Look yourself in the eyes (a mirror helps) and repeat 100 times:

“I will get a grip”
“I will get a grip”
“I will get a grip”
“I will get a grip”
“I will get a grip”
“I will get a grip”
“I will get a grip”
“I will get a grip”
“I will get a grip”
“I will get a grip”

Ah, f… it! 10 times will have to do.

This morning I lay in bed, half awake, for an hour and twenty minutes – listening to the radio, attempting to convince myself to get up. And now it’s after lunch and I wish I were still there. It’s just the post-holiday blues, I guess.

Willing myself to concentrate on work, now, but my tasks today are all so vague and hard to pin down. If I had a piece of buggy code that needed to work by the end of the day, it would be so much easier to get on with it, but it’s all “research” and all I want to do is go home and stay under the covers for at least a long weekend. I do have a lingering cold (the British climate, or rather, the British attitude to such issues as insulation and ventilation, does not agree with me), but it’s not anywhere bad enough to get me off work. It’s not even really bad enough to use as an excuse for feeling miserable while at work. What’s the point of a cold if you can’t even use it as an excuse for feeling miserable?

Voice in my head: I Guess that’s why They call it the Blues (Elton John)

Well, I’m back. Had a lovely time. The last four days were a bit hazy as we started the whisky tastings some time in the late morning in general, and although I didn’t have much of any one whisky I did have a lot of different ones. I learnt a lot. We had tours of several distilleries (of which, the Aberlour tour is recommended, but be warned that it must be booked in advance), and though I knew roughly what the production process was, and though I have been round distilleries before (granted, I was ten at the time), there were a lot of details to absorb (hm, apt word) – enough to make one’s head swim, even without the occasionally heavy alchohol fumes in the air.

In Dufftown we stayed at a place called Tannochbrae, where we also had dinner every night, a wise decision as the food was heavenly (in fact, the tagliatelle carbonara was so good I ended up having it three days in a row) and reasonable. As a B&B Tannochbrae is soundly recommended, for the food, the rooms, the prices and the hosts.

I have, of course, spent way too much money, but I think it was worth it.

More tidbits will probably follow over the next couple of weeks, but that will have to be all for now.

Voice in my head: Complicated (Avril Lavigne)

Googlism:

Well, I recognise “ragnhild is actually pronounced “robin””, but I wonder what all the other Ragnhilds and the Ragnhilds’ friends and relations are going to make of it…

Now, “ragnhild is buried in crystal lake cemetery” is just alarming (you’d think I’d have noticed?) and if “ragnhild is presently the executive director of the bridge”, I think maybe they ought to have told me.

However, “ragnhild is an amazingly sweet girl” is reassuring.

Voice in my head: Elmer Fudd singing “O Susanna” (“It wained the night and day I weft, the weathew was so dwy”)

Don’t know what all the fuss is about concerning Scottish weather, it’s behaving beautifully at the moment. Blue skies, sun enough to satisfy even the most fanatic fans of Ra. In fact, it’s almost a little too much of a good thing, especially as I left my sunglasses back at the B&B. Luckily the temperatures are quite wintery, I could see my breath this morning. Much more comfortable for traipsing around in.

This is costing me a fortune per minute, so I’ll excuse myself with the well-known (though rarely practiced) opinion that brevity is the soul of wit, and hope you all have as nice a day as I’m having.

Voice in my head: Isn’t it Ironic (Alanis Morisette – backed by frantic typing all around me)

Had lunch in the Willow Tea Rooms today. It was something like a religious experience (no, honestly).

Have to go, the internet cafe is closing, will try to get back here tomorrow…

Apparently today, 19 September, is “talk like a pirate day”. Hm.

Voice in my ear: Les Miserables (complete concert version) on the stereo

Via Theresa, another quiz:

Snake!

I’m the snake print Doc Marten…
I’m a wild child and I live on the edge baby!

Which Doc Marten are you?
(by *coffeebean*)

Which reminds me: I need to look for a new pair of docs in Scotland (they are marginally cheaper, oooh, and maybe I can get them duty-free, too, must check that) I was intending to go for plain black, though, not snakeskin. I’m not sure which model to go for, though. Something like this would do me nicely:

I’d also really like a pair with the Union Jack.

Ahem. Money, money, money. The Union Jacks may have to wait.

Apparently, someone found my site searching for “Disney’s Greatest Hits On Ice” on Yahoo. Huh? I can’t help but feel they must have been disappointed in their original goal. Hopefully they had a laugh before checking another link out. Well, I do have the Disney’s Greatest Hits double CD, maybe I’ve mentioned it at some point?

I’ve seen so many comments about fall coming the last few days. There have been a lot of comments at work, too, and that’s easy enough to explain – but how come the fall feeling has arrived all over Europe and on the other side of the Atlantic at the same time? Maybe it’s just a case of me noticing the comments because I have been having that fall feeling myself?

The change here has been marked. We’ve gone from 20+ degrees to “brr, it’s cold in the shadow” what seems like overnight. It’s great. I’m not a summer-person, in fact, summer is probably my least favourite season (with Spring and Autumn sharing the top spot). I like chilly air. I like rain. I like wind. I like curling up with a book under a blanket, knowing that it is cold and unpleasant outside, but I also rather like going for a walk in all the “unpleasantness”. The one mitigating feature of summer is thunderstorms, but there are too many days of excessive sun and heat. I’m glad it’s almost October.

Autumn is also a much better season for travelling than summer. This is not my attempt at persuading myself because my holidays start Sunday, simply a statement of fact as I see it. There are less people (my misanthropic tendencies have been mentioned before), and the people that are around are more likely to be locals and so A. more fun to talk too anyway and B. more likely to be able to tell you such things as which of the village’s pubs serves the best food, and when (you know those “Good Food Served All Day” signs? They are often inaccurate on several counts). There is also, at least for me, a limit to how warm the weather can be before all I want to do is find an airconditioned room and stay there permanently (or at least until hell freezes over). Whereas the limit to how cold it can be before travelling becomes really uncomfortable lies safely below anything I am likely to get south of the polar circle outside the months of December, January and February (which, you will notice, do not classify as “autumn”). The light, certainly thinking in terms of photography, tends to be more interesting in autumn (or spring), too. In summer, I tend to take my best pictures at dusk, the light at mid-day is too harsh. This is a preference, naturally, and also probably due to my lack of technical finesse as far as photography goes.

Tuesday morning when I got up I realised I was up before the sun (not by much, though) – the sky in the east was almost indecently pink. That was the first sure sign of autumn for me. The other was that chill in the air that makes you catch your breath when stepping out of a warm house.

Looking forward to the trees turning yellow and red. In the meantime:

Voice in my head:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
and sorry I could not travel both
and be one traveller, long I stood
and looked down one, as far as I could
to where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other as just as fair
and having perhaps the better claim
for it was grassy and wanted wear,
though as for that, the passing there
had worn them, really, about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
in leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I saved the first for another day!
Yet, knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh,
somewhere ages and ages hence;
two roads diverged in a wood and I,
I took the one less travelled by
and that has made all the difference.

(Apologies to Robert Frost for inaccuracies in the punctuation, I’m quoting from memory.)

Still tired. Hoping the holiday will set me up nicely, as the autumn and winter will be majorly busy. If not, I may decide to turn into a hibernating animal. I could certainly do with a few days curled up under a duvet doing nothing much at all.

On the bus this morning one girl was reading an essay in English on the British Empire (as far as I could make out) to another girl, in a rather heavy Norwegian accent and a rather penetrating voice. There is a lot to say for audiobooks on the bus, and the fact that it blocks out most other noise is certainly not the least of it. Considering how misanthropic and demophobic I am, it’s quite surprising that I rather like public transport on the whole.

Voice in my head: Narcissus Boy (Alanis Morisette)