Joining up

Well, I don't know what to expect, but it seemed like a good idea to have a blog. I've long been computer-phobic and now I have a job in which I maintain a website. Go figure. So now I garden in the mornings and spend my afternoons at the computer. It's not how I expected my life to go, but it seems to work. This is my first post, and I haven't actually decided on a theme yet. I kind of thought I would do my personal profile first and that would suggest something to me, but I haven't discovered a way to do it yet. I expect there'll be a lot about books, mainly the ones I'm reading at any given time.

eg I'm currently reading T C Boyle's The Inner Circle. I first read The Tortilla Curtain and loved it, then I had a go at Drop City and hated it. Didn't finish it, though I tried really hard. It was just too fragmented - I couldn't get familiar enough with the characters to care about them, and the narrative was hard to follow and basically not that interesting. When I stopped reading, at p.140, I had no curiosity about what happened to anyone when they were left to their own devices. Obviously I'm not enough of an ageing hippy to relate.

The first-person narrator of The Inner Circle isn't particularly likeable - a bit self-absorbed, if anything - but at least I'm interested enough to wonder what's going to happen. And I am enjoying the adventure of assessing the plausibility of the character study of Dr Alfred Kinsey (yes, that Dr Kinsey), which so far is quite convincing.

So, today I've finished composting the roses in the aviary (50+ zebra finches, 6 Chinese quail, an antiquated miniature rabbit, and a duckling of uncertain breed who appeared on the neighbour's front lawn last week and is resisting all our efforts to become friends), emptying the compost bin in the process. I started to turn the middle bin (there are three of them) into the finishing off one and then the timer rang to tell me I'd finished my allotted time and I put down my spade in great relief. I'm out of condition, clearly.

Work consisted of updating the info on the website, as I do every day, answering emails, dealing with the mail I collected last Friday, put in a bag and forgot about (oops) and drafting a letter asking for a quote for some equipment I plan to apply for a grant for. It doesn't sound very exciting put like that, but I love organising things, and being in sole charge of the organisation that pays me is so much better than my previous job, where my working conditions were at the mercy of an incompetent team leader who didn't actually know what I did, and the structure of my days was determined by some underpaid minions in a call/contact centre who knew even less.

When I started to work from home people told me I would have to figure out how to resist the temptation to procrastinate by putting in a load of washing, or start dinner, or whatever. Well, hello! Isn't that the point of working from home? That you can do those things, and not have to try and fit them around someone else's schedule? So I do. Because otherwise I'd be staring at the screen all afternoon, and everyone knows that's not good for you. Ok, so I get to go out and check the post box or bank cheques and that sort of stuff, but when I was in my previous job, I didn't work non-stop. Does anybody? So this works. It's taken me nearly 4 months to figure out the best schedule for me, but it takes that long to settle into a new job anyway, doesn't it? Actually, I don't know the answer to that. I was in my other job for 26 years, right from when I left university. It's only in the last year that the working conditions changed and became impossible - before that I was reasonably happy, doing my work efficiently and effectively.

That's probably enough for one posting.