Through to
the End of the Month
30 January
Yes, yes, yes, I know it's not quite yet the end of the month but it's as near as damn it. And, no, no, no, I have not had a stroke. I seem to have worried both Phil and Colin with my recent descriptions of feeling unwell.
I did say that I felt as though I might have had a stroke. But I also said that I'd been to the doctor's and they'd ruled that one out. Having been back to the doctor's this week they're still not sure what has been going on but they are doing blood tests and will refer me to a neurologist if needs be. At this stage, I'm quite convinced that it's nothing life threatening and am more than ever feeling that the migraine theory has a lot going for it. But we'll see. Anyhow, back to the chronology.
We come to the fourth weekend of the month and my Rossi was full of cold so we decided and managed to do very little.
Following our sudden rash of going to exhibitions (Renaissance Painting at the National Gallery, the works of William Morris here in Walthamstow and works about the Apocalypse at the British Museum), it was exceptional to have a weekend where we lazed around in bed, watched TV and read. My only trips out were to do the shopping and to go to Quakers.
Highlight of the weekend was 10 Things I Hate About You which was billed as a teen comedy and which I didn't have too many hopes for and rented simply as eye candy. However, it turned out to be a really slick re-telling of The Taming of the Shrew with a lot of knowing nods for those who knew the original (bits of original text suddenly woven in, outlandish word games played with character and place names, etc...), drenched with mordant and ironic wit. I loved it. There was enough word play and enough wry observation of human behaviour and enough inconsequential slapstick (ie the sort that in real life wouldn't hospitalise the characters) to keep me chuckling and laughing out loud.
Well, during the course of the working week, I gave three half-day sessions of training,
one induction session for our new NT-based service during which a server fell over for 20
minutes, finished off and presented two papers and laid the groundwork for another two
or three. I sorted out next week's committee meeting and sorted out another mess my colleague,
Rachel, had caused, this time through her intransigence over a room booking. Still my strategy
at the moment is continue tidying up after her but to let people know what I'm doing in a
quiet way so they can make their own minds up.
I also had my out of hours meeting with Rick to tell him that I was not happy with the way things were. I was candid without doing a character assassination job. So, it's on the mid-term agenda. Rick was also quite helpful in saying that I have to blow my own trumpet a bit more and let him have more information about what I'm doing. Well, he had three spreadsheets the following day laying out work I've done in the last year.
Thursday and James, the brain-dead, workshy, milksop of an administrative assistant who is
working with us at present, phoned in sick. I don't think Rachel has ever heard me fulminate
before. She did then. I wonder if she's beginning to get the message that I'm dangerous
when roused.
So, the weekend began in the bath again. It's a four week old tradition now. Saturday morning I gave a training session to a Quaker Monthly Meeting gathering about web sites. The purpose of my session was to demystify the Web and to present it as just another publishing medium. So my message was that, although there are a few specialist areas of knowledge needed to do with the associated publishing and distribution activities, basically they will face the same issues as Quakers have always faced of deciding on content, authorship, editorship, design and maintenance. As ever, I was fabulous.
Apart from that, it's been an incredibly quiet weekend.