Spontaneous culture

Passing the Art Gallery on the way home from a spontaneous brunch at Cafe Rouge* yesterday, we decide to pop in and see the Miffy exhibition**. We ending up seeing all sorts of things, and having discussions about the sheer superfluity of a Victorian painting of a water nymph*** and whether the painter of the large Samson and Delilah scene had ever seen a naked woman's breasts****. We also try interacting with some of the Miffy exhibits, but find that we're probably too large to play dress-up. On the way out, after having raided the gift shop for Christmas presents***** we decide we can spare five minutes for a market research interview on whether we liked the experience. What did you find good about your visit today? I'm tempted to say: no one told us to stop touching the artworks, but caution prevails.

Incidentally, Manchester Art Gallery gift shop stocks a range of verging on the obscene household items shaped like little people. If you know anyone that likes that sort of thing.

I did well yesterday: I bought three christmas presents, all on budget and totally unexpectedly.

It is: 4.5 working days til I leave this job! Yay! 26 days to Greenbelt.


*Good toasties, too much vinegar on the poached eggs.
** I didn't specify high culture, now did I?
*** Remind me again of the difference between porn and art? There's just no call for that. It ain't even educational.
**** Conclusion: yes, but he wished they'd look more like how he painted them.
***** Forward-planning? Moi?

Small hillocks

Now that I've handed in my notice due to being bored stiff 90 % of the time, I've been handed projects to do. This means that I am learning loads, and am rapidly becoming the main point of knowledge for how and where to find all the info one might require on an increasingly important tool for performance measurement. This week an uber-boss may teach me some basic macro programming for Excel.

Note that all this happened after I handed my notice in. You'd think they'd want to build all this knowledge in someone who's sticking around, wouldn't you? And anyway, if this is what happens, I wish I'd handed it in sooner, rather than playing 600 games of Freecell over the last three months.

It is: 10 working days until I leave. 32 days to Greenbelt.

Discovered

I knew this was a bad idea. I've never yet managed to keep a diary beyond about the first week of Febrary, and so here I am, with a blog barely a week old, and nothing to say.
I’m still counting down to my leaving date (which will be the fortieth anniversary of John Lennon’s famously ill-considered comment that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus) and my new job starting (295th anniversary of the first race meeting at Ascot) and Greenbelt. (This year, beginning on the tenth anniversary of Sun Myung Moon officiating at the marriage of 35,000 couples in Seoul)

I’ve had an exhausting morning going to an extremely routine nurse appointment: the nurse was even running ahead of schedule, but when I returned to the tram stop, I found that there were no trams running at all on the Bury line, due to a problem with a stretch of track. By the time the slowest bus in the world had got me back to town, the trams appeared to be running again.

But I am looking forward to a nice evening in, complete with husband, and perhaps a little gentle dress-making, depending on whether or not I can be bothered to go and buy the thread I need at lunchtime. Or I could buy stuff for the Sanctus1 prayer space, which I’m running next Wednesday. Or I could exchange some shoes which I suspect I’ll never wear for some less sparkly but more professional looking ones. All of these options involve catching a tram to the Northern Quarter and then walking around in sticky heat and getting back to Castlefield in 45 minutes flat. This is not feasible in this weather. But then, if I'm late back from lunch, do I care?

It is: 11.5 working days til I leave. 36 days to Greenbelt

Verfification

I've invented a new word.
Verfification.

It's for when you're supposed to being checking something is right, but you kind of go Errr, yeah, probably.
Like when they ask you to check the amount and sign for your purchases. Or when you should probably look up which terminal your flight departs from, but the tickets are at the bottom of the bag and it's bound to be the same one as usual, right? Or you're supposed to be analysing some data that you really can't be bothered with...

It is: 13.5 days til I leave my job. 38 days to Greenbelt....

I’m currently trying to read: Rowan William’s The Wound of Knowledge. The first few paragraphs are fascinating, but I just can’t seem to get any further. Is there a burgeoning Christian marketing opportunity for someone who will translate his enlightenment into plainer English? I’m also trying to read In Memory of Her, only I can’t be bothered to look up what heuristics are. I never could, even when I was doing a sociology course at university and all reading matter kept referring to heuristic analysis. I’m pretty sure it’s a word made up by feminist scholars to make it look like they know something men don’t.
In fact, it’s just occurred to me it might be like “Herstory” as an alternative to History – her –istics, meaning the interpretation of something in the light of feminist theory.

It is: 15.5 working days til I start my new job. 43 days til Greenbelt.

Which is worse?
Not being able to access your email because fish.co.uk is having one of its periodic bad hair days?
Or accessing it after several attempts to find there was nothing there anyway?

Time to go eat something before my fourth night in a row of rushing off to some kind of meeting. Next week there's going to be a Plan. It's going to involve: not doing everything. Seeing husband might be fun, too.

Oh well. It does seem relatively easy to set up a blog. Now all I have to do is think of thrilling witty posts and find the time to upload them. This is likely to be much harder than the first part.
But for now, I'm off to have something to eat before I go and do some training on stuff that I'm not really required to know.
Still, I do have a big meaty project to get on with tomorrow, one that I, as usual round here, have no skills for. But I've been verbally promised training, so that is one up on the usual state of affairs.

It is currently: 16.5 working days until I leave. 44 days to Greenbelt.