Sadly I didn’t get as much sleep as I had hoped, and consequently also didn’t get up as early as I had hoped I would. Nonetheless I still made it to my Databases class, which was on fault tolerance across distributed systems. Interesting stuff and still very much an open problem. In other news, it was raining again today, after some nice days over the weekend, some grey days earlier in the week… now it’s rain time again.

After that I went and tried to cash my rebate cheque (which I got a while ago) and the bank on campus told me I needed to have an account somewhere to put it in (as I have no local bank as yet, I’ve been working from my bank in New Zealand), find the bank it was issued from, or get a friend to bank it for me. I’ll look into if there’s the right bank downtown or something, and in the mean time I might ask Rob or Marisa if they could bank it for me or something.

Anyway, from there I went and picked up my packages. One was my Valentine’s Day present for Anastasia, which took a lot longer to get here than I thought it would. I was hoping that it would be here so I could give it to her while she was here. Ah well. I’ll just have to send it down to her. The other was a small, balloon covered package from New Zealand.

You’ll have to excuse me at this point as I go into fanboy mode. First, some history.

Some of you may know that I used to work at E-caf in the Arts Centre. While I was working there, there was this lovely girl named Hera that used to come in on some of the Saturday evening shifts that I worked and start playing little ‘practice gigs’ right downstairs. Since at that point in the proceedings there would be very little for me to actually administer (either no people or the people that were there weren’t the kind that needed assistance), I would walk halfway down the main stairs and just hang over the rails watching and listening to her play (which echoed all the way up anyway). There’s something cool about gigs that are only a dozen people at most. I would have a coffee from the Boulevard Bakehouse and pay attention to people when I needed to (which was pretty much just when they wanted to leave) by periodically checking on things. Hera’s music was her gorgeous voice and her playing on her guitar, some songs simple and some more complex but always melodious and filled with her talking to the crowd in between. I got to know pretty much all of her songs as she played them, including the little vocal exercises that she did.

Whenever Hera was the artist playing in the Arts Centre on the lawn, I would come and sit down in the sun, listening and usually having some coffee from the Bakehouse or some food from one of the many stalls around the back behind the Court Theatre and the shops around that side, like the Fudge Cottage. Anyway, I got Hera’s CD ‘Not So Sweet’ as soon as she released it, got it signed and everything. Later at one of her going away concerts at the Dux de Lux I also picked up a signed copy of her limited release of a live concert in Reykjavik. I haven’t managed to pick up copies of ‘Not your type’ or her Icelandic one, ‘Hafið þennan dag’ (which you can buy here) just yet because she’s always out of copies when I ask to buy one. ^^; That and the shipping from Iceland is probably killer… then again, I might just pay for it anyway.

I pretty much went to all of her gigs in Christchurch that I could. I met her boyfriend outside one of her gigs at Mainstreet. Nice guy, musician as well with long dreads. I later met him again at another one of her gigs at the Dux – I didn’t actually expect him to remember me, but he was chatty nonetheless. He told me the name of his band while I was talking to him, but I had forgotten it by the time I stopped talking to him, so I couldn’t look it up when I got home. ^^; I even went to a gig of hers with Dad at some random bar in town for one of the Jazz festivals in Christchurch where she was just singing a bunch of jazz standards with someone else playing the guitar… that was awesome. ^^ I’m trying to remember the guitarist’s name… Petch? Keith Petch or something. If I had my Hera CD cases here, I’m pretty sure he does some guitar on one of them as well.

Anyway, a little while ago I got one of those general emails from Hera updating me on her upcoming gigs… in Christchurch. It also announced the release of her new CD, ‘Don’t Play This’. I emailed her (as I do very occasionally to generally keep up my support) saying that I sadly would not be able to pick up her CD just yet or be as regular at her concerts now that I’m in Seattle and that I missed the Arts Centre gigs from ‘back in the day’.

Generous soul that she is, she sent me a signed copy of her new CD! How cool is that? I’ve just finished listening to it and found that it’s a bunch of cool new songs (one of which I already had because I downloaded the music video) as well as a lot of songs that I’ve been listening to her play at concerts since I started listening to her. It’s really interesting to hear how they sound in production with the extra instruments and the different feel that comes with it being on a CD and not all the variation of being live when it’s just her voice, her guitar and sometimes an accompaniment. In particular ‘The devil and me’ has a different feel to it from when I first heard it live a few years back. ‘Déj

Well, I managed to get a semi-reasonable amount of sleep and today wasn’t too bad. I went to my lectures, I made some more progress on my Animator project for graphics and actually got some work done as well.

I think part of my problem is I have inaccurate perceptions. Sometimes things which I think will take me a long time (and therefore are ‘large’ on my mental importance scale) actually don’t take me very long at all when I sit down to do them. The converse is true also, which means that my perception of progress is a very… inconsistent one. Sometimes I’ll have a day where I will sit down and start to do some ‘large’ things, and find that I get through more than I thought I would because they don’t take nearly as long as I thought. This becomes a ‘progress day’, where I get things done and feel really good about it. On the other hand, sometimes I’ll work on things for hours and hours and get nowhere that I thought would only be an hour or two. These are known as ‘did I take stupid pills this morning?’ days.

Today was a progress day. I even went home at a reasonable hour (sadly slightly too late for me to pick up my packages which I have waiting for me at the desk), switched to doing readings and other kinds of work, then watched some anime and went to bed. I can do this, I will get back into some kind of healthy groove.

I managed to get some sleep, but not enough. Felt like crap, missed two lectures again. I’m not a happy camper. I managed to clean myself up and get myself feeling like a human being again, then head to the FIUTS people to get a ticket for their trip to watch the Seattle Supersonics play the Detroit Pistons. I then managed to make it to the Colloquium, which was on scalable, automated testing of software. Pretty interesting stuff, actually. The lecturer made a good case for the use of his system, how it compared with what’s out there, how it differed, etc. I would be very interested in having a play around with his system, given some time (and software projects to apply it to).

I think ‘given some time’ might be the key phrase there.

After the Colloquium I talked to Magda about what happened in class today, where we’re going next, that kind of thing. After that I went to my office and worked on my assignment until the evening, then went home, had some food and went to bed.

Right now I know I’m not 100%, but at the same time I know I’m not really sick enough to just wipe me out of what I’m doing completely until I recover. That and I have a lot to do. So, I’m in this weird in between stage where I know I should take it easy and get back to being healthy, and feeling unable to do so because I don’t want to compromise doing any of the things that I’m currently doing. Cut down what I’m doing, I hear you say? Please enlighten me as to which thing I ought to reduce or remove from my workload. Seriously.

Ok, this is frustrating. I managed to totally delete this entire entry, so this might be a little briefer than I had originally intended.

Well, as I mentioned in my post on Friday, Anastasia came to visit this weekend. It was great to see her again, even if only briefly. I showed her around my little domain, made sure she got a taste of the burritos I have all the time, showed her a little of downtown (we went to a good movie at the Meridian), all the while navigating the buses, which isn’t too bad actually. We also did some shopping and walked up the Ave a bit.

Mostly we just kinda held on to each other and made sure that we weren’t dreaming. This whole distance thing is a total bitch. I don’t know if any of my readers (all six of them or something) actually have any good advice on how to deal with it or what to do about it, if you do please post or email me. I could use the advice. This morning was yet another heart-wrenching moment of having to let her go after a very brief visit. Being based out of New Zealand is a somewhat large distance… I mean, even now that I’m in Seattle, I know it isn’t going to cost me $2600 just in flights to go see her and that’s great, but in a way makes it harder because I know that she’s more accessible.

Anyway, after she left today I came back to my apartment, did some chores (almost threw up taking the rubbish out, I’m glad I got some liners for the bin), sat down and chatted to some people online and did some reading for class tomorrow. After doing my readings, I went to bed and watched some television before trying to get some sleep.

Well, turns out I didn’t sleep at all last night. Again. Got up when my alarm went off, had a shower, pulled myself together then took the buses out to the Sea(ttle-)Tac(oma) airport. After a little bit of a wait (the flight was delayed in Dallas), I got to grab Anastasia and hold on to her again. Still novel and brilliant no matter that it was 6 weeks and not a year like the last time in between seeing each other.

We left SeaTac, went back to my apartment and just spent some time together, talking and being able to convey all those things that you can’t across a webcam.

Anyway, eventually we went and got dinner, came back and watched some television, then I tied up a few things on my computer and we went to bed, both of us being tired from not enough sleep.