It was back to work today, after a four day weekend (thanks to a Bank Holiday Monday and a day’s leave on Tuesday).

Looking back at the weekend, what did I achieve? There’s my problem right there. It’s meant to be a holiday, a time to relax, but instead I find myself worrying about wasting the precious time off! That’s why I don’t tend to take holidays. Weekends are okay, Bank Holidays not too bad. Days I’ve actually taken off work though – they are the tough ones. I’m spending that rare resource, those irreplaceable days when my colleagues are at work but I’m not. Those days can’t be wasted! I will, normally, be sitting at home looking at the clock, watching that time slip away. It’s midday! What have I done with my time?! Woke up late, maybe caught up on a DVD or some TV. Waste! I’ll make up for it this afternoon. 3PM. Only a couple of hours or so until I would be leaving work! What have I done with my time?! Surfed the Internet a bit? Looked at my latest pet project but made no real progress? Waste! 5PM. That’s it, I’ve wasted that day off! That kind of self imposed stress I can do without – that’s why I don’t take holidays!

What did I actually do in this instance over my extended weekend? I caught up with a couple of DVDs rented from Screenselect (A Few Good Men and Jonathan Creek, if you must know – both excellent!) I also bought (rare these days) the DVD set of American Gothic, an excellent 1995/6 TV series that I’ve had my eye on for some time, just waiting for the price to drop to an acceptable amount. £22.99 was good enough for me! Obviously it wasn’t all DVDs this weekend, or my head would have exploded at my extravagant wasting of holiday…

Before most of those DVDs was a Saturday/Sunday mostly concentrating on the recent Staggering Stories Update. In fact it was thanks to all that hard work that I allowed myself to spend most of the Monday in front of the TV. I deserved it! That concentrated hard work was my own fault – I fail to observe my own deadlines for Staggering Stories… Tuesday last week I had finished about half of my Doctor Who Series Two (as in the second Doctor Who television series), Season Two (as in the second season of this new series). Then I had people over on Wednesday, pulled a day and a half working day on Thursday and had people over again on Friday. Yep, I was out of time! Apologies for the rushed feel of the article in question, now you know why it is like that! So, after finishing that and pulling together the largest update this year it was about 1AM Monday morning and time for bed!

Then on Tuesday (after the previously mentioned DVD session on Monday) it was time to do something productive – this was my officially booked off day from work, after all! Zip down the town at about 09:30, after the morning rush hour with an odd hankering for Trivial Pursuit. Huh? Trivial Pursuit?! You know you are getting old when you actually want to play a trivia game. Not that I actually had anyone to play it with. I really wanted it as a PC game, failing that a decently priced board game. I failed to find either. No sign of the PC game and £30 for a board game is a bit excessive, especially for an inexplicable urge (I’m not even any good with trivia!) The DVD editions sounded good but at £36 I thought I’d rather check online prices, especially as I’m likely to lose interest in the idea by the time I got home. In the end it became a possible new pet project: TriviaML – an existing Open Standard for trivia questions and answers that might just be perfect to base our own online quiz on for Staggering Stories! Yes, new interactive content for the web site. Maybe!

That wasn’t the real pet project on my mind right now, though. Oh no. That’s CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). It is long since time that Staggering Stories gets a make over (see earlier blog posts on the subject!) My first effort was to understand and edit the format of this blog. You may, or may not, have noticed that the width of this site has increased from about 800 pixels wide to 1000 pixels (and you may need to refresh the page a couple of times if it’s cached old graphics). Staggering Stories is already best viewed at 1024×768 or better, so it made sense for the blog to be the same. It wasn’t too hard. Next up is more experimentation with a complete rebuild of AdamPurcell.co.uk (including listing my latest blog posts there, as planned for all blog posts on the main Staggering Stories site eventually).

Much more to do, so when’s my next holiday booked?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 30th, 2006 at 21:59 and is filed under commentary, staggering stories, tv. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.