Phew. For a moment there I thought I was going to get through a whole week of holiday without managing one single refreshing lie-in. I've slept appallingly badly for the whole week up until today, for no terribly obvious reason (though I suspect I haven't yet adapted to the chillier weather).

Fortunately, I managed a good 'un this morning, so now I feel much better. At least temporarily.

Also managed some work on PuTTY yesterday, which was again the first time I'd had the energy in the whole week. Looks as if I really needed the actual rest… Sadly, despite the feeling of wellbeing and satisfaction that always comes from having done a decent piece of work on something that really matters to me, I felt unaccountably mopey when I went to ejde's party in the evening. Perhaps I was just tired. One or two people, notably lnr, made valiant efforts to cheer me up, which seemed to work quite well at the time, but as soon as I left to go and get some sleep my mood crashed again. Feel pretty much OK today, though, so I suspect it was just tiredness.

Oh, and I've been buying gadgets again; now I've got all these MP3s, I've acquired a SliMP3 (www.slimp3uk.com) to play them through the big speakers in my lounge. This allows me to put music on while I'm lounging on the sofa, without having to get up every forty minutes to physically change the CD; it also allows me to queue several albums in advance and then just sit and vegetate while they play through; and at some point I shall get round to setting up a Radio Indecisive mode in which it plays random stuff constantly. I rather like it :-)

Oh dear. I think people are going to point and laugh at me for a couple of weeks.

Ever since I got my hair cut short three months ago, I've been maintaining it myself with clippers. This has already paid for itself in barber charges, I reckon, and is generally very convenient.

Unfortunately, it does mean I have to keep my mind on the job. To pick an example purely at random: if you cut most of the hair, take the comb thing off the clippers to tidy up the edges, then notice there's a bit at the top you missed, you need to be awake enough to remember to put the comb back on before you go over that bit again.

As a result I now have a small bald spot on one side of my head, which will take a week or two to grow back to a sensible length. Until then I will be forced to look extremely silly, and short of wearing a hat all the time there's nothing I can do about it. :-/