Angry man in a coffee shop

Today I went over the road to Starbucks, which was so exciting I completely forgot and if you'd asked me five minutes ago if I left the office, I would have sworn blind I was at my desk all day long.

Lazy Tuesday

We stayed up much too late last night, which meant that today was an utter struggle from start to finish. I crawled out of bed at seven, bumped around the flat and then rushed off to work for a call at eight o'clock, but I'd forgotten to give the person I was having a call with the conference number, so that meant another ten minutes when I could have been in bed, asleep. Curse my disorganisation.

Saving money: #1 Drinking Lattes

One common piece of personal financial advice is to stop drinking lattes. If every day you're paying $4 for a latte, over the course of a year you've forked out more than $1,400. Does that make you wake up a bit?

My dogged determination

Today I had a presentation to make to about fifty people across the region. Unfortunately in typical dog-ate-my-homework style, all the data I was depending on was incomplete, wrong, or just plain unavailable. And what I did have left to show people seemed to have become invisible, so my nicely formatted ten slide Powerpoint presentation ended up as a sloppily formatted five slide presentation, which made me look like a halfwit. I did notice afterwards that the person controlling the slideshow had managed to skip past at least one slide without me noticing, which only added to the idiocy I felt.

However, I did salvage some pride by putting this picture of a Spitz at the end of my presentation, at which point people seemed to overlook the preceding pages of bilge, and start asking me why I'd chosen a dog rather than a cat.

Do you really know my name? My relationship with Starbucks

Because I have some fairly clear personality defects, I have a spreadsheet, and that spreadsheet logs how much money I've given to Starbucks since October of last year. Every latte, every mushroom pocket, every blueberry muffin, recorded there.

Well, not every muffin. That would be ludicrous; anal retentive I might be, but I've only got as far as recording how much I've spent. Life's too short to record everything in a spreadsheet.

Perking up

The past two days have been much more enjoyable. No longer have I been having mandatory fun; instead, we've been spending our time looking at fish, either live, in the aquarium, or nearing death, at the fish market.

Only 54 weeks until Christmas!

It was a struggle to get up this morning, and it was with rubbery legs that I walked to the tram stop. Damn that stupid run. Next weekend I'll take the bike out instead (and after a year and a half of not cycling, I expect I'll really benefit from having fresh legs on my 40k jaunt around Lantau).