*sigh*

Time is slipping away from me. It's August again, and it seems not all that long ago that it was August last year. My life is ticking and I'm not convinced I really feel as if I've accomplished very much while it's been whizzing past.

A year and a half ago, I decided that what I really wanted was to have enough money to work at most part-time so I could do what I considered to be really useful stuff the rest of the time. I hoped that this might be achieved if my share options did good things this year, and I also hoped it might be doable if Vicky and I were still attached once both of us were earning. Now my share options are, well, perhaps not completely worthless but I haven't recently had the heart to feed ARM's current share price into my spreadsheet to see just how little they'd net me; and I'm single, so Plan B is kaput. The prospect of being able to do any decent quantity of free software in the near future is pretty much down the tubes, in favour of all my time continuing to be taken up with a Red Queen-like struggle just to stay in the same place.

This year, in fact, my major "achievement" in the field of non-work things has been to stop trying to answer all the PuTTY mail. Now this was clearly a necessary action and quite possibly something I should have got round to last year or even before, but it doesn't make me feel particularly as if I've made great strides in my chosen life goals.

Hence, *sigh*, in general.

DISCLAIMER: I have been sleeping badly for the last week owing to heat, humidity and hayfever (roughly in alternation) and so this entry will probably not reflect my general level of optimism once I've had a decent lie-in and feel like a human being again. Normal service will be resumed shortly. Move along, nothing to see here.