Snow dog

• Turns out our dog loves snow. Which is good because we had so much of it here. I can’t remember the last time there was that much snow. And besides yesterday which was treacherous it was all pretty powdery and completely beautiful. There were children sledding down hills and dogs chasing each other around - it was very bucolic. Peg was so fun - jumping straight into play pose every time she stepped outside, catching snowballs in her mouth (whoops - turns out eating cold, cold snow causes diarrhea) and digging down snowmen who deigned to speak to her.
• I’m still not recovered from my cold which sucks. Been feeling pretty worn out and really grateful for our dog walker. Luke was in Amsterdam for the weekend for his company’s annual trip. His flight home has been cancelled leaving their poor HR director (and trip organiser extraordinaire) with a whole not small company of people and partners stranded abroad. Apparently the people who manage team bookings at BA don’t work weekends?!
• Tomorrow at 9am me and a couple of colleagues are giving a presentation to Nikkei colleagues, and my bit will be partly in Japanese. I’m looking forward to it, and a bit nervous and I wish I felt on better form.
• I’ve been getting into graphics web programming a lot recently. I’ve worked on a couple of 3D projects which I’ve really enjoyed and this week I completed Matt DesLauriers’ Creative Coding course on Front End Masters - I really enjoyed learning about shaders, I’ll be going back for the advanced course too. I was always a complete maths lover and a keen art appreciater so graphics always feels like a very happy place to be.
• This week is quite a big week at work. There will be some big discussions which I feel like I need to properly prepare for - I’m still learning that discussions are things that can be prepared for and you can take time out of your working day to do that. I have Thursday off - I originally planned to take Wednesday off too but there’s so much going on in my team at the moment that I didn’t want to miss so I cancelled that. We’ve got Luke’s parents visiting for a few days (he has the week off) and then we’re heading to Sheffield next weekend.
• I finally finished A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. It took me ages to read, and at first I really didn’t think it was very good - I found the writing quite bad in the beginning, but I have to say I warmed to it a lot as it went on. It’s not my subject matter of choice at all (alien species living together aboard a spaceship) and I only read it due to a personal recommendation but I’m glad I read it in the end, and would consider reading the rest of the series. I listened to 1979 by Val McDermid which was fun to listen to something set in a newsroom. I’ve now just started listening to My Year of Rest and Relaxation. I also caught up with War and Peace. Pierre and Dolhokov just had a duel!