Returning to the 21st century

I seem to have been a bit quiet here lately. In large part this was because our recent holiday took us back to the 19th century. Our cottage does have electricity, and it does have a telephone. Though the quality of the line is such that I wouldn't be surprised to hear "Mr. Watson—Come here—I want to see you". In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Mr Watson hadn't been able to hear Mr Bell rather more clearly than I manage to hear anything on our contraption.

Among the things that our cottage doesn't have however are: television, radio and internet. The next door cottage does have an internet connection, and one of those rather friendly WiFi boxes that allows other people to tunnel through it to the outside world. In a very solidly built slate cottage however, it was occasionally necessary to actually press your device against the wall when standing on one leg and praying to the gods of electromagnetism to be able to get enough WiFi signal to download a plain text weather forecast. So blogging wasn't happening.

Then we came home.

And my cleaner has morning sickness and hasn't been for over a month, so I had to remember how to clean. I got bored after about half the house, but at least that half included the bathrooms.

And I'm addicted to watching the Olympics, so I keep staying up too late, getting too tired and then having no energy reserves for anything other than being cross with LittleBear and eating too much. *

And I'm spending my non-Olympic-destroyed patches of time writing Other Stuff. It's work-related stuff, and difficult, and I'm not enjoying it, and it's making me fraught and stressed, but I keep feeling I need to get it done before I'm "allowed" to write anything of my own instead. Tonight I've decided I'm allowed to do "me" stuff in my free-time, and that four evenings in a row of work stuff is enough for this week.

And I've re-remembered that I'm running a 10k in just under 6 weeks and I've just spent two weeks on holiday without doing any running at all, so I've had to knuckle down to actually going out running again.

All of which has meant I haven't really found the time for writing here. 

So this is me, finding a small window of time and reminding you that I'm still here, and reminding myself that I can still put fingers to keyboard and write about something other than scientific instruments.



* What's different this evening? 
My choices are:
- various forms of fighting. I don't like fighting
- women in huge quantities of make up and bling dancing with ribbons, which is skillful, but frankly a bit bloody weird. I keep trying to watch, and keep giving up at the weirdness of it.
- women's gold medal hockey match. Far, far, far too stressful.