Portrait of myself today, on the day the United States of America inaugurate their first black president. This post will probably be more valuable to me in years to come than anyone else right now, but never mind...

I'm tired tonight. I mean physically tired, not mentally. Reading this back to myself if I just wrote "I'm tired" I'd assume mentally fatigued, as that seems to be my ground state.

I'm suffering a mild cold but it's nothing serious. I'm unseasonably upbeat about work; for anyone looking forward, predictably but conciously disorganised, but improving. Tomorrow I have my annual review. I ate Quorn Korma tonight, one of my (very few) signature meals. I'm about to make the mistake of leaving the dishes until the morning.

I'm in my third year occupying the NM queue and currently making a concious effort to get through it. On sunday I spent several hours on the effort; first, beating some of my packages into shape; then, looking at my outstanding questions. Tellingly I found the latter much more rewarding than the former. I'm also going through one of my seasonal "why do I do this" moments with Debian, perhaps not coincidentally whilst we are mired in a freeze for an overdue release. More on that in another post.

I had a flat viewing this morning, one last night and another scheduled for thursday night. I'm living in "cosy" a one-bedroom flat with a nice view and terrible heating.

I'm about to go to bed and pick up my current novel, "the Family Trade" by Charles Stross. As it's a fantasy novel, I can kid myself that I've broken out of the habit of reading Science Fiction novels (this after finishing Crichton's "State of Fear", an undeniably SF novel that sits in the mainstream literature shelves of just about every book shop). I shall probably write and publish book reviews for "State of Fear", "The Family Trade" and "Accelerando" (another Stross, thank you AJ) at some point.