A friend of Michele's sister runs a tea shop called "Tea Ja Vu". We were invited to have dinner with them on Sunday, and so Michele and I prepared Strawberry Panna Cotta from a recipe found on one of Michele's favourite food blogs.
(I wish my photo looked like this)
Unfortunately we never got to go to dinner, so I was left with seven of these in the fridge.
Woe is me :P
I mentioned it before, but my sister bought a 15" PowerBook. I'm still insanely jealous, but at least I got to play with it last night. I took my trusty 12" PowerBook over loaded with software and set her up with everything she needs, and took her through how to use it.
She had this huge grin on her face the entire night :)
I recently went on the MacOS 101 Mac OS X Support Essentials v10.4 training course. Then last week I got a sponsorship offer to attend the MacOS 310 Mac OS X Deployment v.10.4 training course. Unfortunately, by the time that everything was organised and approved it was too late. There is still the possibility to attend the MacOS 200 Mac OS X Server Essentials v10.4 training course. If all goes according to plan, I should be able to get into this one, which should be good although the Deployment course may have been more useful. My copy of Apple Remote Desktop finally came. It's a little buggy in places (what isn't), but it is very shiny, and very useful. It really helps with the day to day administration of the Macs in the department.
I've decided that the next computer I buy will most likely be a 15" PowerBook. I'm looking to get it around mid next year, all things going well. Perhaps by then the new Intel based PowerBooks will be out too. Either way, I'm looking forward to it.
I'm not sure, but I think the recent overload might have been something more than just too many annoying people bugging me during a busy time. I've achieved a lot between then and now, and now that the busy season is over (with good results!) I can sit back and look at the work that I've done and be at least happy with how it came together. But even then, it feels that I'm more aware of the issues that I though I'd resolved a long time ago. I'm not feeling as depressed about them as before, but they're definitely sticking in my mind. More and more I feel that it isn't going to get better, so I should move on.
And then I get a phone call which makes me even more confused...
I've been doing okay at work, changing my work personality to fit in better with the others, but the little annoyances are still there, and still affect me. I was dealing with it fairly well until last week. While the work isn't stressful or hard, the constant distractions are preventing me from finishing (or even doing) the large important tasks. In two weeks, I hadn't finished a single one of those tasks (except maybe reimaging the lab machines - but that was fraught with problems of its own).
The straw that broke this camels back was the constant demands from certain a academic to resolve a problem that they were having with one of their applications. That was okay on its own, but it took one and a half weeks to get done because the academic concerned for some reason didn't want to try the suggestions that I was making. The constant harrasment and mild abuse during this time, on top of all the other petty demands and distractions from other academics that end up taking up so much of my time, finally wore me down on Tuesday. I snapped, and took the rest of the day off. And the next two days as well, for good measure. I came back to work yesterday (Friday) more relaxed than I have been for a long time. I even managed to knock one of those big and important tasks off my list. But during those two and a half days off, I came to the conclusion that I need a holiday.
Excluding weekends (because they're usually busy in their own right), I've not recently had a chance to take some time off and just do my own thing. In fact, if I think about it, I haven't actually had a proper break for ages. I was sick the week between jobs and for the Pemberton trip, and I was stressed over financial matters over the Christmas Break. The last real chance for relaxation came with the trip to Sydney last February. So I'm thinking about putting in for some leave after I've finished my list of Things That Must Get Done.