At the weekend I did a bit of a trip across the country as I was going to a party in Warwickshire (complete with ballgown and tiara – photos later if anyone sends me some). I popped down to Witney in Oxfordshire to catch up with some old friends as we lived there until about a year ago.

The weather was lovely, clear and cold but sunny, and it shows off the countryside in that area to its best advantage I think. The cotswold stone is sandy but somehow does look better in the frost so I think I was pretty lucky with that. As I was spending my last few weeks in that area of the world (we had a house near Burford), there were days of still, foggy weather where the frost seemed to condense onto the tree branches and hang there – very spooky and atmostpheric – and the conditions on Saturday reminded me of it.

It was my birthday yesterday – hurrah! – and I had a lovely day. I’m a bit too old to get very excited about presents really, but this year was pretty good!! I’m getting a Nintendo Wii when they are released in Europe in two days time, and I can’t wait!

I had quite a few lovely presents to unwrap on the day (some of them cheque-shaped!) so big thanks to everyone – and to everyone who sent cards too, they’re beautiful. My sister bought me a pink toolbox which I’m well impressed with, best present I’ve had in ages :)

Which is used in the same sense as “the jury’s out”, meaning the decision hasn’t been made yet, or the outcome is unknown.

The strongest indication of a weak team is the realization that if you were to quit and start your own business, you wouldn’t try to poach any of your colleagues.

I saw this in a post about learning from failure on ranganwald’s blog and its so true!

I’m having an interesting etiquette issue. I’m a woman working in a male-dominated environment, and basically I don’t think like a girl. I wear flat shoes and greet people with a firm handshake and drink pints; that’s who I am and I don’t believe my gender should get in the way of how I want to live.

Other people have different ideas though, and although my boyfriend is the same age as me and works in the same industry, now we’re in our mid-twenties I’m starting to notice that social expectations of us are diverging.

A good illustration of this is the minefield of greetings – hugs or handshakes? Personally I think that people who know us both should probably treat us the same but its not really working that way. Close friends of either gender hug me in greeting; in contrast they mostly shake my partner by the hand. It does feel strange that we get treated so differently.

I’ve just come across this quote on James Shore’s Website:

For an extrovert, socializing with strangers boosts their energy. For an introvert, socializing with strangers drains their energy

Do you know someone who seems innately unable to focus on one thing? They can only complete a task when there are twenty others vying for attention and even then they’re flitting between them like a lizard.

You know the person I mean, you call them to ask if they want to go to the cinema, they don’t answer the call so you leave a message. They return the call from the car dashing between a meeting and the supermarket and explain they would love to go to the cinema with you, and can schedule a 2 hour slot on Thursday, between evening class and preparing for a dinner party the next day. This sliver of time means the choice of films is reduced, and while waiting in line to buy tickets, the person is checking their diary and calling their mother. By the time you wave them goodbye, you’re exhausted and wondering how they ever get anything big done when they can’t make space in their lives for one thing at a time. Well here’s the revelation:

I am that person. The only way to get me to do something is to present me with 20 harder and equally urgent tasks. There’s no need to shuffle my priorities to facilitate task switching, I will just switch. Somehow I am the embodiment of that famous phrase or saying “If you want something doing, ask a busy woman”. Give me one thing to do and no deadline, and it will probably never get done. Show me an impossible task list and I can do easily ninety percent of it. Here’s another revelation:

I like new paragraphs in the pauses I would use when speaking …. no! That’s not what I’m supposed to be saying! My next revelation is that I don’t understand why this is the case. I’m an energetic and organised person, why isn’t my throughput of tasks constant? The resources available to me are more or less constant, I’m the same person all the time, but somehow unless I’m being stretched either by workload or task complexity, I just can’t seem to keep the volume of activity up for long.

Perhaps its to do with momentum. The harder or longer your to-do list is, the more it weighs and the faster you have to go to get through everything. So once you get moving you just roll and roll. That’s my theory.

I’m tall. Not landmark-sized but well above the average for a woman (5’11’). My role model is Allison Janney who is taller than me again and interviews wonderfully on the subject of tall women. I’d like to outline the main points of having this personal feature.

Good Points

• Not many people can tower over you without standing on something
• People assume you are confident, which is useful if you wanted them to assume this (such as at a job interview), but can be a pain the rest of the time
• It helps on a netball court
• People don’t have to stoop to hear what you are saying

Bad Points

• Its very hard to hide behind another girl
• When holding an umbrella and walking in the rain, unless the rain falls vertically, your feet are still going to get wet because there’s so much space between the umbrella and the floor
• If you wear women’s clothing, you risk looking like you are either a cross-dresser or a teenager that grew too quickly
• If you wear men’s clothing, you will actually look like a man
• If you go to specialist shops to get clothes to fit (rather than marginally longer leg lengths), you will spend a lot of money on clothes
• Pretty shoes are never pretty by the time they are big enough to get your feet into
• It is very difficult to buy ladies’ gloves to fit
• When you are growing up, you are going to spend 5 years being 6-12 inches taller than any of your dates

The bad list is longer than the good list, but I wouldn’t swap my height for anything!

Someone who provides neither direction nor support for my project when I ask for it is not my manager – no matter where he apears on the org chart

I saw this on The Daily WTF

Well behaved women rarely make history.

from the fantastic Bumper Stickers II