Marty and I are giving our first joint talk which could well turn out to be a disaster. At the time of submission this sounded like a great idea. Marty knows that I pay more attention to detail than him so the talk should have structure and I know that Marty should be able to keep the audience entertained and if all else fails talk for an hour about something.

When I mentioned YAPC this morning he said, “What are we planning on talking about again?”. (See, I pay more attention to detail: I know the talk’s about CPAN). This surprised me as I have already sent him a talk outline and can remember having discussions about the content of this talk. He laughed and said, “Well I’m not sure I actually read the outline; I just thought you wanted me to format it” (yes he actually said the semi-colon). And in relation to the conversations he said, “Was that when I was watching that episode of South Park…”.

The Call of the Wild, Jack London

Alaskan tundra –
a dog finds his inner wolf.
White snow turns yellow.

[One Hundred Great Books in Haiku, David Bader]

Tonight my sister-in-law told me that she would be taking part in the attempt to beat the world record for the most people taking part in the same pole dancing routine. She asked me if I wanted to take part and it does sound like an interesting way to keep fit. But I’m not sure that I’m flexible enough to try pole dancing.

Recently I’ve been reading about handwriting and how much is given away about personality and emotional health in one A4 page of writing. I’ve been aware for a long time that everything I say and every movement I make can be communicating things I may not want other people to know. But I must admit I’ve never before thought about the colour of ink I habitually use to write with. I am aware that I made a deliberate decision to use black ink. It didn’t seem like a big decision though as really the only ink colours I could choose from were blue, black, red and green.

Writers who habitually and from choice use black ink are not so much revealing an emotional state as an attitude towards communication.

Such individuals are concerned with precision, exactitude and in the clear understanding of all aspects of the message they are attempting to convey. They have a strong desire to make themselves clear and to avoid confusion. Frequently the use of such ink is associated with people in professions which demand a high degree of precision, such as accountancy, engineering, mathematics and so on. [The Hidden Language of Your Handwriting, Greene & Lewis]

On the 21st June Tony and I went looking for Proleek Dolmen. Although we had read about this on the Mythical Ireland site and Tony had seen road signs for this in the past we couldn’t find it. I ended up going into the Tourist Information Bureau in Dundalk to get directions and was told that the Dolmen was at the Ballymacscanlon House Hotel. If you do go looking for it you may have to get directions from reception in the hotel as it isn’t clearly sign posted in the hotel grounds.

This has been a great month for books. I bought myself 10 novels for my birthday and Tony took me to a second-hand bookshop sale where I bought another 16 non-fiction books. I only have two of the novels left to read but still have quite a lot of the non-fiction to get through. At the minute my bedside reading list looks like this:

• Emperor: The Gods of War (Conn Iggulden)
• The Gold Falcon (Katharine Kerr)
• What Colour is your Knicker-Elastic? (Sean Orford)
• Sword in the Storm (David Gemmell)
• The Hidden Language of Your Handwriting (James Greene & David Lewis)
• Gods of Management (Charles Handy)
• Spellbound: The Improbable Story of English Spelling (James Essinger)
• The Human Mind: and how to make the most of it (Robert Winston)

I have been waiting 6 years for Katharine Kerr to release book 12 in her Deverry series and now just need to decide whether a should re-read the first 11 books before reading the new one.

I was reading about studying in Japan and was really surprised to come across the following:

“It is strictly prohibited for foreign students to work in an entertainment service establishment that may affect public morals such as bars or cabarets where you serve customers at the table. This includes even doing dishwashing or cleaning work at pachinko or mahjong parlors.” [Study in Japan]

This year I had my most relaxing birthday. Marty took me to the Culloden for the weekend and I got to spend the morning of my birthday at the spa. Marty wasn’t quite sure what a spa was or what sort of treatments he could get but I think after his all over body massage that he’s quite keen to go back!

Whilst at FOSDEM Marty decided to take the LPI Certification Level 1 exams. He has been considering teaching this course in Belfast and thought it might be a good idea to sit the exams first.

At the start of the conference they announced that one of the sponsors was going to pay the exam fees of the three candidates with the highest score. Marty received notification today of the bank transfer.

Over the past couple of days I have been given some strange things to eat. Marty and I stayed in a traditional ryokhan in Hakone for a couple of nights. As part of the package they provided us with Japanese food. For breakfast I was presented with rice, cold fish, miso soup, pickles, cold sausage, and scrambled eggs. Now scrambled eggs might sound like breakfast food but these eggs were cold, presented on a bed of lettuce and had been scrambled with baby eels that have little black eyes. There is no way I could eat food with eyes for breakfast.

As part of the dinner set, which was served in our room, we had stew that was cooked at the table. I didn’t really like the stew but it came in really useful as I was able to cook the sashimi in it. I know this was probably a terrible thing to do with the very expensive raw fish but I prefer my food to be cooked. Not all the fish was raw. We were given a deep fried catfish to eat. But it had eyes and fins and I just don’t like my food to look at me. Thankfully Marty likes loads of food and was able to eat lots of mine for me. We were also served lots of food that I didn’t recognise but sometimes it’s better not to know what you are eating.

Today Marty got hungry walking through the train station. He went to a small cake shop to buy a snack. They specialised in apple dishes and the air was filled with the wonderful scent of cooking apples. But Marty decided to buy candied sweet potato. And I was really surprised to discover that these actually tasted really good.