Should finish Against the Day this week and will be looking for something lighter to read, so I'm thinking PG Wodehouse or Peter Tinniswood, something that won't require me to read half of Wikipedia figuring out whether a character's name has a hidden meaning, is just a throwaway  joke (like Barry Nebulay, Inspector Sands, the Principessa Spongiatosta or "noted Uyghur troublemaker" Al Mar-Fuad) or actually belonged to a real person who happened to be in the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time. Not to mention all the history, science real and cranky, religion, musicology, geopolitics and more esoteric stuff packed into those thousand and something pages. It would be nice to decompress my brain. Although I do have Jeff Faux's The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future - and What It Will Take to Win It Back in the post from Amazon, which probably isn't going to be a bundle of laughs.

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Italian progfest is going well, mostly appealing on levels well beyond the expected overload of quasi-symphonic bombast, gassy mellotrons, analog synths and tight-trousered Hobbit-bothering -- although not knowing a word of Italian they could all be singing about gnomes and elves and sacred quests beyond the Vale of Boraxarob to touch the magic tights of Nymgymmer for all I know. More at great length later, for sure. I'm a bit disappointed by the lack of cheese, to be honest. I expected to be wallowing in the look-at-me-I 'm-playing-eight-keyboards- at-the-same-time wankery of Keith Emerson and Rick Wakeman taken to hopeless extremes but there's no wafting capes, needless showy  technique for its own sake and ripped off hoary classics here. Either I've been extremely lucky with this selection or I'm going to have to look elsewhere on the prog-globe for so-bad-it's-good kicks.

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Elsewhere, that thing they call "work". Hmmm. I think I've broke the back of the mammoth task ahead of me, that task being to give a damn about what I'm currently working on. (Boring technical aside: I hate working from mock-ups since they've usually been put together by someone who knows about design and ease of use and consistency and therefore can be counted on bearing little resemblance to what comes out of development several months down the line. I'd rather piss around and wait until the gruesome final product arrives, but that's hardly likely to endear me to anyone.)

Back into the office after MLK day plus two "snow days". I'd forgotten how bleak the view from my desk is, looking out at a five story concrete car park, wet grey still ice-glazed against the wet grey of the sky. And no birds sing. Sleepwalking from the bus the only thing that kept me alert was the sound of ice falling from overhead powerlines and shattering like glass rods around me. Could seriously hurt if one of those caught you on the noggin. Still reading Against the Day, in case you were wondering. Page 951. The only chance I get to read these days is on the bus, although AtD really requires an internet connection as you're reading so you can keep track of places and dates and names, see who and what is real or imaginary. You don't really need to know much about the Riemann zeta function, however....

The boy is one year old next week. It only seems like yesterday, etc. His current trick is to push his afternoon nap later and later each day -- yesterday it was nine o'clock, which meant he woke, refreshed and ready to play around 10.30pm. He refuses to be fed and has settled on a diet of diluted apple juice, muffins and cheerios, although he picks out the yogurt-coated ones. It's startling, to me at least, how quickly he's developing. I thought babies remained babies for a lot longer than this, that there was a couple of years when they stayed where they were put and just waved their legs in the air and gurgled. I didn't think I'd be fighting for the TV remote control for a long time....