a view through my own eyes

Last Monday after work I drove into town to collect mrspao. In due course as is the way of mrspao she appeared clutching some bits and bobs for dinner and a smallish black bag. In the car she handed me the bag, said that she had been very naughty and had something that she wanted to get it her chest. Looking in the bag I found series 4 of 24.

So we decided to watch one episode a day. (yeah right, like that is so not going to happen)

We watched an episode and jointly decided that it seemed rude to leave it on its own, so we watched another. The following evening we watched the third episode on the disk and then decided that it was not nice to leave the fourth episode unwatched in case it felt lonely. Variants of this pattern repeated through the week, with a rather longer session on Friday evening. To be honest I have no idea how many episodes we watched on any of the evenings, they seemed to blend into each other.

Saturday morning there was something like four episodes left. Since mrspao needed a trip to the dentist we decided to be good and wait until later. Dentist accomplished we pootled round town for a bit, had some lunch and somehow discovered that season 5 of 24 with a student discount was sillycheap.

By around 10pm on Sunday we had finished seasons 4 and 5 of 24. So mrspao went to bed and I wrote an essay that I was going to write on Friday Saturday Sunday evening!

But damn they finished on a bloody cliffhanger!

I don’t think I had ever spent quite so much time in front of a television in my life until the weekend.

Tonight when I picked up mrspao from the same place in town I was both relieved and disappointed that she was not wielding season 6. It can wait, whether we will hold out until Easter weekend though I do not know.

This is a charming little book set in the world of Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy.

It is a short story, beautifully presented in hardback with a foldout map and other nick nacks that as the author says may or may not be related to the story.

It is a tale of an adventure of Lyra and her daemon Pantalaimon in Oxford a year or so after the events of the previous books.

I do not want to say anything about the story as it is so very short and so enjoyable in the way that the first book of the trilogy was. This though does not have lofty goals and was I think Pulman’s way of saying that he still had things to say about Lyra and her world.

A quick easy read.

Well the first book of the year is finished.

This is an utterly compelling: what was it, who did it and why did they do it.
Set in the period immediately post 11th September 2001 in New York, it follows the lives of a group of friends as they react to a reporters uncovering of events of over 20 years ago and the subsequent death of the reporter.

The story follows the more recent events and through flashback provides the older events that drive the more recent.

I found this book utterly compelling and whilst I worked out the ‘what’ I did not completely work out the the ‘who’ or the ‘why’ and that for me makes the book a success. It is well written and was not hard going at all and if anything is like watching an jigsaw being pieced together with only the full picture being visible as the last piece is snapped into place. This book drew me in, the chapters are short and so it was easy to grab a few pages here and a few pages there, but as I was pulled in to the story I noticed that I spent more time each evening reading the book.

This is the first book of Rozan’s that I have read and I think I may well seek out more.

This is highly recommended.

The following quote came in through our helpdesk software at work:

I am an American, so if those are English terms, I am not familiar with them.

Fantastic.

I had been concentrating on the task at hand, it was not particularly late in the evening and nor was the task particularly complicated or difficult but it did need to be just so. Repeated thinking and tweaking the same thing whilst referring to other related stuff was starting to send me slightly screwy.

I was losing the sight of the wood for the trees.

I realised this when I put my eye drops in…
…the wrong eye.

Sigh.

…but I am around!

Catch up time:

1. been to see the eye surgeon twice
2. now only have six stitches holding George in place
3. have been told to get new lenses made for my glasses
4. cooked turkey (suprise) for Christmas day and it was good
5. mrspao excelled herself on the Christmas presents this year
6. I received best of all a Tardis money box
7. I can never find anything on TV when I want to watch it
8. mrspao bought me a TV card so I am now slowly building a pvr
9. when I want to watch TV I should then be able to find something I want to watch
10. have read more books – reviews coming soon – quite a few of them
11. I had to go to work during the Christmas shutdown – booo
12. I was paid handsomely for it – hurrah
13. I now have the marks for most of the degree work I did last term
14. and am happy with the marks
15. the Christmas decorations are now down and the hall looks a tad bare
16. term starts in a week
17. so I have to start back on the reading tomorrow
18. I made a list of jobs to do before the end of 2007
19. I did manage to fit the lights in the lounge and the front room
20. I also fixed the loo (so I remember its an Armitage diaphragm valve)
21. and flashed the BIOS and other firmware in my fileserver and enabled all of the disks
22. I haven’t yet built mrspao’s spinning wheel – sorry mrspao
23. nor have I cleared or tidied the garden
24. they are on the list for next weekend
25. I did remember to take the DVD player in to be fixed as it was expensive enough to warrant (sic) the cost of a repair
26. we had people round to eat on boxing day
27. we had to tidy the front room to accommodate them
28. the spare room has a bed in it
29. somewhere
30. the bookcases are slowly filling with books
31. we still have boxes of books in:
32. the spare room
33. the garage
34. a wardrobe
35. we watched series 3 of 24 over the Christmas break
36. and series 2 of House M.D.
37. mrspao has now seen series 1 of BSG and has started on series 2
38. I lost the eye cup on my camera
39. I have no idea of how or where
40. I am likely to find it five minutes after the new one I have ordered has been fitted to my camera