Strange morning

I don't know what's come over me. I woke up at 7.30 feeling bright and almost fresh, which is in itself unusual (unless I have to go to work, I'm not usually seen before mid-day). Then instead of having a cup of coffee and a cigarette, I did some ch'i kung (qigong) and t'ai chi, then instead of watching the BBC News I watched a videotape of san shou (the two-person form). After that, I read and responded to e-mail for a while (nothing unusual there) then practiced some sword strikes and did a little meditation. Now I'm about to have a proper breakfast with eggs, rather than the two slices of toast which is all I can normally face in the mornings. Weird.

I also had a dream that I was living in Azerbaijan ("It's the centre of the world!" I claimed) but I doubt if that has anything to do with it.

Sorli want! Solri want!

Continuing today's martial arts mood, I checked out the website of the Zhong Ding association, a school originally founded by one of my t'ai chi friends back in the UK, Nigel Sutton (when I was teaching the course at Leeds University, we'd get him to come up and do workshops occasionally. There I came upon this course: a whole year's full-time training in t'ai chi and related arts. It's reasonably priced (650 pounds for the course plus 3 pounds per night for accommodation, meaning I could do the whole year for under 2,000 pounds) and it's in Penang. Too late for this year, but if they run it in future years, maybe the university will give me a leave of absence. Think I'll drop Nigel an email ...

It's going to be a long night

Having got up at an unusually early hour for me (see previous post), I now find I have to stay up till 4 a.m. to tape the last episode in this series of Angel. It's normally on at 8 p.m., but the in-laws were over, and father-in-law wanted to watch a match. No problem, I thought, we can do some male bonding, then I can tape the late night/early morning version, forgetting, of course, that on the nights when I stay up till four, I haven't been up since dawn (well not really dawn, but hey, it would have been dawn if this had been December instead of July).

I decided to while away the time by signing up for Instant Messaging with Yahoo. I'd been avoiding them since they took over Geocities and screwed it up, and because of rumours that they were passing on personal information to third parties. Looking at their new site, I decided that their new privacy policy looked acceptable, and thought also that if a number of Linux IM clients were supporting Yahoo, it was probably OK (Linux users are paranoid about security stuff).

Well, that was certainly a way to kill time. I've spent the last half hour trying to register with Yahoo, to no avail, the main problem being that they don't seem to recognise Turkey as a country. East Timor, yes; Turkey, no. I suppose I could enter UK with my British postcode, but why should I bother. And their CGI sucks.

So for the time being, anyone who wants to IM me will have to do so through either
ICQ: 154306773, or
AIM: solriN

I've set myself to "available" (sounds sexy), so you can help keep me awake until Angel comes on.