Feline sleep deprivation

After a couple of days of the cat serving as a reliable alarm clock (6:30am and 4:20am starts respectively) she let me down today, and I only crawled out of bed at 7:15. Which meant that I didn't get down to the train station until the carriages were sardine-tight at 8:45, even with only ten minutes wasted with post-breakfast internet surfing, and so I didn't get into work until half an hour later than so far this week, this time feeling noisome and claustrophobic from being crammed in with so many other commuters so early in the morning.

If you start the day badly, sometimes it takes a lot of effort to get back on track. I found myself spinning aimlessly, unable to concentrate on anything for long enough to achieve anything meaningful. Eventually I got it together long enough to rearrange some data and make a pleasant looking graph, but those were the sort of things that if I was feeling punchy and full of vim I could have done in five minutes and then asked for more.

However, in a distracted lunch hour, I discovered some improved templates for the blog, which is why the colour scheme has changed from yesterday to today, and now after a year of feeling deprived and worrying that I should really learn how CSS works, it turns out I don't need to; I just needed to download a nice template from a website for free, and Bob's your uncle, or at least the chap who's made your blog have a menu at the top again. Which means I can sigh with happiness. Although I feel a little stupid for not saving a picture of how the blog looked previously so I can compare and contrast.

But you know what? Jesus Saves - I just sit here and wish I had a better backup retention policy.¹

Still, after lunch I battled with Powerpoint for a few hours, discovering new ways for it to reduce productivity, and then rounded off the work day by discovering some depressing things about how computers won't talk to one another when you wish they would. Honestly, it's like my laptop and my colleague's laptop had a big argument ten years ago, and are still refusing to speak. Sigh.

Clearly this, along with the cold weather and not leaving the building for ten hours straight, reduced the energy I was feeling today. After two hours of martial arts this evening I felt a bit better, but I was still tired enough that I was close to tears in Pumpernickel this evening when I had to make difficult decisions about my sandwich (like whether it would be made with white bread or brown). And I'm now tired enough to mistype homophones (like 'weather it would be made') so that's a sign that I should take a rest. Have to be fit for a double-whammy of comedy on Friday and Saturday...

¹ This is a joke that some people working in the I.T. industry might, under certain circumstances, understand. The number of people who will find it funny is, I suspect, a non-commercially viable subset. So it goes.