Long day

Today was another long day. I got up at six, jogged slowly round the block and then ran up the hill away from the freeway through Bellevue. The hills in Bellevue are a bit bigger than the ones in Singapore, and having to do six repetitions of this was tough. By the fifth time up the hill, I was feeling beaten, and on the sixth my legs felt empty, devoid of strength. I got to the top of the hill but I was a busted flush; I trundled back down the hill, did another lap of the block to warm down, and then went and cleaned myself up for the day.

I know that running up hills is good for me, but it's hard that they have to be so hard. I suppose it woke me up.

After forty minutes of hurting myself in sweat-wicking fibres, it was time to spend an hour battling with an interface for Google's advertising tools. That was a lovely thing to set myself up for the day, a vaguely enraging burst of activity that eventually put me in the mood for going to the office and shouting at spreadsheets instead.

Yesterday my laptop had given up the ghost on me, and today a man came to fix it by installing more RAM. He unscrewed the back and saw that the reason it's been playing up was that the existing RAM had never been clipped in properly to begin with. An underpaid worker in a factory in Shenzhen had missed that at some point, but I didn't mind: now I've got a laptop with a ridiculous 8 Gb of memory, and it doesn't take five minutes to warm up in the morning any more. Of course, it felt a lot quicker when I first had it - give it six months and it will be juddering to a halt again.

So my computer's upgraded and I'm vaguely downgraded from running up a hill multiple times. The afternoon was a bit tough - I got lots achieved, but because I was in the same room as somebody when I asked them a question. It's annoying that email doesn't work, whereas getting on a plane and travelling for 28 hours does. And it shouldn't be that way. Blessed with an English accent, it should be easier for people to understand what I write than what I say, and I can't believe it's the force of my winning personality that makes people do what I ask.

Maybe they just want me out of their offices, and are doing their level best to make me leave.

Blessed as I am with towering self esteem, it takes a lot to get rid of me, but by seven-thirty I'd clung limpet-like to the office just a little too long. I went back to the hotel, stopping to buy some Incredible Athletic Powder on the way (and a comb), desperate to have a bath and wind down.

In a hurry, I went to the bar to get a quick meal, and then because of a kitchen snafu had a half hour wait for a pizza. So the day elongated just that little bit more. Still, they filled me up with freshly made ginger beer (curiously made from 7-Up and angostura bitters) so it wasn't so bad, I suppose. I wonder if tomorrow will be shorter.