What I did at the weekend

Firstly, congrats to k425 and Rapunzel on the arrival of k425sbug! I was in the pub when hoiho texted to let me know, so apologies to k425 for what might have been (I can't remember!) a drunk and incoherent SMS...

Now, let's see, where did I get to? Ah, yes -- hoiho, sion_a and I went to see Waiting for Godot at the ADC on Thursday night. It was mostly very good; review to follow, if I remember.

I did another shift at Oxfam Books on Friday morning. Spent a lot of the time learning how to tell from the labels whether records are worth money or not -- Claire (experienced volunteer-type-person who knows a fair bit about records) was trying to teach Diana (deputy manager) how to do this, and I was initially just hovering and listening out of general interest (and lack of anything else to do), but I ended up getting very interested in it and doing a fair amount of the work.

After finishing at the shop I went for lunch with hoiho, and we then spent most of the afternoon drinking coffee and pottering around town together, before he finally really had to set off back to Scotland for another week. Lovely to spend the afternoon with him but sometimes I feel like we spend all our time saying goodbye to each other. <sigh>

As I was walking aimlessly back towards town, trying to shake the feeling that someone had switched off all the lights in my mind, an old lady who was clearly in some distress accosted me and begged me to help her -- she'd left her mother (who was over 90) sitting "on a metal bench somewhere" while she went to Sainsburys, but now couldn't remember where the bench in question was, except that she thought it was near Marks & Spencer. I walked back in that direction with her ("it's no problem, I'm going that way anyway", I half-lied -- well, I wasn't going anywhere in particular, might as well have been going that way as any other) while trying to keep her calm, and eventually, fortunately, she spotted her mother wandering around outside Superdrug.

I don't believe in Fate (though she may believe in me), but it seemed strangely ... serendipitous? provident? ... that this lady needed someone to help her find her way around physically at just the same moment when I needed something to give me a mental sense of direction.

Not that the sense of direction lasted long. I got home and paced fitfully around the house for a while, messed about online for a bit, before finally deciding that I couldn't face any of the parties I'd been invited to in Cambridge (apologies to all concerned), and I wasn't going to achieve anything other than making myself miserable if I either tried to go to them or stayed at home on my own, and instead I was going to go to Oxford to see barnacle and Kate, and hopefully sample the beer festival while there.

( Oxford girl )

Got back to Cambridge very tired some time after 9pm, ate Chinese takeaway and watched HIGNFY with sion_a, then went pretty much straight to bed.

In work today. Tired, and wishing I didn't have to be here.

It's a small world and it smells funny

Right, time to clear up who's who, and say HELLO, PEOPLE:

cleanskies, who I definitely hadn't met (at least not properly) before, because I would have remembered. Appears we already have lots of friends in common...

triskellian and smiorgan, who I'm sure I have already seen somewhere about before, possibly while I was hanging around on the fringes of OUSFG/RPGSoc.

award, whom I've seen around on wimborne's journal.

klepsydra, who I have met elsewhere.

Nice to meet you all, to put names to faces, to discover mutual friends, and to collapse my world by another n degrees of wassname. :-)

When Aspergers attack

Next time I don't understand something Perl-related, remind me not to ask for help from people who will just tell me "Well I don't see any problem, it's just [three lines of line noise]".

Conversely, if people want to make me feel too stupid to live, they know just how to go about it. As usual.

* * *

I'm sick and tired of trying to tiptoe around the neuroses of geeks who don't know how to interact with other people, only to get sneered at when I don't know how to do something programming-related. From now on I don't think I'm going to bother trying.