My shoulders have tensed up into a set of tight little knots and are stubbornly refusing to relax. I'm not sure why; work is work, and I got some (not enough) sleep, and there were no nightmares, and I have a warm cup of cinnamon plum tea. But I'm tense. Maybe it's because the work I'm doing is so fiddly -- tons of tiny UI changes which require me to hunt around in (sigh) Patrick's code and completely reorganise the structure of it. Patrick wrote very good stuff for us, but his brain seems to work nothing like mine does, so dealing with the way he flung information back and forth between lots of tiny methods can be stressful. Plus there's a meeting this afternoon, and even really amusing development team meetings (as this looks to be) make me tense. I hate sitting and talking when I could be working.

Hmn. It's also possible that having twenty nasty pieces of email in my inbox every morning isn't helping. I made the mistake of subscribing to diary-l, on the theory that it would be nice to get back in touch with the community of online diarists. Mistake, mistake, mistake, because it seems mostly to be insults and flames, including an on-going war between two people for no reason I can discern. I've just now unsubscribed again, and good riddance, I suppose. I would like to get back in touch... but it's not worth the price in stress.

Woo! Jim just called to remind me that tickets for Rent in San Francisco went on sale at 11am -- and to tell me that he got opening night (3 March) tickets for us and our friend Paul. Orchestra tickets. Row E. I giggled a lot and told him he was wonderful and got generally bubbly. I'm really looking forward to it, even though it's still months away.

It's weird, in a cool way, to think of having plans for 1999. I like being able to take it for granted that I'll be here and Jim will be here and we'll be together four months from now. Not that there's any reason to think otherwise... but I used to find it difficult to get excited about the future because I was never sure it'd be real. I'm glad to be getting over that.

And wow. 1999. How 80's.

It's a beautiful day outside, just the kind I love, which means grey and raining and cool. The sky outside the window is intensely bright pale gray up high, with a band of darker stormy rain-grey in the middle, and then a softer white-gray at the horizon. The trees in the parking lot are behaving like proper trees, which is to say they're losing leaves and changing colours, so there are bare branches in front of the sky, and occasionally it's a little windy so the ends of the branches sway. It's perfect weather for tea -- I switched from the cinnamon plum tea (which was a little too sour, but that may have been over-brewing) to china rose, which I know I brewed way too long, but is nonetheless deep and flower-sweet. I'm still fiddling with GUI stuff, but I've hit a rhythm with it now.

Fondue Wednesday night was wonderful. The waiter was funny, competent, and very laid-back; he made a few mistakes, but rectified them with great charm. The food was lovely, much better than it'd been the last few times I was there -- they'd brought back a few of their old combinations, which made me happier. For cheeses we got stinking rose (garlic and some more garlic and yet more garlic), and something I can neither spell nor pronounce (Kirschwasser?), which was cherry brandy & nutmeg. It had a very strong flavour, but went really well on grapes and bread. For meat Jim & I split a bunch of interesting stuff -- venision (my favourite), elk, bison, chicken, and the infamous savage wild duck. It was all good, but nothing really stood out -- just warm flavourful meat cooked in red wine. Dessert was bittersweet chocolate with amaretto in one pot, and decadent chocolate (milk and dark chocolate, espresso, coffee liquer) in another, with lots of fruits and pieces of candy to dip into the melted chocolate. Yum.

Having Keely here has been really nice, much more so than I expected. I was afraid we wouldn't have much to talk about, but instead I'm in danger of never getting enough sleep again -- there's so much to say! I look forward to when she's moved out here for good.