I go online, and my breath catches in my chest until I hear three little words: You’ve got mail.

it was the last week of my birthday month. thank you for the secret luck wishes, they’ve helped me take unexpected holiday and ride around afghanistan on my horse with my dog and eat tacos. i’d like a little more, if you have some to spare.

the week was nice enough. i visited the office. had dinner with becky avery on the 40th floor. great hummus. the vegetarian duck was a filthy bitter mushroom but everything else was delicious. except the creamed spinach tasted like fish. but the mashed potato was wow good, and the brocolli.

zippy the zip came visit and i made white girl tacos with ground beef and taco seasoning and the old el paso crunchy shells. my mother and me used to make that when everyone else was out of town, we’d get one of those old del paso boxes and a lettuce and some chicken and then we’d sit on the floor and eat it. that’s the only times i really remember us eating dinner with the TV off.

another good meal today too. we went out for eid for dinner and my waiter told my girlfriend i looked like a dead pakistani woman. great tagine. what else is there?

what else is there

i’m tired, a little nervous, everything’s gonna be okay. tomorrow we must all shower and eat well and worship the sun.

p.s.

maybe Greg Kinnear had a point, in his opening lines of 90s romcom You’ve Got Mail:

Listen to this: the entire work force of the state of Virginia had to have Solitaire removed from their computers because they hadn’t done any work in six weeks.

You know what this is, you know what we’re seeing here? We’re seeing the end of Western civilization as we know it.

Name one thing that we’ve gained from technology. One thing.

You think this machine’s your friend, but it isn’t.

had a really big week. helped with a docs day at work, had notepads made. everybody involved did a great job and we had lots of fun.

had a couple of lovely days and evenings with the little birdie.

made doogh and sparkly pink with my drinkmate omnifizz.

running around robbing banks all whacked out on scooby snacks.

more later. wish me luck.

a lot happening at work at the moment. let’s wait and see.

the data powered spiral to the bottom. imagine doing something because you thought it was a good idea. not anymore. now you need data to back it up. but if you want to do something brand new, something without precedent, what do you do? look at data for similar projects? well there’s no such thing as similar when it comes to magic. and things that work are magic. survey people? well it’s very difficult to communicate an idea. sometimes the only way to communicate it is to show it, but then it already has to exist. so what on earth are we going to do? we can’t just keep repeating these aesthetic copies of what went before. this can’t be all there is.

i feel a bit sick, maybe i ate some bad fish. thursday was a long day, but it was so beautiful at the end. it’s nice to walk around and have a little burrito and walk around. zips handed over my birthday present. imported from italy. it’s a dolce & gabbana bialetti french press. it’s fantastic. i haven’t received many birthday presents in my life from people i’m not yet related to. i’ve had so many coffees from it already.

i’d forgotten how strong a psychological boon it is to have such a clean and shiny home. it stays with you everywhere, even when you are walking around outside.

rejoice!

zaina came over and we did a deep clean of my apartment. truly it is the springtime. it was a wonderful time. one of my favourite weekends. my apartment is twice the square footage now. i almost get bored walking from one side of the room to the other, because there is so much space in here. perhaps a little too eager in getting rid of superfluity. i no longer own an oven glove or a toothbrush. but it’s worth it. it’s like i’ve just moved in. maybe i’ll throw everything else away too. what a lovely birthday. birthmonth. did you know it’s the anniversary of my birthyear? very sleepy, very sleepy.

you’re swell.

double digits.

good night.

zeezy is kent, hi zeezy!

so am i! hi rabbit! happy birthday!!!

i’m so relaxed, and i smell like pigs. we went to kent to brush a goat. the sheep were so nice to meet. especially rupert, who is a very nice sheep. very soft. really dig your hand in there and scrunch around. he’s made of wool and he likes it. it’s fun having pigs eat snacks from around your feet. it was one of the warmest weekends on record. the alpacas were nice too. hopefully they will make for the cover to pet sounds.

not the weather i mean. that’s probably obvious.

we met a lovely horse later, on the way back to our airbnb. it came right up and said hello. zaina made us a lovely ulster fry for breakfast. and we had assam with milk. everything that hapepned was very good.

a lot of the week was spent tidying up. this week will too. time to start eating only cucumbers. spring is here. zaina bought me flowers. they are very beautiful and blooming on my kitchen table. it’s nice to have flowers around. i’ve been speaking to them and feeding them and feeling their petals. and picking off anything that’s changed colour to look death.

really enjoying the sound recently of how whatsapp degrades recorded music. i would happily listen to an album of whatsapp-downsampled tracks. feel free to make one. i’ll listen.

thanks to everyone who beeped the beepulator last week, i enjoyed beeping with you.

thanks as well to whoever keeps listening to my music on spotify. i get little e-mails every now and again that tells me what people are listening to and that’s very nice to read.

sorry to everyone who has text me + i haven’t replied. i’m so bad at texts now. i see all the red circles, they’re on my mind.

we’re on the train now, almost home. will be so cozy to be in bed.

yay.

x

they say
this is the city
the city of angels
all i see is dead wings

ok let’s go

what has been going on? big week for snacks. not a big week for getting out of bed and going around the world. maybe next week can look like that?

zeezy is in Oman, hi zeezy!

lots of progress on littlebook. made a little music too. appeared indirectly on the front page of hackernews. lots of phone calls. my bed contains 3 stringed instruments, 2 guitar pedals, 2 synthesizers and a microphone. i’ve gotta go for a walk. i’ll do that now. see you in 20 minutes or so.

tick tock.

there’s nothing but bears and deer out there! and sainsburys prawn sandwiches with tasty seeds in the bread. that’s a good sandwich right there. would anyone like a cup of tea? i’d love a cup of tea. you know what? i’m going to make tea.

water and beasts

been a while since i was out there on all those slippery black rocks with the salty greens and the little snippers sneaking out the gaps and the water crashing into bursts of violent white foam across ones little feeties. gotta get out there soon. the salt and and the seaweed. yum yum yum. lay down on the ground and get splashed on. wake up in the water. play some cards, light a fire, long trip home.

we’re going to visit some animals in Kent next week for my 58th birthday or whatever it is I am now. 23? i’m going to brush a goat, in any case. i’ll be brushing that goat. remind me that we need to bring cucumber sandwiches.

handing you a teabag and saying there you go, you get yourself a wee drink.

i just spent so much time building this little beepulator. i hope that you enjoy using it. the javascript was nothing, but i got really lost in the css for a while. nothing like a good time. i suppose i should make it so my RSS feed just tells you there has been a new post, but not actually include the content. because much of my posts are web-only, and won’t work in a lot of RSS readers.

made the mistake of looking at tomorrow’s work calendar. now i’m hungry. i’ll add some features to lima which i’m now using to configure my computer with docfiles to finally maybe replace my insane emacs docfiles config. one day perhaps i will even be able to free myself from emacs. it needs a few features:

• storing blocks and values as variables
• variable interpolation
• os-specific blocks
• (maybe) executing shell scripts
• running on a bunch of files with shared context

but more importantly:

• eggs
• eggs 
• eggs
• eggs

neat squeakers

nice sneakers

good speakers

let’s sleep