Work sucks.
No, I guess its not really that bad. Same complaint the world over. Just a few annoying co-workers throwing sand in the bearings, so they'll get noticed. At the last place it was my boss's role, before that it was co-workers. The current fun involves one of the junior management trying for a power grab. They are trying to get one of their associates to take over the work of mine "to help out" as this is the aspect of my work that gets the most recognition. Amazingly our department boss put his foot down (eventually) and halted the stupidity. Yay!
As a break from the fussin' and fightin' today was also school day, so an hour at the "language club". These have improved immeasurably since we lost our "facilitator". Today's teacher was Lucy who has a confusing un-Beijinglike accent and who is awful at pinyin but is great at encouraging us to learn characters. The textbook has very little in the way of character tuition so this is very welcome. I still have to reliably remember 100 so I have a very long way to go.
Anyway, I have the flight booked so I'm off to cousin Mary's wedding in Ballyroan next month. Maybe I'll finally get down to Tullamore to see the mob there. I haven't been in the country since I interviewed at UCC, and UCD before that. Thankfully I caught up a little when Ger visited a short while ago and sundry uncles and aunt descended upon S.F. on some kind of wine tour/debauch. It'll be a similar kind of game when another cousin gets hitched in Mayo in December. The Brother makes the trip over there quite frequently and amazes me of tales of speeding across on various vessels. I used to hate the 9 hour trip on the cattle boat from Liverpool. Ain't the modern world wonderful.I've been watching Crackingura: the loyal 47 monkeys which I had only previously seen in bits and pieces. It moves surprisingly fast for a 3 hour fillum - much better than the Star Wars nonsense (you need sandwiches and a flask of tea to survive that).
I am reading a variety of different things at the moment. For relaxation I am tending towards Kahlil Gibran. There's some examples of his works here, here and here. He was one cool dude.
[Can I use unicode characters?]