… because I haven’t been to one of their shops in ages. Well, ok, I was in the Cardiff branch back in June, but I didn’t buy much. Today, I wanted to stock up on my LUSH favourites such as Honey, I Washed the Kids soap (got a free sample of that too) and the new Porridge one. And I got a free gift for spending over £20 so I picked a White Wedding ballistic - I may save it for my wedding day bath.

I did get briefly confused because the Belfast shop had moved to the other side of the street, but I just followed my nose…

Visited W H Smith as well to get a pencil case for work (I chose a Mr Men one with pen/pencil/sharpener/eraser) and got utterly distracted by all the beautiful notebooks. I ended up buying a spiral-bound one with brown paper pages, and also buying a new Parker fountain pen because I’ve never got round to replacing the nib on my 125 and it was just as cheap to buy a new pen. With blue-black ink cartridges, too. I started to write in my new notebook, and it was pure delight - hopefully I can kick-start my creativity that way.

Also today, I am mostly … getting stuck in to all my new work

… and enjoying it quite a bit. New tools, new methods; lots of structured authoring which suits me very much. If I can just live down Monday’s absent-minded attempt to add an apostrophe to a document by applying my pencil to the computer screen, I’ll be fine…

… and with a thousand and one things to do this weekend as part of wedding preparations. Less than three weeks to go and I still need to figure out the music, organise the flowers, finalise arrangements at the restaurant and have the final fitting for my dress. Oh, and book the hairdresser. As well as doing the normal weekend housework… Erf.

I’m worried I’m coming down with something (my glands are really swollen in that ‘fighting off infection’ way) and I really just want to sleep a lot. Bah. I’ve even cancelled my Derry hen night that was supposed to happen this evening.

Really glad though that next week is the last one I spend full-time in Belfast. I was definitely suffering information overload by the end of the two weeks’ training, but I start doing ‘real’ work on Monday.

… to the best of my abilities and as much as can be covered in a two-day course aimed at people who have some idea about coding. Which, admittedly, I do, thanks to all the LambdaMOO that lurks in my past (understanding the object-oriented bits today was a doddle thanks to that). But it’s unlikely that I’ll have to do any C++ programming in the future. Perl, possibly. And I really liked the look of Ruby. But C++ probably not - although I may have to be able to at least look through code and understand it.

Anyway, the past week and a bit of training have all been on things quite different from the work I’ve done previously as a tech writer (my Linux fiddling was back in my sys admin and support days), and I’ve enjoyed the change.

Also today, I am mostly … stuffing myself with Indian food

… because I don’t get the chance at home and since I’m living in a hotel at the moment, I do have to eat. Went with one of my New York-based colleagues who’s over for the training/induction course. So far in our meals together (we ate Thai last Thursday), we’ve discussed the topics that you’re not supposed to, ever: politics and religion! Good discussions though, and definitely better than sitting by myself staring at a book or the TV as I’ve done a couple of times over the last week and a bit.

… after yesterday’s torrential rain in Ireland. Not that my house was particularly affected, apart from the concrete paths in my garden getting really waterlogged, but the situation was very different in a lot of places - twenty feet of water in a brand-new underpass in Belfast, for example! and I’m not sure which bus routes will be running tomorrow.

I did end up thigh-deep in flood water though, when Marion got locked out of her house and needed me to bring the spare key. I ended up spending the night there after we piled stuff from low places onto high places, and herded her cats and dog into the house. She’s gone through one very serious flood there, back in 1999, and we had our fingers crossed that she wouldn’t have to do it again. The river running along the back of her house was very high, but it was the tributary that runs under the road just next to her house (behind the wall you can see in those photos) that was the problem as it overflows badly onto the road even in ‘normally’ heavy rain.

The water did get a couple of inches higher than shown in the ‘during’ photo (it was just over my knees at that point, and was a good bit higher when I waded back through later on to check my car was in a high-enough spot), and high-tide was somewhere around 8:30pm. The flood started subsiding by about 11 though, and when I woke up at 6ish this morning and went to check, there was nothing but a small puddle and a lot of debris on the road.

Not everyone was as lucky though - there’s a big clean-up operation going on in Ireland today.

… as, on my first day of my new job, I’ve been getting stuck into Linux for the first time in about 8 years. Last time I ran it myself, I didn’t even have a GUI! Today I’m been having fun (well, ok, not fun exactly) reacquainting myself with VI and regular expressions.

And now I’m hanging out in my hotel room with wireless access (that I have to pay for, alas) and planning to do some writing. But I’m watching University Challenge first and despairing at how ignorant the contestants are of general knowledge even if they know some very specialist stuff.

… on the FreePoverty site. The aim of the game is to correctly pinpoint places around the world - it seems to be made easier once you get to SuperHard level by most of them being in Argentina and Algeria for some reason.
Interesting game, anyway. And hopefully useful.