8-)

a nice xmas day
pub at lunch time
then round to john and lynn's for xmas dinner
their kids are cool - jumping all over me and playing table hockey with india
then while the kids are put to bed a little bit of a harry potter movie
then 'round to rob and sarah's early evening
games and chat and pleasant company til eleven then back home for a quiet sit down with a couple of movies

42775

RIP James Brown (1933-2006)

Neverwhere * * * *

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
extremely readable
i saw the first couple of episodes of this when it was on tv
but now to read it was different and i didn't want to put it down

in need of a word

i think english needs a word for understanding something emotionally

you can understand intellectually that for example it is over between yourself and person A but not understand it emotionally

i thought perhaps "grok" but to grok somthing is to know something intellectually and emotionally - it doesn't seperate the two and a good percentage of the time the two are not in lock step

like in Jane Austen's Emma
warning spoiler

Emma's relationship with Frank Churchill where she fancies herself in love and it's all in the mind and she comments at one point how interesting it is that her first thought is for Frank but it wasn't it was for Mr Knightley

sort of to know something in your heart

and not always positively

you can tell yourself u don't hate person B because hate is wrong and destructive but deep down u do hate them

over time (hopefully) the intellectual and the emotional become congruent and a little self knowledge helps

and also

thanks to Josh for the cartoon

also i know anxiety is usually unproductive and destructive but often I can't control the feeling but i know it's just anxiety

we're too often just 10,000 years of reason riding on top of 5 billion years of chemistry

42102

moved the last of my things out of the flat and cleaned it and so that's it. The end of the bedsit years#2, there may yet be bedsit years#3 or more but for now a chapter will close tomorrow when i hand over the keys to the agency. So i'm having a glass of wine and have raised a silent toast to all my homes over the years - old and new.

Sputnik Sweetheart * * *

Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami
mysterious

SPOILER AFTER CUT

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oh so vivid but just a dream *sigh*

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やきば

刃

(^‐^)_且~~

41118

great birthday card from lynn and john

a picture of a crying baby and in big bold type at the top
Adam had a lot of tantrums. He was practising to be a man

hah DOH too true lol

happy birthday to me

it was nice to see a few people i haven't seen for a while for my birthday/not quite my birthday but *shrug* and now it is my birthday so happy birthday to me

40639

Work is the curse of the drinking classes.
- Oscar Wilde

Emma * * * * *

Emma by Jane Austen
delicious -- poised -- charming -- funny

SPOILER AFTER CUT

40011

oh i felt good about myself earlier
time for the monthly weigh in
i decided to take my boots off this time, unlike last month, and came in at 14 stone 5 --- 8 pounds down on last month's (but i think the boots made a difference) and down from 15 stone 2 in October which was the last time i weighed myself without the boots. I feel like I'm making nice gentle steady progress. coolio

39905

question
Jane Austen's Emma is my current book and it makes me wonder, is Jane Austen the greatest English novelist of all time? Possibly -- quite possibly.

nerding

i'm playing with xml and xsl and currently loading data into an xml page and whilst doing it as an exercise it stikes me that as a solution it's really dumb and PHP and mySQL are much better however i suppose (call it a known unknown) that i'm missing quite a lot of the power of xml because i don't know or understand the power of it. I would like to see more mysql and xml compatability so it was easy to enter an xml page into a mySQL database and i wonder if you can produce an xml page from a range of mySQL queries rather than just a full database copy as xml. Ahh a question for google!

39387

congratulations to Rob and Sarah on the birth of their daughter yesterday