Back in the office today, after two weeks off. In those two weeks I've managed to do several almost useful things, which is unusual.

I've finally got hold of a gluten-free bread recipe which I'm actually willing to eat for pleasure rather than just using it as breadcrumbs. As a result I've spent most of the last two weeks methodically going through everything I can think of to eat on toast, and eating it on toast.

I've also advanced the remains of my house-sorting-out list, by acquiring a bookcase for my DVDs and hence removing them from their previous location in an unsightly and inconvenient pile in the corner of the dining room floor. This took some work. After searching various furniture shops (both online and off) for the right sort of wall-mounted bookcases, I eventually resorted to Dad's carpentry skills to get a custom bookcase built for me. So last week I went down to visit him for a couple of days (at his suggestion) with the plan that we'd build a bookcase together in his garage. In fact, ‘building it together’ turned out to mean that I mostly held one end of something while he bashed nails into the other end, but I took careful notes throughout the procedure in the hope that I might be able to at least try to build a similar sort of thing myself should I ever need to. Then I brought the newly assembled bookcase home, where I had to varnish it myself and wait another couple of days while two coats of varnish dried, then I screwed it to the wall on Saturday and filled it with DVDs. I'm unreasonably pleased with the result given how little of the work I actually did.

Aside from those, there was some geeking (some useful, some potentially profitable, some thoroughly silly) and some helping of other people get useful things done. I feel almost entirely satisfied with the way my holiday has gone, apart from the fact that I feel somewhat tired now it's over!