It's beyond me

The news we were all expecting was confirmed today: we won't be Council employees for much longer; instead we'll be working for the water management company whose name is as yet unknown. It's possible, but unlikely, that we'll stay in our current office. In all likelihood we'll be shifting to Petone, probably before the end of the year. I don't mind Petone at all, but it will still mean some added hassle and expense.

Work could be better. Or could it? I don't think I'll ever properly fit in, no matter where I work, unless it's by myself. Only a relatively small percentage of being at work, in an office, is actually doing work. The rest is all that people-related and politics-related and system-related stuff that I'm really bad at (and eventually, being bad at that stuff impacts on your work too, as you have less and less of a clue of what's happening). I'd say the split at my workplace is 40:60 in favour of the "other" stuff. My team-mate told me about her time at Saab (cars) in the UK, where it wasn't far off 10:90 by the sound of things. It's no wonder they went under. A shame, because they made nice-looking cars (I'm a bit of girl when it comes to cars: I'm much more interested in what they look like than how they perform.)

On Tuesday I went out into the field. It was a great day for it. I went with a young Czech woman who is fairly new to the Council, to try to find out how the stormwater network connected in parts of Berhampore and Island Bay. She was so good, and I felt completely hopeless. It's not easy (for me at least) to figure out what connects to where, when you have so many tiny channels that often give just a trickle of water, if that. It gave me some appreciation for why our data on open channels is so patchy.

I had my second Chinese lesson last night. It isn't getting any easier. In some ways it's a great language. I liken it a bit to Lego: to make a sentence you just connect the blocks you need, without having to add any funny embellishments first, and you can easily change a sentence by rearranging the blocks and maybe changing one or two, in a perfectly logical way. But obtaining the necessary blocks in the first place is really, really hard. As I said here, Chinese words have no "shape" to them; they're just sounds. We're a long way from learning the characters, which is a monumental task. Here's a brilliant article, written in the early nineties, explaining why Chinese is so damn hard. All the apps and clever programs that have been created since then probably haven't changed the situation all that much.

Last Saturday I went to Greytown in the Wairarapa with Martin, to pick up his drum kit. It was wet and windy, and I had to watch what I was doing as I went over the Rimutakas, especially on the way back. Then on Sunday I helped Tom take some electronic gadgetry off to the tip. He's going to Japan on the 20th, for a year, and is understandably excited. He applied for an English teaching programme at the start of the year and got put on a waiting list. This last-minute acceptance came out of the blue; he'll resume his PhD when he gets back.

With Tom gone, our fortnightly board games sessions won't be the same, if they happen at all. On Monday we seemed to spend more time eating cake than playing games, not that I minded one bit. The cake (in the shape of a Tardis), and ice cream and mousse and raspberry coulis (?), was for Tracy's 30th birthday, which is actually today. As for the games, we first played a printed game where you had to hop from one square to another, with certain restraints that could be relaxed if you had a special power, and collect all the gold before your health level reached zero. Or something like that. I've played a lot of games like this now. I was much more a fan of the second game, What's My Word? (A word game, yay!) Both players (or in our game, teams) have to pick a six-letter word, and take it in turns to guess certain parts of the word (e.g. the first three letters, or the middle four), and those parts have to be words themselves. You get 25 points for a correct letter in the wrong place, or 100 points if it's in the right place. The points system is what makes the game so good: the method of scoring also provides vital clues for guessing the word. Anyway Tracy and Tom's word was SLUICE, and Tracy's mum and I managed to deduce it. I picked INVOKE for our team, and they got it too, although I think we got more points overall. (Here's a review of the game - I'm enormously envious of the bloke who wrote it.)

On Saturday Tracy's organising an RPG from 1pm to 6pm (I bet it goes longer) and I foolishly said I'd play. I think there will be six of us. She's put a lot of effort into it and I'll have to spend some time figuring out how my character "works" tomorrow night, in advance of the game or battle or scenario or whatever I should be calling it. It sounds like hard work. Why oh why can't I play "What's My Word?" instead, over the best of 19 games? Is this what they call a first-world problem?

After ten years, a space probe has come within quacking distance of a rubber-duck-shaped comet. I have no idea how. Apparently the spacecraft will stay at that distance, rather than just drifting away again, and will analyse material from the comet that will help understand how planets in the Solar System were formed. It's all way beyond me I'm afraid. As I think this blog might be in future.

Counting down...

As usual I woke up to National Radio this morning. Since the agreement to trade the NZ dollar directly with Chinese currency, we're now hearing stuff like "5.38 renminbi" when they read out the exchange rates. It sounds funny, and I'm pretty sure they should be saying "yuan" instead. "Renminbi" is analogous to "sterling", and you'd never say that something costs five sterling. Today was Geoff Robinson's last day, after almost forty years of presenting the programme. He signed off on a very good news day, with Japan being ordered to stop whaling in the Antarctic.

Today at work I did my monthly calling analysis for the last time. It's the only task I do that allows me to say anything. March saw record call volumes, surpassing 300 calls a day for the first time. I tried to make a bit of a point of it being my last report, especially because the figures were striking, but I'm not exactly Geoff Robinson and nobody really cared. I've only got nine more days in the office - I'm really counting down now.

I played board games at Tracy's place last night. Her dad was there - it was the first time I'd met him; he and her mum split up some time ago. He'd just got back from an Antarctic cruise and he showed us lots of photos of penguins and fantastically-shaped icebergs. He'd only just got back from Tahiti. I wonder where all the money has come from. The four of us (Tracy, her had, Tom and I) played two games: Blokus and Ticket to Ride. They were both enjoyable games and, unlike last time, at a level of complexity that I can handle. Any skill-based game we play has an unwritten rule: in all probability Tracy will win. Last night was no different. She'd be an extremely good poker player if she had the inclination; she could make way more money than I ever did. Her self-confidence would be greater, and at higher stakes that counts for a lot.

I'm flying down to Timaru in the morning - I'll be down in South Canterbury (and Otago, I think) for three days.

Keeping my Peka up

First things first, my Android phone app for 15Up (if you can call it my app) is finally out. For a minute there I didn't think it would see the light of day. You can get up to level 6 (of 15) without having to pay a cent, but with the way work seems to be heading, I'm banking on a few people downloading level 7 and above.

I decided at the last minute to "do" New Year's Eve with the anxiety group because I thought it would be good for me. We met at Lazeeza, a Mediterranean restaurant on Dixon Street, at the far-too-early time of 6:30. We were there for an age, and I was unlucky enough to have no-one I could reasonably talk to. I happened to be sitting at the end of a long table, right next to that horrible bloke who played squash a few weeks ago, and opposite a guy who doesn't really talk at all. The squash bloke likes to mock everything and everybody; he reminds me of kids in my class when I was eleven. I had a pasta dish which was fine but not nearly enough to fill me up; the kunafa I had for dessert was delicious. Time dragged, and eventually it was decided we'd go to the beach to see in the new year. A few people had brought their cars, and we made our way to Owhiro Bay. People lit a fire, which you're probably not supposed to do, but they were pretty sensible about it. I tried to help out by collecting wood. It made a nice change to welcome in 2014 in a fairly remote location (no mobile reception) under the stars. It still amazes me how many stars you can see in New Zealand. In the UK  it was never properly dark - there was always so much light pollution. I found out that one of the "stars" close to Orion's Belt is actually a galaxy. There's so much astronomical stuff I have no idea about; I should probably download one of the many apps where you can just point your phone at the night sky and it tells you what's what. It was good to get home: the anxiety group isn't really working for me anymore. The events draw many more people than they used to, and they last so much longer, making me more anxious.

On Thursday (the 2nd), Tracy invited me to the family beach house at Peka Peka, just north of Waikanae and about half-way to Palmerston North. Her mum had the place built in about 1985 when Tracy was a baby, and it's a lovely spot there, very close to the beach. They had another family (of five) staying, whom they were very good friends with. The idea was that we'd kayak or even swim in the sea - it's a lot warmer than around Wellington - but it was a bit too windy and the beach was riddled with bluebottles. We had a good walk, ate some excellent food, and sat down to play some board games: Takenoko (which I'd played, badly, twice before), Settlers of Catan (the king of modern board games but a new one on me) and Jaipur (a two-player card game which I really liked). They had a whole raft of games and puzzles to tinker with, and they got really into Sherlock which they had on DVD. I wondered, were they all Aspies?

I ran much hotter in our four-player Takenoko game than in my previous attempts, but Tracy still beat me into second place by two points. Settlers, which we played with five, was a tricky one for me: so much of the game relies on trading resources with your opponents. All my opponents were either siblings or long-time friends, and I felt a bit uncomfortable asking someone I didn't know from a bar of soap whether they'd trade two sheep for a brick and an ore. At one point someone suggested I was taking too long. Well, what do you expect, I hardly know the rules. Another time I had nine cards in my hand, no-one to trade with, and no idea what to do. I was completely flummoxed. Surprisingly enough I didn't win that game. Jaipur was my favourite - it's a card game with a fairly loose theme where you play the part of a merchant in India, buying and selling valuable goods. The game also features camels, which play an important strategic role. Tracy and her mum walked me through the game, which was over quite quickly, and to my surprise I won by a handy margin - it didn't feel like I'd won at all. Then I found out it it was best of three. It was like those tennis matches I played (such as here and especially here), where I'd win the first set 6-2 or something, but I knew he was in fact better than me. Predictably Tracy won the second game comfortably. The third took longer than the others, just because of the way it panned out, and I unexpectedly won it by just two points despite giving up the "camel bonus".

It was a really pleasant day all round, with easy-going people who I felt I could relax with most of the time. Even just getting in the car and going somewhere made a nice change. Peka Peka was where the Emperor penguin Happy Feet mysteriously appeared in 2011. It also has a reputation for being a nudist hangout, which is hilarious when you consider the name. I suppose you could call the release of 15Up an appy feat.

I've still been feeling yucky, with a lot of dizziness and not much mental energy, but at least I've got my physical energy back. The importance of exercise is enormous. Tomorrow I'll be back to work for a five-day week and so will my boss.

A matter of life and death

Yesterday morning, my time, my actuary friend from Birmingham emailed me. His father had passed away. He had been ill for a very long time. When my friend was just three he suffered a heart attack; he had to "watch himself" ever since. In the last few years he got steadily worse. He survived longer than anyone expected, and it is of some consolation that he was around to see his daughter's wedding in April of this year. I didn't meet him very often - the last time was when I visited the UK in 2010 - but he struck me as a very kind, warm-hearted (if ailing) man. I wrote my friend an email this evening, or attempted to. What do you say? I said that his dad must have been very proud of his son, and he couldn't have had a better son to look after him. Which was true. It was only when I wrote back, from the quiet of my living room, that the passing of such a kind, gentle bloke really hit me.

In other (far better) news, my own father got his results back from his prostate biopsy and he's been given the all-clear. That's a huge weight off his mind. It's not just the cancer, it's all the treatment and horrible side-effects - incontinence, extreme fatigue, and whatever else. And the fact that so many false-positives from the biopsy render all that treatment unnecessary. All in all, it's a big sigh of relief.

I didn't mention the results of the blood test I had a couple of weeks ago. Which means they were good, or else I surely would have mentioned them by now. My thyroid is working perfectly normally and I'm not at risk of diabetes. Cholesterol is still a slight concern. My level of bad (LDL) cholesterol is down, but the good (HDL) stuff is down too, so my ratio, which is what they worry about these days, has hardly changed. My doctor said I should take all cholesterol readings with a bucket of salt (which, funnily enough, contains zero cholesterol).

Last night Tracy, Tom and I played a co-operative board game called Mice and Mystics. There are mice, who are the good guys, and a variety of bad guys such as rats, spiders, centipedes and cockroaches. And of course a cat, although we didn't come across him (or her) last night. The game is in fact a story comprising eleven chapters; you can play just one chapter (as we did last night) or a full "campaign" that follows the story from start to finish. We each took on the part of a different mouse, each with its own special powers. Tom's mouse, for instance, was fast and agile with a prehensile tail which could carry a weapon. My mouse, by contrast, was slow and plodding but it wielded a sodding great hammer that could knock out anything that came near it (if the right symbols came up on the four dice I rolled). The currency used in the game wasn't money or gold or silver, but cheese. I was impressed by how one bloke could think of such an intricate story, and then turn it into a playable board game. The game pieces were a work of art, literally as we found out - Tracy had painstakingly painted them with a fine brush, except the centipede and spider which she hadn't got around to yet. We ended up losing the game through a series of unlucky dice rolls; in fact we did well to last as long as we did. I got a bit confused with all the rules, but Tracy was always able to clarify matters. Mice and Mystics is a new game; the only similarity with the much older Risk is the amount of dice-rolling involved. Hopefully we'll try a few more games. In spite of its flaws Risk is probably still my favourite: it'll take something to beat the smell you get when you open the box.

Tom emailed me tonight. Now he wants to move into my flat. Oh shit. I didn't even read his whole email. I saw he wrote "no pressure" but I know I'll feel a shit-ton of pressure if he moves in. He can't move in. I can play board games with him, exchange emails and ideas with him, and chat with him in person. But not live with him. I wouldn't be able to relax. How on earth I tell him it's a no-go I don't know.

Some people in my team at work have joined a football team. They asked me if I was interested. "I'm really just a watcher." This Friday they've got a get-pissed-and-do-karaoke night. Either I go, and feel horribly out of place, or stay at home (which would be the far easier, and cheaper, option). I drift further apart from them whatever I do. Then in a couple of weeks they've got the Christmas party. This isn't my favourite time of year.

I'm obviously not a proper Kiwi (more about that in my next post) because I think it's a shame Ireland didn't hang on to beat, or at least draw with, the All Blacks. Not that I watched the game or anything.

Armies and mobs

My boss had family stuff to deal with this week so she was away for most of it. That made work a bit easier to cope with, but I still don't think I've got a long future there. I'd say it's 50-50 I'll be there in six months.

On Monday we finally played our second instalment of Risk. I didn't enjoy it as much as the first time. As we traded in sets of cards, new contingents of 40 or 50 armies came into play, and we all agreed that things were getting a bit ridiculous. One minute I had control of three continents, the next minute (well, next half-hour) Tracy's rampaging red army left me, um, incontinent. After two hours (that's five hours of total playing time), Tracy knocked Tom out, taking all his cards and gaining several dozen more bits of plastic. I'd forgotten about that rule, which makes eliminating someone quite a big deal. At that point we called it a day. I wouldn't have fancied my chances against Tracy's sheer numbers and, let's face it, her superior gaming skills. We commented on how everything was designed to drag things out, even the way the cylindrical playing pieces rolled off the board. It would be easy to tweak the rules to cap the number of armies at say 15 or 20, instead of incrementing by five every time someone makes a set of cards, and I think that would make for a better game.

Here you can see Tracy's stupidly large red army (her reward for wiping out Tom's green) about to take over the world. Some of the pieces represent ten armies, so it was even scarier than it looked. This is where we packed the game in.

The three of us had a good chat after the game, which I found more engaging than the game itself. We talked about crowd mentality. Someone is teetering on the ledge of a tall building, possibly about to end it all. A crowd gathers, and when it reaches a certain number (Tracy said 350 I think), people start chanting "Jump!" It doesn't matter who or where, when it reaches this critical size, this same terrible thing always happens. Supposedly it's because you stop being individuals at that point, and become a mob instead. The same thing happens when riots break out at football matches - people's ability to think as individuals goes out the window. In the past, people have said that football fans are often poorly educated and come from working-class backgrounds, and that explains their behaviour. But ticket prices have gone through the roof, pricing most working-class people out of the market, and guess what, hardly anything changes. You also see this phenomenon online - people showing extreme anger and hatred over just about any subject, taking sides, and losing all sense of self. I find it all quite scary.

Tracy, who is normally ready for bed shortly after nine, was instead (as she admitted) as high as a kite. I could do with some of whatever she was taking.

They showed the second half of New Zealand's World Cup qualifier with Mexico on TV at work yesterday. Wow, what a gulf in class there was. Without a decent keeper it could easily have been 9-1, never mind 5-1 (no exaggeration). It was nice to see that one trickle in for NZ at the end, even if it'll almost certainly make no difference to them. People have been quick to turn on the All Whites coach and team. There are two points I'd like to make. One, but for a couple of minutes of madness, Mexico would have been out of the running and NZ would have been playing Panama (surely a much easier proposition) instead. Two, the All Whites would be better served by joining the Asian confederation, as Australia did. They would then play more often, against better teams, and surely improve.

I've seen the dreadful pictures coming out of the Philippines following the typhoon. I've only donated $6 - I can't afford much these days. Although the impact on many people has been devastating (and will continue to be), I'd imagine the impact on their mental health has been far smaller. If success is having food, water, shelter and (maybe) medicine, all that other unnecessary stuff no longer matters.

I've been reading Shorty, a book of Barry Crump's short stories about a diminutive novice golfer that I picked up in a second-hand shop. I must give it to Mum when I next see her. It's a good laugh. Golf lends itself very well to story-telling. I found this bit, about a party Shorty was invited to, very funny:
It was a talking party, where you help yourself to drinks from a big table at one end and then go for a walk, talking to one person for a while and then changing partners. The tricky part is that you have to think of something to say to each new partner. Some of them play it in pairs or groups. I gathered from some of the things that were being talked to me, that the ones who were best at this game were considered the most socially desirable. I wasn't going to do very well at this game.
That pretty much describes my limited experience of parties, except mine is real.

Risky business

I'm feeling better now than I've done in months (probably since May) and have no real idea why. The diet, the pills (I'll be dropping back again on Friday), the long weekend, who knows?

Dad is supposed to be back now, but with the storm, I've no idea whether his flight actually took off when it was scheduled to. When someone in my family attempts to fly somewhere, myself included, a severe weather event is almost guaranteed. I gave him a ring at the weekend, and also had a longish chat with my brother who was a mixture of happy (that he's with his friends, half a world away from his horror story) and cheesed off with his financial situation, which is about as bad as mine.

Dad's trip to the UK has meant I've spoken to Mum on the phone even more than usual. I'm happy with that - we get on pretty well these days. She hasn't been feeling 100% for a while but stubbornly refuses to see a doctor. She thinks it's all down to the food she eats. That includes the rash on her upper arm that keeps slowly expanding.

The highlight of the long weekend for me was my first ever proper game of Risk. We played at Tracy's place - the same crowd (well, three is a crowd) of Tracy, Tom and me. The idea was that we'd play for two hours, and whoever occupied the most territories at that point would be the winner. I was fortunate to snag Australia early on, and it was close for the lead between Tom and me. As such, most of my attacks were directed at Tom. After about 90 minutes we felt like we were just getting going (man it's a long game) so we upped the time limit to three hours. I focused almost exclusively on the Southern Hemisphere, and as I threw more than my fair share of fives and sixes, I was able to control South America and/or Africa. But my luck ran out and Tracy, who had kept a low profile, came marauding in. At the three-hour point my yellow army still occupied more regions than Tracy's red (Tony's green army was on the wane), but with someone making such a strong fightback, finishing at that point wouldn't have been "right", so we decided to adjourn until the weekend after next, at my place. How do we do that? Ah yes, take a photo of the board. I'm not sure I can wait so long to play again - it was a very absorbing three hours. Tracy has so far had one extra turn (she started), I'm next up, and I'm already thinking what I should do with my new complement of eleven yellow plastic cylinders. Tracy said after an hour that she was doomed, but I think that was a bluff. She's a smarter, more experienced gamer than either Tom or me, and I'm sure she knows it.

My hand-me-down copy of Risk is the 1963 version. The actual copy can't be that old - it's probably early seventies, which admittedly is still pretty damn old. Even after playing one session I can see that Risk has its flaws, but it's still an excellent game, and in its time it must have been revolutionary. Board games up to that point were: roll the dice, move your counter the number of squares indicated on the dice, then do what it says on that square (if anything). Risk is a complete departure from this. Plus it does seem to simulate war rather well at times - often I was thinking, yes I took that territory but boy did I lose a lot of men doing it. I'm glad I've got this version which requires you to choose, in turn, where to place armies on the board at the start, rather than having them randomly determined. I think that choosing territories adds an extra dimension.
The instructions give me a window on what life was like in the sixties and seventies. "The rules which follow are new and are the result of continuous research and testing ... They develop strategy sooner and make for better play." So you knew the game took seven hours, but that wasn't a problem?! Wow. In 2013 a mass-market board game taking more than a couple of hours would be a non-starter. The time factor is probably the biggest criticism of Risk. Then there's the role of luck - it's hard to determine how significant that is given the sheer number of dice rolls in a game. Thirdly there's a rich-get-richer mechanism (the more territories you've got, the more armies you get, which enable you to control more territories...) - that would probably be my biggest complaint.

Before the game we talked a bit about computer programming. Both Tracy and Tom love it. "It's fun." Well, programming for its own sake, or even to achieve a goal I don't care about, ain't my idea of fun. I did a short programming course at uni but we weren't actually taught anything, as far as I could see, and the two or three people on our course who already knew about the language drip-fed the "answers" to the rest of us who were completely clueless. If, on the other hand, my program is doing something I'm interested in, you know, creating an app or something, I could see myself learning the relevant language.

On Sunday I went to sit out on the bank at the Basin, and to my surprise there was a four-day game going on between Wellington and Otago. The home side were doing well, and when one of the batsmen was dismissed for a century, on came Jesse Ryder for the first time since March when he almost died following that attack in a Christchurch bar. As it happened, his father, his girlfriend and other members of his entourage were right in front of me. I spent more time watching them than any of the players. Ryder raced to 48 by the end of the day and was out for an impressive 117 on Monday.
(Edit: I shouldn't pretend to know anything about domestic cricket. Jesse Ryder had moved teams over the winter and was now playing for Otago against his old side.)

This morning Birmingham and Stoke played a memorable match in the League Cup. With the score at one apiece, Blues had a man sent off on the stroke of half-time. Unsurprisingly Stoke, the superior side on paper, capitalised to go two goals up. Eleven minutes to go and Blues bring on Peter Løvenkrands, and what do you know, he pops up to score twice in the final six minutes to force extra time. Only three minutes into the extra period and Stoke go back in front. Blues are dead on their feet as they try to scramble another equaliser which they somehow manage in the 118th minute. It sounded far too good a game to be decided on penalties (and don't forget, Birmingham played the last 75 minutes a man down) but alas Blues missed their first two spot-kicks and that was pretty much that. For all my cynicism about football and team sports in general, this was a "feel-good" game for me, in spite of the final result.

Update: Dad is back; I just spoke to him. No problems with the scheduling, but he felt very ill at Hong Kong after an ultra-cramped Virgin Atlantic flight, and was worried he wouldn't be able to continue his journey. He vowed never to fly with Virgin again. He flew with Air New Zealand (a far less painful experience) on the second leg.

Gale tales

Extreme weather is now the norm, or so it seems. When Geraldine made the news yesterday morning (there had been a fire and some roofs had come off) I rang Mum. Her power was out and she hadn't slept much - she'd stayed up to watch the Shanghai tennis final; the storm peaked in the early hours. But she was fine and there was no damage to speak of. It wasn't much fun for her being alone in the house though. Dad has a knack of bogging off overseas and missing these "weather events". She got her power back on at 8pm last night. The storm ripped through Wellington too; scaffolding spectacularly collapsed at a building site just two-minute walk from my work. I spoke to my cousin who finally got back to Wellington after having five internal flights cancelled. Tomorrow she flies to the States.

Tracy was out of action for all of last week - her thyroid was all over the place, high one minute, low the next. Yesterday though she'd improved enough to invite Tom and me over for board games. We just played one game - Alhambra - quite a cleverly-designed game that combined classic "economic" strategy (is it worth paying x to obtain y?) with spatial considerations (where is the best place to put this tile - if I can legally place it at all?). I'm better at the economic stuff than the spatial stuff. Tom and I were thinking on a fairly basic level, while Tracy (who admittedly had played it before) was on a different plane in her strategy, so it was fitting that Tom and I finished in a dead-heat, with Tracy a dozen points ahead.

Sunday was a glorious day and I managed to get sunburnt sitting on Oriental Bay near the tugboat restaurant. After yesterday's storm and today's rain that's hard to believe.

The luck factor

I've just got back from playing El Grande, a medieval Spain-themed board game, with Tracy and Tom. A very good game it is too. It's just about simple enough for me to understand (some of these modern games are too damn complicated for my liking) but it has multiple layers of strategy. It's dice-free and (on the face of it) almost luck-free, but as I actually won, luck must play a significant part. It took us two hours to play- if we were more experienced it would have been more like 90 minutes, which I think is just about the perfect length for a game. There was some faux-Spanish spoken, such as Tom's "el sixo" for a score of six.

Last Wednesday I attended the games evening at the library. It was nice to be in my comfort zone, playing games I'd actually heard of. I played Scrabble with one of the staff who organised the evening, and a guy from the autism group who talked almost constantly throughout. (It's amazing how many people I know who are capable of incessant talking.) I won by a decent margin despite being hampered by an unusable Q. I then played crib with that librarian - I happened to win by just one point in a dramatic finish.

Julie is someone else who can talk non-stop. She builds an impenetrable wall of words; every now and then I'll interject with "hmmm" or "that's right" and that's as far as I'll get. She'll get upset if I try to end the "conversation" which is usually a very negative monologue. Frankly Julie is a "time sink" I'd be better off without, even if (in her better moods) she can be understanding of my own problems.

Tom came over yesterday. He's got this amazing self-built briefcase computer. I wanted to take a photo of it and post it on here, but I could see he didn't like it when I pointed a camera in the general direction of the machine. Its innards include hard drives with huge capacities; it's got a screen on the outside and various protruding sockets. He transferred a bunch of comedy TV shows onto my laptop which was nice, but it took three hours, meaning he was here longer than I'd have liked. He gave me some handy pointers for my app though. I've been having all kinds of problems with it - everything that I could possibly think of has gone wrong, as well as many things I never would have thought of. I was over the moon this weekend when I received a much improved new version from the developers; up until then the problems seemed almost insurmountable.

At the weekend I heard a Scots College student (name Sebastian Hallum Clarke, born 14/7/97) talk on the radio about his success with apps. Later Kim Hill interviewed Eleanor Catton, 28-year-old author of an epic novel which has been nominated for this year's Booker Prize. In both instances you could see what a difference your upbringing (i.e. luck) makes.

This puzzle app is a lifeline to me. My chances of going anywhere in my current role are zero. Going anywhere good at least. My boss has sadly just been made redundant, meaning I'll soon have my fifth boss, and first female boss, in my time at the company. I don't think she'll be anything like as personable as my current manager. It's hard not to feel slightly edgy about it all.

Yesterday Tom told me that he went cold turkey on Efexor from a fairly high dose, with little in the way of an adverse reaction. He said Efexor numbed everything, as it has done for me. He now takes no antidepressants at all.

So Rubert Mugabe won the latest election in Zimbabwe by a landslide. Amazingly turnout for the election was 135%.

My brother had some drama at Christchurch when they tried to hit him with excess baggage charges running into the thousands. He should be back in the UK now, although I haven't heard from him.

Earthquakes - focusing the mind?

As expected I didn't get much sleep last night. I left the radio on most of the night - somehow that made the aftershocks more bearable. I slept upstairs to be close to the front door so I could make a quick exit if I needed to. National Radio has just one guy on the night shift which runs from midnight till 6am. At one point he was having microphone problems. It was starting to droop, he said, and was in need of some Viagra. Then he read out the shipping forecast with a lot more emotion than you'd get in the (iconic) UK forecasts. "Fifty knots in Puysegur. Five-oh. That's a biggie."

The aftershocks seem to have abated. At about 10:45 this morning we had a 5.2 shake while I was on the loo but I haven't felt a significant shake since. Our work building was closed all day today and we won't be re-entering until noon tomorrow. Overall Wellington hasn't fared too badly. If the quake had hit directly under the city as it did in Christchurch in 2010 and 2011, instead of being out at sea, the story would have been very different indeed.

Tonight I played two games of 7 Wonders with Tracy and Tom. In early September Tracy is having an operation to have her thyroid gland removed.

If anything my mood has improved since the big quakes. Maybe they've helped focus the mind. I've seen probability estimates of further large shakes - from the various figures bandied about it seems nobody has a clue what might happen next. Trying to predict earthquakes is notoriously difficult.

Good on her

Wow. Marion Bartoli really is champion of Wimbledon. Who would have expected that two weeks ago? I'm very glad I got up at 1am to watch the final even if Lisicki's nerves meant she was some way short of her best. Nerves play an even bigger part in women's major finals than for the men - the serve isn't as dominant so a soul-destroying run of say six losing games is much more common, and unlike for the men, six games is half the match. Bartoli was extremely determined and pumped up but all that adrenalin didn't compromise her thought processes in any way. Game two of the second set was huge psychologically, as was the first point of game three where Bartoli was well out of the rally but hit a down-the-line winner that would have been called out if Lisicki had challenged. Lisicki was struggling with her ball toss and by game five, when she chose a bad time to play a drop shot (people try that so often when they aren't thinking straight) she really just wanted to get off the court. I was happy that Lisicki staved off three match points for what would have been a harsh 6-1 6-1 defeat. For the next ten minutes she was a different player, but just as things were getting interesting Bartoli served out to love with a new racket and new balls, finishing on the right end of a crucial opening rally and serving an ace on match point.

That someone different like Bartoli can claim the greatest prize in the game must be a good thing. I really liked her speech as she held the trophy. She supposedly has a sky-high IQ (I saw someone on ESPN unsuccessfully try and trip her up on the Fibonacci sequence) and is also a keen painter. It took her 47 attempts to win her first grand slam title - that's a record: Novotna was older when she won Wimbledon in '98 but it was "only" her 45th attempt. As for Lisicki, she's got an excellent aggressive game which we only saw last night in that late cameo. I doubt it'll take her 47 tries to claim a slam.

The hard drive of my laptop is stuffed and it's costing me $340 to get it sorted. That's an expense I could have done without.

I was a bit tired today after getting up last night, and there's no way I'm watching the men's final tonight. Out of the blue Tracy invited me and Tom over to play some unusual board games this afternoon. This was fun even if I didn't know what was going on half the time - I'll write about it when I can do so less painfully.

Out with the old

I had a hard time concentrating yesterday afternoon. Realising I have very few real friends can do that to me. I suppose Julie is the only real friend I have here in Wellington, and she made it pretty clear on Tuesday that she wanted to die.

I still think I struggle to make friends because I can't do that "interplay" thing. I know it when I see it, but I can't really define it and I certainly can't reproduce it. Maybe the real reason isn't that, and it's actually because I'm boring or selfish or both.

At least yesterday was Friday. For a lady in the so-called quality team, it was her last day. She turns seventy in two weeks, making her three times as old as many of her colleagues. They'd arranged a morning tea to celebrate the big seven-oh (how often do you get to celebrate that milestone at work?) but things happened quickly. I have first-hand experience of just how quickly things can "progress". She'd been there 7½ years, getting paid very poorly, but a new boss and some new systems led to her demise. Her leaving date kept being brought forward and in the end she just wanted out. An email was sent, implying that she'd jumped, but everyone knew that wasn't the case. So instead of a birthday morning tea she got a leaving one, which was quite substantial - the amount of food provided is mostly a function of how long you've been there rather than seniority. Her boss, who would normally give some short speech, didn't say a word.
Her husband died some time ago, and under the law at the time his family got everything while she got nothing, hence why she was still working at that age. She's also had cancer. Some people have it tough.

Old people have been a feature of my recent blog posts. I've always had a lot of respect for older people and tend to get on reasonably well with them. That's probably because there isn't the same expectation - and pressure - that I feel when talking to people of my own age. When the other person is of a vastly different age to me (older or younger), the "interplay" thing is no longer as important. I've always thought it shocking how the elderly are treated in Western cultures - they often have a lot of valuable experience that for some reason is deemed to be irrelevant. To show you what I mean about valuable experience, watch this video of Felix Baumgartner's record-breaking jump from last October. It's an amazing, goosebump-inducing, video anyway, but what puts the icing on the cake for me is Joe Kittinger, directing operations from Mission Control 24 miles below. Kittinger was the previous record-holder: he jumped from 19 miles way back in 1960, and here he is at the age of 84 directing proceedings, ticking off items from a checklist. His "Attaboy" and "Your guardian angel will take care of ya" made the moments before Baumgartner's big leap quite moving.

Margaret Thatcher's funeral is expected to cost £10 million. Yes, she was a hugely influential leader, and I think that anybody's funeral should be a big deal, but ten million pounds? It's incredible how much some things cost. The price tag to earthquake-strengthen my work building is $35 million. The cost of refitting a nearby café, just so it can serve coffee, is $4 million (my cousin and I talked about this - she didn't think that was a lot). It's always interesting to talk money with my cousin; her dollars and my dollars aren't really the same currency. She recognises that too, and she's also aware that it rubs off onto the kids. When I last visited they gave their eldest boy $2 (he'd lost another tooth) and the shiny coin meant more to me than to him. If he wants something, he knows they can just buy it for him.

I had lunch with Tracy on Thursday. I think I realise now that she'll always just be a sort-of-friend with whom I spend one lunchtime every second month or so. We met at the food court, as usual, and all her complex (but very real) food allergies gave us an obvious starting point for our conversation. We do have quite a lot in common, but I'd say she's got a lot more self-confidence than me. With her it's a case of "I've got Asperger's, I'm happy with that, and all you crazy neurotypical people can do what you like." With me it's "I may or may not have Asperger's, I'd rather not know, but whatever I've got I'm not particularly proud of." Being at peace with herself meant she could appreciate the small things like the seagulls (we sat out in the warm sun) and I wish I could do that more. Most of our conversation revolved around her, or at least things that were common to both of us; we only briefly touched on anything specific to me. It would be unfair to call her self-centred; she does a lot of volunteer work. It would be safest to call her a complex character.

Iron lady (and some others)

Margaret Thatcher has died. She was Prime Minister for all my early childhood. I was too young to have any real opinion of her; she was just someone I saw on the telly a lot. She certainly polarised people: some (like my grandmother) thought she was Britain's saviour; others demonised her. If I'd been old enough to know and care what she was doing, I don't think I'd have been a fan. Yes she did make Britain a better place for some. Our family were perhaps some of the lucky ones. In the mid-to-late eighties Dad's paintings were practically flying out the door.

One thing's for sure: the Iron Lady was clever. For the big announcement that the Channel Tunnel project would be going ahead, she was called upon to deliver a speech in French. The snag: she couldn't speak a word of the language. No problem, someone gave her a quick crash course at Downing Street just before she hopped across the Channel. When she came to make the speech, she still didn't know what she was saying (she was just making noises according to some pronunciation guide) but those noises somehow combined to produce passable French.

Last night we had a special "games night" at the autism group. Tracy brought along a selection of games; the one we played was a collaborative game (a good idea, and something I'd never tried before) in which the object was to rescue people from a burning house. It featured an octahedral dice - I'd always wanted to play a game involving dice with more (or fewer) than six sides. We "won" the game by the skin of our teeth. The "house" was single-storey; when we finished I said it was crying out for another floor or two. Tracy said you can purchase an extension that provides just that. I was really pleased with the way Danielle seemed to come into her own as we played - she got to grips with the rules faster than I did. That's what's so great about a board game - everyone gets to participate more or less equally. That's far from what happens when people just talk.

I saw Julie tonight as I usually do on a Tuesday. I haven't seen her express this level of complete and utter hopelessness before. The only potential bright spot is that she should be moving out of the rest home soon.

Just a sniff...

Since I last posted there has been a development with my puzzles, provoking an unusually high level of excitement in me. There's the faintest sniff of a possibility that this development could substantially alter my life, hence the excitement.

I didn't go to the autism group last night. I'd made up my mind not to go, and emailed Tracy the night before, then she texted me at half-five yesterday trying to convince me to change my mind: her dad would be there, he didn't really know what Aspies were like, and apparently I'd balance out some of the more extreme personalities on show. She failed to convince me. I went to see Against the Wind, quite a sad French movie, at the Paramount instead.

I saw Die Hard 5 with the depression group on Saturday. The movie didn't do it for me. It was good to catch up with some people though.

Julie is having an operation on Thursday, the first of two days I'm taking off from work. I'll be picking her up from her rest home at 6:30am to take her to hospital. She's hardly in the best physical condition to have the surgery but doesn't feel she's got much to lose. I'll then be going to see the opening day of the second cricket test between NZ and England at the Basin. I'm not a huge cricket fan (I've never seen live test cricket before) but because it's this particular match-up, and right on my doorstep, I feel almost obliged to go. One complaint I hear a lot regarding test cricket is "it's too long". Well yes, in the third millennium, with all our busy lives, who can afford to sit through all five days of a test match? But my answer to that is, who says you have to watch the whole thing? It's a story; what's wrong with dipping in and out, like you might do with Coronation Street? Miss an episode or two, you can catch up later. The times I've most enjoyed following test cricket have been listening to radio commentary (which can be brilliant) while doing something else.

I've been thinking about the bloke from the autism group who came round to my flat twice. Why did I find him hard work? I think it's pretty simple: very little warmth radiates from him. That must make it very hard for him to form relationships. It's not an uncommon trait in Aspies of course (some of whom do have relationships and even children) but it's by no means universal; Richard is a good counterexample.

I'll miss Richard when I fly up to Auckland after the cricket. He's going down to Rotorua for his sister's 40th birthday; he gets on well with her and should have a good time. I'll be attending the autism group on Saturday and catching up with one of the facilitators beforehand. Apart from that, my weekend is unplanned as yet.

Putting it out there

We had another big turnout at tonight's autism meeting. Seventeen showed up including a stand-in facilitator from South Africa who did a good job I thought. We were split into two groups - the loud group and the one I was in. Being in the quiet group gave me the opportunity to talk more than usual; I talked frankly about my inability to form relationships and my desire to work for myself some day. I took the email address of a timid guy who's had as much success in relationships as me (albeit in less time); I'm hoping we can share some ideas. Tracy was there - she really hasn't been well lately. Her number one goal was to start a family. Another woman had a goal (or rather an un-goal) never to have kids. The South African woman said to me, "you seem to lead a pretty normal life" when I told her about my job and my flat. But that's exactly it. It might look normal but it sure as hell ain't.

I've been feeling a bit low the last couple of days. Yesterday was another beautiful day. I went to the waterfront market, bought lunch (a butter chicken wrap) and enough fruit to feed a small army (the stonefruit has been great this summer), then took a walk along Oriental Parade. They were taking the Hobbit frontage down from the Embassy with a giant crane. There were a lot of teenagers milling about by the waterfront, doing all the things I never did at that age, and that's often a trigger for a downswing in my mood. Bizarrely I'll sometimes feel better in bad weather because I won't see so many people out enjoying themselves to compare myself against. I slipped and slapped yesterday but neglected to slop - as a consequence my knees and ankles turned bright red.

I've just finished another book. This one was a true story about a group of MIT students who lived the high life for a couple of years by beating blackjack for millions of dollars. Word of their exploits gradually got around, they had to take more desperate measures (like wearing disguises) to keep their operation going, and eventually they packed it in. Fascinating stuff, and I was firmly on the side of the students while reading the story because card counting (in my book) isn't cheating at all. I had no idea quite how sophisticated the big casinos' camera networks were (and that book was written ten years ago).

Julie, who turned 67 last week, goes into a rest home on Wednesday. I hope it's just a temporary measure. It's so sad to see someone in that much pain, with no friends or family for support. I'll still pop in to see her every Tuesday.

The Solomon Islands were hit by a massive earthquake last week. The quake caused a tsunami and for a short while New Zealand was on a kind of yellow alert. Nothing came of it and we could all just carry on with our lives. In the Solomons, where they keep getting strong aftershocks, the situation is rather different.

Tennis and tats

I got sucked in again last night, in an even worse fashion than the night before. I listened to the commentary of Djokovic vs Wawrinka, an absolute belter that finished at quarter to four (NZ time) this morning. I slept through the fourth set which Wawrinka won on a tie-break, but was glad (kind of) to hear the fifth set which reached a spectacular crescendo in the 22nd game. At the end of surely one of the best last points ever, I couldn't tell who had won it because the commentators were in awe. I felt a bit sorry for Wawrinka at the end; he played the match of his life and he might never get the chance to beat a superstar at a grand slam again. Today Chris Bowers said it was an even better spectacle than last year's final. I wonder whether Bazza stayed up to watch it.

So I've been pretty sluggish today, which thankfully is a public holiday in Wellington. I got up late, worked on my puzzles for a bit (I want to get a portfolio together to send to Australia) and read some more of Nick Hornby in the sun on the bank of the Basin Reserve. There happened to be a closely contested four-day cricket match going on. I'm guessing it was some top-grade club match but I really had no idea. Every now and then I'd get a whiff of pot smoke.

At the beach yesterday I was struck by the sheer number of tattoos on show (I know I've blogged about this subject before). One bloke had "Fuck the World" across his upper back. Seriously man. I'm not ante tattoos per se - people can do what they like - but I find some of them (like that one) really distasteful. I'm sure the prevalence of "tats" is on the increase. It feels like half the population now have them. I've always thought that insurance companies could use tattoos as a pretty reliable rating factor for life policies.

I didn't meet Tracy for lunch last Thursday because she was ill. On the Monday (the day of the autism meeting) she had iron pumped into her intravenously over several hours. She's been ill quite a lot lately and it's a bit of a worry.

Sugar Man - must see!

On Sunday night I saw Searching for Sugar Man at the Paramount on Courtenay Place. It's the best film I've seen in years, no exaggeration. What an incredible story. You couldn't make it up. I picked a good time to see such an uplifting movie (boy did I need a lift). Rodriguez's songs were amazing too, so soulful, so genuine. It's not hard to see how his records sold so well in such an oppressive regime as South Africa in the seventies. I'd still like to know what the hell happened to the proceeds of those sales, but that wasn't really an appropriate question for the film to answer.

I saw Julie again last night. It can be hard work sometimes. She rambles, you get all the he-saids and she-saids, and if you're really lucky she might eventually get to the point. She showed me a psychiatrist's report which used the extremely poncy (but accurate) word "circumloquacious" to describe her way of talking. At times I can hardly blame her for wanting to dodge the issue, which is often distinctly dodgeworthy. It's all very sad and I feel powerless to help. She'll need to go into a rest home and is (understandably) having difficulty in coming to terms with that. Sometimes I manage to steer the conversation (if you can call it that) into more positive territory, and on occasions we'll talk about my "issues". Last night she warned me about getting into relationships with people on the autistic spectrum (she was in a 30-year-plus relationship with an autistic man).

On that note I'll be catching up with Tracy tomorrow for lunch. It's funny, a few times I've been about to tune out of her station when I pick up a faint signal. I'm hoping I might eventually hear her loud and clear. The two guys who normally disrupt the autism group were absent for Monday's meeting. This made for a more pleasant experience for everyone. Danielle didn't have an easy Christmas - her father didn't treat her well - and she was almost in tears as she talked about it. I met her tonight at the tramping group. I'd signed up for a trip this weekend but they've postponed it till 2nd February.

On Monday we got our performance grades at work. There had been plenty of talk about them, to the point where even I started to care about what grade I might get. Sort of. They only had three grades which were shared out 20:60:20 or thereabouts. I was happy to get the middle grade; to my surprise it seemed I didn't just scrape it.

They're into round two at the Australian Open. I'm not following it as closely as I used to, but one result stood out a mile from yesterday's first-round matches: 42-year-old Kimiko Date's 6-2 6-0 win over 12th-seeded (and 30-year-old) Nadia Petrova. Date reached the semi-finals of Wimbledon in 1996 after a remarkable run of comeback three-set wins. In her semi she blitzed Steffi Graf in the second set to level the match and another comeback looked likely, but play was suspended for bad light, her momentum was lost, and so was the match the next day.

29 degrees but an ice-cold Christmas

Unfortunately all the tension between my brother and his partner has cast a shadow over what was supposed to be a family Christmas.

On Christmas morning we had bacon and eggs for breakfast, followed by champagne which I needed like a hole in the head. Mum made a wonderful dinner; as usual I ate too much. We watched Mary Poppins and the brilliant Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The temperature reached 29 degrees but at least we could switch on the air con. No such luck when we visited my uncle and aunt's place in Woodbury that evening - I sweated like a pig. My brother's partner didn't go, saying she was sick. She probably did have a slight upset tummy (I don't think the drink helped) but she'd already made up her mind hours earlier that she wasn't going. That night the engaged couple (ha!) had an argument and at 2:30am she sped off back to Rolleston in her company car. Since then she's been texting and phoning my brother incessantly. She's also been sending long eloquent emails to Mum, giving her side of the story. She'll be coming over soon to pick him up; they've booked an expensive whale-watching tour at Kaikoura. I'm hoping they call it off after that.

Last Tuesday - that's the 20th - I played a freeroll poker tournament at the Realm in Hataitai. I found it stressful, I found it gimmicky, I felt out of place, I didn't play well and I didn't last long. Martin never turned up.

I saw The Intouchables with Tracy (along with only six other people) last Thursday. I organised it - that's a rarity for me. It was a damn good film. She can speak good French so we were able to compare notes about how they decided to translate this or that in the subtitles. We had a chat after the film over a meal (of sorts - she has so many weird and wonderful food allergies). She gets tired easily as a result of her thyroid problem so we didn't stay long, but I felt there was at least the possibility of something happening between her and me. Since then she hasn't contacted me at all, but she's a bit like that so I'm not giving up completely. Not yet anyway.

I was glad to finish work on Friday. It hadn't been an easy week with people seemingly still on a high from the Christmas party. The next day I went to the zoo - for the first time since I was a kid - with some people from the depression group. They take far better care of the animals than in the virtual freak shows I remember from years ago. Here are two chimpanzees with their arms out for food, a tamarin (which I always want to spell with a D) and a pair of gibbons (males are black, females are white):

Baffling

Oh no, not again. That was my immediate thought when I turned on the radio to catch the news yesterday morning. Yet another school shooting. Twenty-eight dead: twelve girls and eight boys, all aged six or seven; six female staff at the school; the shooter's mother and finally himself. But for the quick thinking of the school staff there would have been more fatalities. Unfortunately this will keep on happening again and again unless America does something about its gun laws. Fat chance of that. Americans are as horrified as the rest of us when children are killed in this way, but few of them want to do anything about it. I find that utterly baffling. (I just heard on the news that there are 89 firearms per 100 Americans.)

On a lighter note we had our office Christmas party on Friday. It took place on the waterfront and started at noon. It was OK for the first couple of hours while the food was out - I've come to realise that I max out at around the two-hour mark when it comes to socialising - but I became more uncomfortable as time wore on. A lot of the talking I did (which wasn't much) was with a woman of nearly seventy - for some reason the bigger the age gap the less social pressure I feel. At half-three I was itching to leave - I was just sitting around staring into space. I was thankful to be babysitting for my cousin in the evening - that gave me a good excuse not to drink much and to leave early. I managed to escape on the dot of four. I went over to my cousin's place just after six and stayed until she and her husband got home at 11:15.

Yesterday the anxiety and depression group had a meet-up at Mac's Brewery, again on the waterfront. Only four of us showed up including a bloke from Wales, of about my age, who had only been in the country two months. He seemed a really nice, easy-going bloke, but nowhere near anxious or depressed enough to be part of the group. He talked about a recent date he went on, and the various extreme sports (which NZ is famous for of course) that he'd already tried. I almost think any prospective member should have to fill in a questionnaire if they want to join, with eligibility restricted to people who score above a certain level based on how they answered the questions. Been on a date in the last month? Lose ten points. The last week? Lose fifty. In this guy's defence, I'm pretty sure he had suffered from mental health problems in the past, and as he's new to NZ I could hardly blame him for joining groups as a way of meeting people. We had some really interesting conversation to begin with, but at the two-hour point (again) I started to struggle. When we parted company after 3½ hours I was in a worse mental state that when I arrived. I think it was the realisation that while many people find social situations hard, for most of them it's a temporary problem and only certain situations. For me it's permanent and virtually all situations. And there's the relationship thing - no matter how depressed people are, they still somehow have meaningful relationships. But I don't.

On the radio this morning they talked about "Mad Pride", a relatively new movement of mental health patients, along the lines of Black Pride or Gay Pride. The use of the term "mad" here is interesting because it's a word with many meanings: "fanatical", "angry", "foolish" and "insane" to name just four. Then there are a few compounds like "madcap" which I think of as being a wonderfully British word like "barmy" or "bonkers". I guess it's the "insane" sense of "mad" that's being used by the Mad Pride movement, perhaps with a tinge of anger, and because "mad" in that sense is a pejorative term it's only people who are "mad" who can get away with using it, a bit like what we've seen with "queer". The radio programme continued by interviewing some members of Sendam, who are mainly a drumming band based in Wellington, made up of mental health patients. The name is almost "madness" backwards - if they'd kept the double S you'd have pretty much got a cross between a Korean car and a viral pop song from the same country. They band were accepting donations so I gave them $15.

Talking of relationships, I asked Tracy if she wanted to see The Intouchables at the Penthouse. She said yes - probably one evening this week although I don't yet know which. Do I treat this as a date? Although we have similar interests our personalities are maybe too far apart, but you never know I suppose.

A bloke who sat not too far from me got fired last Wednesday. There in the morning, gone by lunchtime. It was for serious misconduct, though I have no idea what. I don't keep up with all the office gossip. From what I could tell he was good at his job. My boss and his boss are are in the process of grading and "calibrating" us based on our performance. As we found out last week, the percentage of employees who gets each of the grades is fixed. This raised one or two eyebrows in our team: "So even if we've all done a really good job, some of us will still get the low grades?" Yes, my boss said, saying that he didn't make the rules. I then piped up, saying that at least there's a flip-side: even if we've all been rubbish, some of us will still get the top grades. One of my colleagues likened the system to a school exam; working for a large company feels a lot like school to me. When I arrived at the company to start my actuarial role, I was given an HR pamphlet outlining various grades; it mentioned a literal decimation policy of "managing out" the bottom 10% of employees. As soon as I read that I thought, oh shit, that'll be me. In my current role, despite all the talk of grades last week, I really couldn't give two hoots what grade I get.

This afternoon I went to play poker with Martin at the Realm in Hataitai. Only it wasn't on. Their regular Sunday tournaments ended last weekend. We played a few games of pool instead on their free but ramshackle pool table. They've still got a tournament on Tuesday night and we've agreed to play then, so I'll need to rearrange my other commitments (I normally see Julie on a Tuesday).

It's been quite a hot day today. A couple of times lately I've been caught out, forgetting that Wellington does get sun occasionally and that it does burn just like anywhere else. I've still done precisely zero Christmas shopping. I plan to squeeze it all into a couple of hours next Saturday. What on earth do I get my brother?

I recently discovered the Icelandic group Of Monsters and Men after hearing this song which a bank used for one of their adverts. I think they're great.