State of the Nation

I've not posted here for a while, which is a bit of a contrast to last year's blog fest. So what's been happening. Well, I've been intermittently not so well lately, and indeed I'm not at the moment with some weird aural effects which have been going on for three days now.

It took me a while to work out what's happening but the main problem seems to be that my right ear is pre-processing what it hears so it sounds like I'm listening to a short wave broadcast. This is all a bit disturbing as I had different, but vaguely similar effects after my stroke back in 2002 and pretty much all my neurological damage is on my right side.

Probably partially because of this my sleep pattern is completely to cock at the moment. For example I was on the sofa from 02:45 to 05:15 this morning surfing the Net because I couldn't sleep.

But I've not been ill all the time over the last few weeks and even when I've been ill I've at least been planning so when I finally was able to get on with the latest round of programming work for one of my customers it all went very well. Most of it has now been delivered and they seem pretty happy with it. So that's good.

Meanwhile Beth's been to Glenmoor Lodge again on a "winter skills" course: essentially how to go hillwalking in the snow, so crampons, goggles, hard hat, and ice axe.

That left Jake and I had a week on our own. I'd bought an up market pedometer just before Beth left so spent the week keeping my step count above 10,000 a day. That's easy to do when you're doing two dog walks a day and walking to Tesco to stock up with food every other day, plus Wrestlers but not so easy when you're ill like today when I've only managed just over 4,000 steps.

But I did do 19,000+ on Sunday walking to Lode with Jake so it's swings and roundabouts.