting service a couple of years back, and it's some of the best money I've ever spent.  All my pictures reside there and are replicated across all my systems as a result (along with all my other key projects and documents).  But my Pictures directory has been a jumbled mess for years in terms of organisation.

I've looked at a few file organising programs, but they never seem to do exactly what I want.  So now I'm writing my own.  Features:

1. The main pictures directory will be organised into folders by year, then month.  Other organisers seem to frequently break it down into day folders, but I've always found that annoyingly granular.
2. It will be able to suck up other folders (such as dumps of camera memory cards), read the metadata off the pictures, and automatically file them correctly into this file structure.
3. It will remove duplicates, of course.
4. I've done a partial job of tagging my photos and videos using TagSpaces, which seems to me to be a pretty good standard.  Their UI is a bit clunky though, so instead I'll create a separate directory for each TagSpaces tag, containing soft links to all photos with that tag.  So I'll easily be able to, say, see all my Hamish pictures just by looking in this directory.

It's a pretty straightforward program; I knocked off probably half of it tonight, though I know I'll want to add features as I go.

I have a big box of actual prints, too, that I really should digitise, but of course they won't have the date they were taken in their metadata, so I'm not looking forward to organising them afterwards.

UK? No, I'm not 'kay.

So the roller coaster that has been climbing the hill for three weeks, going chk-chk-chk, is about to go over the top. I'm on a plane tomorrow, and it still doesn't seem real. Though I've been studying and practicing so much that I'm pretty much just ready to get things over with.

There's still a number of likely questions that I'm just dreading being asked. The potential for humiliation just seems massive, and their generosity just seems to make it worse (I don't think they'd ever actually say, "We flew you all the way up here and you don't even know what a websocket is?" but that's what a missed question will feel like.) (Note to self: look up websockets.)

As terrifying as the interview is looking, getting an offer would be almost as terrifying. You know how dolphins can "walk" on top of the water by kicking their tail back and forth really hard? I was thinking recently that that's what my career feels like a lot of the time. I've developed a strong tail from it over the years but a few months back I was thinking how nice it would be to just swim about in the water for a bit. If I get in at Big Company, I'll not only continue the water-walking thing, but I'll have a ball balanced on my nose to boot.

I just had prep phone interview number 3, which contained detailed feedback about the tech phone interview I did last week, and a more detailed breakdown of what I'll be asked about. It did nothing to relieve my stress levels; in fact, after things seeming so surreal all week (especially, going into the office as if everything's normal), this brought reality crashing home. I'll be having five one-hour sessions, each involving at least two of the leadership questions I'm dreading (E.g. "Tell me about a time you took a risk and it failed"). One of the sessions will be entirely that. My "down time" will be a one-hour lunch interview with the managing director of their development centre (boss of 110 people).

I really think they're considering me for too high of a position, as I've barely done much in the way of leading, and I'll be considered for what they call an SD3 (software developer level 3), which they need just a few of, instead of an SD2, which they need a lot of. The day before the interview I'll be getting prep call number four (!) that will at least inform me in fairly specific detail what leadership questions each group will be asking me. But there won't be a lot I can fix at that point, or even now.

Marjorie has been great about trying to buck up my spirits. But I'm pretty sure my concerns are reality-based as opposed to just beating myself up out of a lack of confidence. (This is not to be construed as further beating up of myself, either, please.)

Still, I wrote up something that's a little long to be called a mantra, but which I'll try to keep in mind during the process: “Above all, don’t be intimidated. Especially, no nervous jokes about the pressure of the interview situation, the scale of the company, the surroundings, or the prospective role, or my lack of experience with this or that. Act like this is all natural and fine and expected. Be serious and calm, even if you flub a question, or even if you ace a question. Don't be overly relieved at the end. Don’t speak at all if your voice is breaking out of nervousness (this is a major concern of mine), or if you don't know how you're going to finish a sentence. Don't talk just to fill up space. And remember everyone’s goddamn name for once.”

So at least it'll be all over Tuesday evening, yeah? No. To further complicate things, I had an interview last night with a company in Cambridge, who now wants to see me while I'm up there. They're more of a startup with much shallower pockets - but it could be an alright thing. I'll have next to no spare time while I'm up there, and from what I can tell, you can't really get to Cambridge from Edinburgh. I'm also not keen to take advantage of Big Company's hospitality. (I laid this all out for them, and they just now emailed me back, offering to fly me Edinburgh to Stansted (the London airport everyone forgets is there), then up to their office, during one of the two days I was planning on checking out Edinburgh with Marjorie. Sure. Fine. What else can I say?)

Increasingly, sleep has been just an occasional visitor, who leaves abruptly in the wee hours as if he has an early train to catch. I suspect to see him only here and there in the coming week.

It's all a helluva thing. I don't have any category to put the whole experience into.