... and relax

Had a wonderful long weekend - after an annoying start, with Aer Lingus supplying no information whatsoever about delays until we were halfway through the flight, I met up with himself at Dublin Airport and we headed out to my parents. Much talking, laughing, eating, walking on the beach and playing with the cat ensued, along with some computer fixing.

I got back on Monday night and got down to some actual work on Tuesday - after a week of having almost nothing to do, it was a relief although I really can get used to having free time... I was good and ate at the salad bar at lunch, but suffered for it - I think the sweetcorn had been left out too long. Today was more of the same work-wise, along with some objectively petty discussions about grammar and punctuation that have been dredged up by some of the translators starting to write up an in-house style. At the end of the day, it's not important if we put spaces before and/or after ellipsis denoting a pause in speech or not. It would be nice to do it either rightly or wrongly consistently, if anyone can ever agree on what right is. At least my stomach was happy with the Chinese food counter in the supermarket.

I have booked my flights to the UK for the craft fair and university residential week in July. I also have a guest arriving on Saturday, so one thing I have to do in the next day or so is go and purchase an inflatable mattress. And think of fun places to go.

I started on the translation for the Social Sciences course tonight, and ended up spending most of the evening finding other things quoting a quote I was looking up. Ah, the supreme time-wasting potential of the internet. As usual for this course, it turned out to be immensely depressing if worthy reading.

"They [fascism and religious fundamentalism] both come from very primitive parts of us that have always been the default setting of our species: amity toward our in-group, enmity toward out-groups, hierarchical deference to alpha male figures, a powerful identification with our territory, and so forth. It is that brutal default setting that all civilizations have tried to raise us above, but it is always a fragile thing, civilization, and has to be achieved over and over and over again." (Sermon: Living Under Fascism) I may not agree completely with the list of causes, but definitely do about civilisation.

It has gone hot and stuffy, especially at work where there is no air conditioning (apparently it's been promised for years now) - I need to try to get to sleep on time to have a chance of surviving the day. The heating is off and the window open, so let's hope that does the trick.