You probably started reading this post with half a thought about the titleand might be expecting some kind of Ziggy Stardust reference somewhere. You’re not going to find it.
I’m buried at work at the momenttrying to achieve in a couple of weeks what might normally take a month. I’m making good progress, but it’s more by luck than judgement (I’m also my most harsh critic, which doesn’t help). I wish I could tell you what I’m working on, but I can’t.
So. No life at the momentwhich gives a reason for the mention of Mars. Given the routine at the moment, I might as well be living in a capsure en-route to the red planet. Each day more or less follows the same routine;Alarm goes off at 7am, slide out of bed, shower, shave, get dressed, make breakfasts, packed lunches, and chase the childrenmaking sure they brush their teeth, comb their hair, look presentable, and not hiding toys up their sleeves, etc, and finally leave for workRide mountain bike across town, avoiding traffic that either fails to see a 6’4 cyclist wearing reflective clothing, or is just incredibly ignorant (following today’s display from somebody that deliberately pulled out in front of me, I suspect the latter).
Bang my head against my desk for several hours, while continuing the pretence that I am a skilled software and web developer.
Each lunch that was hastily put together several hours earlier, and run out to the sandwich van when it arrives to grab a bar of chocolate.
Return to desk for several more hours of headbanging, this time watching the clock periodically to see how fast yet another day has been eaten up.
Cycle home in the dark, lights blazing, again avoiding kamikaze drivers, and “other” cyclists (who seemingly have no knowledge whatsoever of the highway code, or lights, or cycling helmets, or reflective clothing).
Walk into the evening war-zone, where I will spend the next couple of hours clearing up the wreckage everybody else caused since school finished, eating dinner as fast as I can, and then washing everything up, and cleaning the kitchen. I will be in the kitchen typically until 8pm.
Check email, skim social networks, and have a couple of hours of “me” timeusually fuelled by coffee, and attempting to avoid being sucked into reading endless webpages, playing with webpages, writing webpages, and/or getting not much done until it’s suddenly 2am again.
Like I said some days it feels like I might as well be part of a Mars mission.
In other news, I’ve reverted the main computer at home to Ubuntu. Windows still exists (in a virtual machine that can be launched when needed), but so far everything is workingwhich couldn’t be said for Windows. And before you say it, yesreplacing Windows with Ubuntu happened in the early hours of the morning during the weekend.
Weekends are a whole different ballgame in our house. I get home on Friday night every week hoping for a quiet weekend, and invariably find out that I had been told several days before that we would be “out here on Saturday morning”, “taking the kids there on Saturday afternoon”, “doing XYZ on Sunday morning”, and so on.
I know everything usually works out fine, and we all have funbut on a Friday night after a long week it sometimes feels like the ground is falling out from under me.