Still recovering from the dental work and lower back pain. Honestly, I feel like an old woman! Must sort myself out before I crack up entirely. But it was a good day nevertheless. Small achievements.

• Had a letter from ING Direct offering me a fancy rate on a cash ISA for next year if I pre-ordered. And for once I actually just filled out the form and sent it straight away. So that’s good. Don’t need to think about savings for another year (apart from actually putting money in the thing).
• The bonus from my last employer for referring a new staff member to them came through. This is very exciting. £1000! Half of it is going to a friend because the girl I recommended is a friend of my friend. I’ve actually never met her, so it seemed only fair to share the loot. His half is going on a tax bill. My half is going on dentistry. Woah. Stop this crazy fun-filled ride?
• Wrote a blog post! For the first time in a couple of weeks my head was actually clear enough to think about and then write stuff. I think it might be mildly interesting to some folk. Maybe. Hope so. The hardest part about blogging is actually thinking up stuff that others might find interesting to read, but I guess that’s all part of finding your “Right People” – if it’s something you find interesting, then hopefully someone out there will find it interesting too. Time will tell. Traffic on caitlinrowley.com had a mysterious spike last Tuesday. No reason for it. I haven’t created much new content – posted a couple of files to SoundCloud (the Three Whitman Songs, if you missed it ), but that doesn’t usually generate backlink traffic because most people just play them and don’t read the blurb or go hunting for more info. And the promotion I did for those was directly to SoundCloud so no clue what’s happening there.
• And we watched A Single Man, which was amazing. Colin Firth is just incredible. So glad Djeli picked it. And he made me soup because I still can’t eat anything much that’s not squishy. What a darling. (Djelibeybi, not Colin Firth.)

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Quietish day at home. Djelibeybi assembled the hutch to go over his desk in the revamped study, so we’ve started painting it now – hopefully we’ll be able to put it in place by the end of tomorrow. We watched the very interesting global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth, then followed it up with… (isn’t it obvious?)… Zack and Miri Make A Porno. And I’ve done a bunch more work on the LCF secret site, which is now very nearly ready for launch to members, which may sound low-key but is actually very exciting. There you have it.

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With parents gone to the Isle of Wight and Djeli home with man-flu, I decided to take a mental duvet-day myself. Watched TV (finally saw An American Werewolf in London), tended to Djeli’s needs for lemonade and Lemsip, went to my physio appointment and knitted a bit. The hat’s nearly complete now but, alas, I have run out of yarn with a mere 5 very short rows to go, so it’s on hold now till I can go out and buy a little more.

Oh! And I also made the Buttermilk Oaten Bread out of my new Teatime Baking cookbook. Verdict: Excellent flavour, but oven is totally mad. Before it burnt everything. This time it never even reached the temperature on the dial so the loaves didn’t cook through properly and ended up a little doughy. Flavour really good though, so they’re definitely worth another try.

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And good golly, it’s been a long time since we just hung out together on our own. Parents went off to see the London Wetlands Centre (and gave it two very enthusiastic thumbs up – must get there sometime) and I did some doodling about trying to make the notes I have turn into a proper opening for the quintet (fail) then Djeli and I sauntered into town to inspect microwaves. We didn’t actually buy anything, but we came away with knowledge and a ball of wool for me to knit myself a therapeutic hat with (Auntie Madge’s Wisp scarf is driving me insane – the point at which I thought I’d nearly finished turned out to only be halfway there so I need something different to knit – a quick win – before I start in on my mother’s scarf which is a chunky-weight chenille version of the Wisp pattern). Then Djeli made his fantastic shepherd’s pie for us for dinner and we all watched My Family and Other Animals and then Slumdog Millionaire. All in all, a tip-top day

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Today I baked bread I pulled out my new pain de mie tin and The Bread Bible and baked up some bread. Unfortunately I suspect that not only does the oven have fail, but the oven thermometer my mama brought with her has been so long unused it’s forgotten how to properly thermomet. By the time it read the 425 F the recipe said it should be for baking the bread, the dial on the oven was up to about 225 C (should be about 217 C) and while the bread has turned out delicious and with a great texture, it IS somewhat charred on top. Think I may have to get another oven thermometer and compare and contrast.

Apart from that, I didn’t achieve terribly much. Made Nigel Slater turkey burgers for dinner. Did a little gentle grocery shopping and accidentally bought Calamity Jane on DVD for £3 which we watched over dinner. Which then led us on to That Touch of Mink. Might need to make tonight a Doris-Day-free zone for the sanity of my mama.

Did a little bit more work on the site, but no huge breakthroughs.

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Got an absolute truckload of work done on the site today and now the blog is pretty much ready to go – very nearly entirely. I think the only thing left to do with it is to work out the custom template so I can import the latest blog post into the homepage. Worked out some cool features too – selecting subnav items depending on whether the post is in the news or article category (or if it’s a category list page of either) and setting the posting date within the <time> tag automatically.

Also accidentally watched The Omen. I’ve avoided this one for years, but it came on and nobody turned it off… and by the time it got halfway through then I was stuck and had to watch it right through to the end. Really good film – very suspenseful, and much more effective than a lot of more modern movies that have to rely on effects to be creepy.

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is that Pro Tools 8 is a fantastic upgrade, and Garritan Personal Orchestra sounds pretty gosh-darned good. AND I found out how to patch multiple MIDI channels through a single instance of the instrument.

The bad news: Serious CPU-overload messages and wierd freezing thing going on with GPO. Really not sure what’s causing all this, but I’m sure it could be fixed by chucking a few thousand pounds at a new machine. Shame, that

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Really not well. Have done nothing, basically but watch telly, most notably “The Day the Earth Stood Still”

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I’m back in recuperation mode after having too much fun and getting too cold and eating a little too much yesterday, so today have done barely anything yet am still as weak as a kitten and totally exhausted. I did achieve a few rows of very slow knitting of the “Strangling Vine” scarf, which is probably about 70% done now. And quite a lot of TV-watching – Ocean’s Twelve, Ocean’s Thirteen, and The Day the Earth Stood Still. Lovely convalescent stuff.

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… to the filmmaker. I do hope he likes them. Guess I’ll find out in the next couple of days. I finally made the breakthrough I needed to with Finale GPO. The sounds are awesome, I have to say – very tempted to add the full GPO to my list of things I want to buy when I win EuroMillions.

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