Diary update

What I've been doing lately:

- Having a migraine. I'm a total newbie to the joys of migraines, and I get them pathetically mildly, but all the strange visual disturbance stuff is present and correct, so they still count. Each one has been a little worse than the previous one, so perhaps I should start looking into triggers. Not that anything comes to mind.

- Reading. I've just finished book 4 of Dorothy Dunnett's House of Niccolo series, so am exactly half way through. Quite apart from the story it tells, I'm finding it really interesting historically. It's wandering into much less familiar territory than the Lymond series, covering (so far) Trebizond, Cyprus and various routes to Timbuktu, as well as the more familiar Flanders and Italy. I've also been reading The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes, about science in the Romantic era.

- Writing up Minutes. It's AGM season in our Morris sides, and I always get the task of writing minutes, since I always reflect the mood of the meetings by recording the jokes and asides and tangents as well as the boring stuff. It requires constant writing during the meeting to record all these things, though, and takes a good few hours to write them up afterwards.

- Games: Pellinor and I are still playing quite a bit of Left 4 Dead together. A new official campaign came out, with lots of new achievements to earn in Versus mode, so we've been playing on opposing sides, trying desperately to wipe each other out. Alone, I'm still half-heartedly playing Icewind Dale 2 - although it turned obsessive a few days ago when I started playing Battle Square, a game within the game that calls for one of your party to kill 250 monsters in single combat. Luckily, you get prizes along the way that help with the really hard ones later. While I was playing, officially the Best Things in All the World were:
- A Club of Disruption
- A narrow door that really big bads couldn't get through
- The reload button

And tomorrow we're off to see Bellowhead. Yay!

Signs of a mis-spent youth

Signs that you play too many computers games, number 17:

You spend a few hours at work browsing a list of new books. Although you've used only your mouse hand, you find that your other hand is aching. You realise that you've spent the entire time with your left hand tense and ready on the keyboard - middle finger hovering over the W, ready to run forward; index finger on the R, ready to reload your gun; ring finger on Tab, to highlight loot and doors and to tell you how injured your enemies are; and thumb ready to hit Space to pause the game life if any monsters suddenly leap out at you while you're ordering books.