*sigh* This cold is really starting to get me down.

It wouldn't be nearly so bad if it wasn't disturbing my sleep so much; and worst of all, it's carefully doing it in antiphase with my working week. So for most of the week, I've been deeply asleep when the alarm went off at eight, and thereby lost the sleep I would otherwise have had; and yet today, when I really needed to do the same thing sans alarm so I could have a good lie-in and recover some of the loss, I wake up at 7:30 and have no chance of dropping off again. Arrrgh.

On the continuing theme of *sigh*, I have a nasty feeling I'm becoming boring. (Or perhaps more boring, I suppose, if you already found most of the things I like uninteresting.)

My recurring life theme over the last year and a half has been to try to find enough hours in the day to be able to do my job, PuTTY or other free-software stuff, have a social life, and get some sleep. Having lived on that basis for some time now, I'm starting to find that when people ask me how I am my answer almost always takes a form like, if I'm at work, "Not too bad; looks as if I might get something done by the end of the day"; or if I'm not at work, "Pretty good. Did something useful [invariably meaning free software] over the weekend, which always puts me in a good mood". My life is filled from wall to wall with work, free software, and socialising, and the result of this is that when I socialise I'm finding myself increasingly devoid of things to talk about except work or free software (and the work side of that always comes down to Dilbertesque management tales, because the technical side is usually inaccessible to anyone without four years' background at my company). And that range of conversational topics even bores me, never mind what it must do to anyone who finds themselves talking to me.

It's not so bad when I get asked how I am, since what I've been doing recently is liable to be an integral part of the answer to that almost by definition, and anyone asking that question has taken responsibility for receiving the answer no matter how tedious it might be. But when I find myself at parties with people I don't know, I start to realise just how much I've lost touch with anything outside these narrow fields of geekery, because I end up racking my brains for bits of conversation and discarding one after another after another due to excessive geekness.

I'm starting to think that finding enough hours in the day to do work, free software and socialise isn't enough; it would be good if I could also arrange to do something likely to be interesting to the casual listener, so I'd have something to talk about in polite company and have a chance of it staying polite. The very thought makes me think "arrgh, where will I find the time?", of course...