I awake fully clothed, sans shoes, face down on a mattress of calico stuffed with porridge, my drool-patch soaking in nicely to combine with the drool-patches of a thousand backpackers before me. In a foolishly improvident move I attempt to lift my head — the action sends my body back to the porridgy embrace of the well-worn mattress, whilst simultaneously dipping my raw brain into a nearby lava-pool. My own heart-beat, pulsing traitor, ticks out the eternity of my agony in a syncopated thumping in my temples — ba-BUH, ba-BUH, ow-OW, ow-OUCH.

I have a theory, admittedly immature, that the human life is punctuated by pivotal events and decisions, nexus points, at approximately prime multiples of years i.e. 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 17, 23 and so on up the prime number series. This means you will have life-changing moments at (for the second prime number) age 3, 6, 12 (puberty?), 15, 18, 21 and so on. Similarly, the higher primes correspond to bigger moments — take the fourth prime, for example, and you get ages 7, 14, 21, 28 and 35.

Dee heard about Singapore! Unfortunately, all she heard was that they’d made an offer to her boss and he rejected it out of hand — crappy pay, no moving expenses, no bonus, who knows? Something about it wasn’t right, and the bossman was obviously convinced that taking that to his team would result in anger, dismay and potentially revolt. So he sent it back up the line, and now we’re waiting another couple of weeks for the next one.

With Chris Kendrick coming to visit, I went ahead and booked a Haggis Tour: Skye High. This should see us travelling around Scotland and Skye on a bus for a few days, with plenty of opportunities for walking (Chris’s idea) and drinking whiskey (my idea), as well as a chance to meet some new people on the bus itself. We’ll stay in backpacker hostels, nice and cheap for the poor Aussie lad, and should get to see some awesome sights – Skye, Loch Ness, Inverness, Culloden Moor, castles, monsters, Celtic battles ahoy!

I’m at work early this morning, sitting around waiting for other people to do stuff (I’ve done everything I need to already!) so we can get somebody to sign off the whole morning as a success. Oh the joy of tech! I’m pretty much convinced that we won’t be going to Singapore now. It just seems to me that Dee’s work is stalling, trying to get a little “natural churn” and have people quit (rather than having to find them new work or give them redundancy payouts).

I spoke to a company in London today; a kind of “first take” on the whole job-hunting thing, for me and the company both I think. They asked some just-barely technical questions, and whilst I answered most with ease, I was feeling nervous and my mind went blank for others (specifically on JDBC, but if you care about that you should probably be reading the other site instead). At the very least I can call it practice — the person I spoke to was non-technical, so I couldn’t ask about the things that are really important to me: open source, GNU/Linux, vi vs.

Danielle’s probably told enough people by now that I can put it up here and let rest of our dear friends know — the “hospital trip” I alluded to in the last post was because Dee suffered a seizure at work one morning. These can have a lot of different reasons and triggers, we found out — stress (she is), pregnancy (we’re not), diet, alcohol, blood-sugar, epilepsy — but spending much of the morning in hospital discounted some and gave more focus to others.

I’m really quite a skeptic, but this last week has me wondering whether bad luck is actually some physical phenomena that I just don’t know about. It has certainly seemed so in the last week – we seem to have caught “bad luck” like most people catch colds, and we’re only just starting to shake it off. First, I got an email back from Canonical/Ubuntu telling me that I didn’t even make a first interview for the Web Engineer role I went for – bummer.

I’ve had such a shitty day at work, nothing to do but have a drink and listen to some tunes, courtesy of Last.fm. Thankfully this means: Beck; Depeche Mode; Yo La Tengo; Bad Religion and more random stuff. It’s not all great, but it’s all good. The wine is a french sauvignon, perfect for the evening meal of trout, steamed vegetables and pan-fried capsicum (red peppers) and spring onion. Oh, and just in case I’m sounding like a complete toss-bag, rest assured that I’m drinking the end of this wine straight from the bottle – no pretensions here, apart from an arguably excessive tendency towards loquacity.

It’s Friday at last, and I couldn’t be happier. Well, actually I could – I’m technically on “backup” this weekend, so there’s a slim chance that I’ll be called to work. It’s not going to be the easiest thing, since I’m going to Glasgow for a ceilidh (is that how it’s spelt?). Lots of drinking, dancing and kilt-wearing. Even better, it’s for Dee’s work so I don’t care if I make a complete fool of myself!