A work in progress, DECLARE @@ID INT, ships in the night

Secret! Mustn't tell! I'm working on a new picture for the side post. A surprise for the penguin when he gets back! Just because someone/somepenguin trusts you with the passwords to their blog does not mean that you shouldn't use the privilege for your own devilish ends. :) I will of course feel very guilty about this flagrant abuse of trust and will be suitably contrite for days, possibly even weeks! Guilty, I can do very well indeed.

The penguin and little Fricka - a study in calm and contentment. We'll have to wait and see how it turns out. Actually it's more "Da Da, FISH! NOW!..............Pleeease!"

I've been up to my eyeballs in code these past days, missed deadlines, staring blurry eyed at a screen full of VB, SQL and bugs (lots of bugs :) wondering why it won't do what I want it to do :) In trying to make it as foolproof and easy for the staff to use, I'm tying myself in knots trying to work out all the ways someone could screw up an online form ("Never underestimate the stupidity of the human race", F Zappa Esq) and still have the system not throw an error. As an exercise in lateral thinking, it doesn't come much more tricky. Oh alright, it does but this is quite bad enough for a lame-brain like me.

Do you ever wonder how you managed to end up in the situation you're in? Was it a combination of all sorts of different decisions or can you trace it all back to one defining moment when the worldlines bifurcated and you went happily (?) down one path while the rest of the universe went down another? I'm pretty much of the opinion that those 'fateful moments' don't exist. Where you are now is a result of a myriad of small decisions, tiny little forking paths, and trying to disentangle them is a useless exercise, except...........

I took a break from the domestic codeface today and wandered off for a pizza. I do not, unusally for my line of work, indulge in pizza that much but I just fancied a fiorentina and as luck would have it, a pizzeria of exactly the selfsame name stands not fifteen minutes walk from my little abode. Convenient, no? Now on the whole, I dine alone at lunchtime. A brief respite from my colleagues is most welcome, not that I do not wish to lunch with them but conversation is invariably about work and lunch is the only time when you can forget about work for a wee while during the day and so I take the opportunity to switch off for an hour or so; a book, the Times crossword and a fish finger sarnie. Not that I am generally left alone for very long but that is altogether another, not in any way unpleasant, matter. :)

So I'm sitting, staring out of the window, nursing my bottle of Peroni (you cannot have pizza and not have beer; it's like copulation with no foreplay, beef Wellington and no Nuits St Georges, Windows Vista and no crashes) when I started thinking about why I was sitting there. Ridiculous, I know, but sometimes the neurons fire in mysterious ways and I've learned to 'run with them'. So why was I sitting in a little suburban pseudo-Italian pizzeria, staffed by Spaniards.

Strangely I started thinking back to that fateful day many years ago when the telephone rang at 10:00 am on a Sunday morning and I, foolishly, crept from bed to answer it. "Good morning", a 'cheery' voice said (obviously someone who does not appreciate the joys of a long lie in and sex over a cup of coffee and a croissant on a Sunday morning), "We'd really like to offer you the job!" Now I'd had five months of post redundancy 'blues' but then, and now, it seems I had two choices. (1) I'm not working for some damn fool cretin who thinks telephoning prospective employees at 10:00 am on a Sunday is a sensible idea or (2) the mortgage is crippling and the money is starting to run out; I could use the work. Needless to say, you can guess which route my sleep befuddled brain took :)

I often wonder whether if I had just told the idiot to 'naff off and telephone at a civilised time' my life would have been so much different than it turned out to be? Would I still be making love on a Sunday morning with the same luscious redhead? Would I have ever have bumped into another (later) partner on the train station, going to work, and thought, "mmm"? Would Mugwump have woken from sleep to wonder in awe what all that cold, white stuff was? Would I have ever learned to code and bedazzle idle onlookers with the sheer geekiness of it all. Unlikely!

So, thank you Steve! You did not intend it but I have had some wonderful times along the way, as well as some pretty depressing ones, met some wonderful people and some pretty awful ones and seen places that may have remained hidden for ever. If you had known what you were doing, would you have still done it? Probably. You were sure as hell dumb enough!

And to all those people that I didn't meet, sorry! Maybe I just burnt your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents' village when I was Atilla the Hun!