a sad state of affairs

This time last week I was planning that today would be spent sitting in the garden and seeing what I could do about developing a tan. Alas, it was not to be.

For one thing, there was the weather, which drizzled all morning and is still a bit humid. Even more significantly, there was also the series of last-minute minor changes which had to be made to the experimental procedure which I'm scheduled to unleash on some (paid) volunteers on Monday. It was ready on Friday, as I thought, to show to someone for a second opinion, and that wasn't exactly painless either. But by Friday lunchtime I had a list of these supposedly minor things to fix, a list which just kept growing, and right now I'm too scared to calculate just what proportion of the past week I've spent down in the basement lab, deprived not so much of natural light as fresh air, twiddling things in various pieces of software which I'm not even particularly confident about using, and negotiating room bookings and when and where to meet the kind folks who're due to lend me their language-related skills for the purposes of this research project.

Upshot: maybe once I've caught up on sleep and reading I'll be back at the blogging keyboard. But this also seems a good time to flag up the growing pressure to allocate my energy to other things & places ... all I can say is, sign up with bloglines and you'll get notified when I add something here ... which hopefully won't too seldom, cos blogging is fun, but I better not promise, because stamina never was one of my strong points =)