Freedom From The Mundane

Humuhumunukunukuapua’a

Image: A Humuhumunukunukuapua’a fish

At one point on Wednesday I sent out a tweet that read “I’m having a great day!” And it was: I was rocketing through my project work at the day job, solved two complicated high priority system problems, and was on a general high from all the progress I’d made with my writing. Things were going great.

After doing some scheduled overtime in the evening I was winding down for the day after having got through some poetry drafts kicking around, when at 10pm my phone rang. That was the moment everything changed. It was a call out from work—things had gone bad during someone else’s change slot. The overnight processing was knackered and our entire Indian outfit was unable to work. It was about as bad as things can get in my support area.

The upshot was I ended up dealing with a team of other technicians at work over the landline and IM, and some bloke from the support company in the States who was calling me on my mobile. It never got resolved until 3:30am yesterday morning by which point I was totally exhausted having work nigh on 20 hours on the trot.

I took Thursday off to recuperate and yesterday was quite a nice day in the end, as I sank a couple of pints of Guinness in the Mercat Bar up the west end with some pals from work. Then I topped that off with a Chinese meal and a film with my daughter: The Pink Panther, her first foray into the works of Mr Peter Sellers.

I headed up town this morning to collect my new glasses—the second time of doing so since the last time they knackered the lenses during the manufacturing process. This time they managed to send back the correct lenses but the wrong frames! Apparently the designs had all changed mid-week but the order codes all remained the same. More waiting time, but my party specs got straightened out so I’m wearing them meantime.

Edinburgh centre was pretty tense when I left it after a quick coffee and read of the paper. There’s supposed to be a march by the Scottish Defence League, which is being countered by a Scotland United rally in protest. It promises to be a tense affair but has given me some ideas for a story. I already penned a poem about it while I was in the coffee shop.

Apparently the national fish of Hawaii is the Humuhumunukunukuapua’a. (Pronounced humu-humu-nooku-nooku-ap-u-wah-ah). Cool, eh?

To today: house tidying, family time, writing, relaxing. Till tomorrow—peace out!

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