Mike's musings

Not well

Went into work this morning to move out of my office :-(. The colleague who's been on sabbatical is coming back tomorrow, and as we've hired someone since then, and I'm leaving in a month or so's time, it makes sense for me to move out. After that, I went home (pausing only to drop off my assignment at the new ERMC offices - yay!), cos I felt just awful. Last night (as the past few), I woke up very early, and generally slept badly, partly due to having a bad throat, so I was just feeling terrible. Slept for three hours at home, and felt at least vaguely human again (though the throat's still nasty).

Checked email, etc.: Peter's asked me to do an audit next week, but I'm not sure it's going to happen. I need clear days to write them up, and I don't think I'm going to be able to find them: the only possibility is really to go out on Tuesday night, audit on Wednesday and Thursday, fly back Thursday night, and write up on Friday. This leaves very little time for writing up, though, as I fly off to Norway on Monday. I'm not desperately keen anyway, given how much time I'm going to be away, but we'll have to see.

In the evening, Steve, a Financial Advisor, came to talk to us about our finances. We've been meaning to sort them out for ages, and the new job coming up seemed like a good excuse, so he spent some very good time with us, and should have some suggestions for us in a couple weeks.

Still trying to sort out decent email access for Certicom: it's taking a while. On the other hand, my new boss seems very happy with how keen I'm being in setting up my early weeks of the new job.

Jo language update

More on Jo. First, it's interesting to see when and how she pronounces certain words. For instance: why do we always seem to have "'at" for "hat", but she's quite able (and happy) to say "hat". Odd.

Second, she's getting very good at answering questions. Tonight, she's been waking up quite a lot, and, finally, woke up to the extent that we needed to go up. She's been putting her fingers in her mouth today, and we've wondered whether she's been teething. So, when I went up, I asked her if her teeth were hurting, and got a "yes", which I really think she meant. Also, this morning, I came upstairs with tea (for me and Moo) and milk (for Jo), and we sat in bed for a bit. Jo got up to wander round, and Moo asked me whether I'd locked the stairgate. I was pretty sure we had, so I said to Moo, who was on the landing: "Jo, could you see if the gate's closed, please?" I know she knows what the gate is, and, sure enough, she went out to the gate, we could hear her say "stairs", so she knew what was going on, and then she came back. "Is the gate closed, Jo?" I asked, and got the answer "yes". I think it's amazing. And she's still a week off being 16 months old.