Knitting up the milk of gilded lilies

As a recovering English Literature graduate and enthusiastic peruser of snidely-written websites about misuse of the English language, I get nervous when I feel like quoting Shakespeare, just in case I'm about to come out with one of those notorious misquotations like "gild the lily". I have even sometimes searched the web before quoting, just to make sure I got the line right. And that's not for a quotation I want to insert in a paper; I've done it when posting to the kind of e-mail list where the only words you can't get away with mis-spelling are ones like "Perl" or "Unices". However, this time I can't be bothered, so to avoid misquoting, I shall paraphrase: sleep is so good at de-stressing you, it's like your sweater has started coming unravelled, and a good sleep obligingly knits it up again. Now I know why, centuries from now, I will not be known as the Bard of Ankara.

Like many geeks, I am fairly nocturnal, so going to bed at three or four in the morning is not at all unusual, but when it comes twice in a row followed by having to get up at 7.30, I start counting the minutes to the weekend. When combined with drinking on an empty stomach, I also start talking nonsense, which can have consequences that make me crave sleep and solitude even more. When Saturday comes and my lie-in is sabotaged by the happy screeching of children playing, death seems attractive. Especially the sudden death of everyone else in a five-mile radius.

So when my wife decided to drive to the Black Sea coast with her sister, and invited me along for a journey which would start at 5 a.m. on Sunday, I declined, thus simultaneously selfishly and graciously freeing up a car seat for my father-in-law (who is an early riser). I slept until mid-day, and woke refreshed and filled with the cornflakes of human sympathy.

The Machine Stops

Today we had a power cut, which is not unusual. What was unusual was that it lasted for an hour. The university has a back-up generator which usually kicks in after anything from two seconds to two minutes. It also kicks in with the kind of kick you normally only see in kung fu films, which made me glad that my wife picked up a six-way extension with a built-in power surge protector. When you spend a month's salary on an amplifier, you really don't want it to be kick-started by the generator when it's been taking its time about charging its capacitors or whatever it is they do. My computer, of course, has its own power saver, but when the warning beeps finally died, I started to get worried. Not about my computer, which I assumed (correctly) would power itself down with no ill effects, but about the freezer. Having bought a fridge with a decent sized deep freeze a few months ago, we enthusiastically filled the freezer compartment with goodies ranging from chickpeas to chicken wings, from köfte to pizza (the latter being the result of Domino's "buy one mega-pig-out pizza, get one free" offer). What if all this carefully stock-piled goodness were to turn into a pile of salmonella-infested sludge?

Of course this shows my ignorance of freezers (my parents had nothing more than a tiny ice-box until years after I'd left home). An hour later, when the power was back and I got some köfte (Mid-East meatballs) out of the freezer, I still had to whack them hard to separate them. Individually, they could be used as slingshots.
( Musings on technology ... )

Another power cut

We've just had another power cut, though fortunately this was only a few seconds - hardly enough time for my UPS system to start beeping. (I want to replace those beeps with a calm androgynous computer voice saying "This is not a drill.")

I reckon that God read my previous post and thought "Hah, arrogant mortal! So you think that you could rebuild society after I hurl a meteor at the earth? Well just remember, it's only half an hour to Buffy the Vampire Slayer!"

Please God, no more power cuts for a couple of hours, right? I'll be good, I promise.