Just can’t think straight this week

I’m sorry folks for the lack of updates this week.

It’s been a funny few days, throughout which I haven’t felt my normal chirpy self. Even as I write this email, my brain feels like treacle so apologies if I make even more grammatical errors than usual.

On Monday I was still in Sweden, and we didn’t fly back until the evening. I think we arrived home between Midnight and 1am – which for the body is really 1am or 2am as we were still on Sweden time.

Tuesday was straight back into work, which I can usually do even after having a long day and late arrival home. However, I just didn’t feel 100% – despite the relatively “easy” work load of just having to answer emails and chase up people’s voicemail messages.

Wednesday was spent at Kingswood Warren – the BBC’s R&D base in Surrey. “Tech Club” was the slightly unusual term for a meet up of BBC folk from around the organisation’s new media divisions. The day was basically 15 minute lightning presentations of what everyone was working on.

My presentation was on my laptop, which decided to blue screen on me and wouldn’t boot up. Just my luck. Fortunately I was able to adlib for 15 minutes on backstage.bbc.co.uk. But I had to leave early so that I could return to base in White City to get the laptop sorted out. Unfortunately the support team weren’t “able” to repair the windows install and were only prepared to reformat the machine and reinstall a fresh build.

The rest of the evening was spent backing up the data on my home computer. I think it was about midnight before that was complete.

Thursday was spent mainly getting my laptop fixed, now that it was backed up. It was also my colleague and friend Sally Egginton’s last day at BBC, so there was a send off lunch held for her. That was interrupted by an innovation meeting which I had to attend.

In the afternoon I felt like shit, to be quite honest. My head hurt from both tension in my neck and a low level headache. Paracetamol didn’t touch it. I went home and crashed out at around 7pm and work up around 11pm to get a glass of water. I think I went back to bed and didn’t wake up again until around 8am on this morning (Friday).

Friday, today, has been an odd day. Having got my laptop back not only does it not have any of the application I need on it, but the way windows profiles work, it thinks they are installed none-the-less. It’s a complete mess. A mess which has really thrown me – I haven’t had my RSS reader for 3 days so I have no idea what’s been happening.

I did, however, just find out Movable Type 3.2 has just come out so I’ll need to look into upgrading the backstage site on Monday. The wiki on there also looks to be on it’s way out too, having raised a very unusual error this afternoon. The last thing I need.

So as I write this email my brain still feels tired. Which is frustrating as I haven’t done anything this week. What I guess I need is a holiday. Yes, I know I was in Sweden last weekend, but it wasn’t really a holiday. I like going there but it’s not relaxing as there are always places to go and people to meet up with.

I also might be coming down with a cold or something – there’s a lot of it about here at work. I also had a typhoid immunisation 2 weeks ago for my trip to China – I guess I could also be going through delayed reaction to that.

Sofia and I are due to go to a wedding this weekend (one of Sofia’s friends). I’m happy to go because it’s important for Sofia, but it’s another thing on my mind that I have to fit in for.

Knowing that I could just sleep for the entire weekend I don’t know whether just to switch off this weekend as best I can, or try and continue to get back to speed with all the things on my list that need doing (both work and non-work). Eitherway, I hope next week I feel a lot better, and that I can get my (work) laptop back to normal.

Well, that’s the end of my evening moan and rant.