I ended up watching a programme last night with Bill Oddie in it. I thought he was an irritating old git before, but this only compounded matters. I felt if I ever met him in real life that I’d just punch him for being annoying and that would be that.

Then I was rudely awaken by the doorbell, it was a man offering to fix the door for three grand. He was standing there with a large plank of wood. The glass to the left of the door was completely missing. I assumed someone had tried to break in. He said he’d be happy to fix it and was ‘just passing’. I asked how. He said he’d use a few thousand of those bolt catch end plate things (you know the ones you get on bathroom locks). I thought this was bodging it a bit. I asked Jamie if this guy was for real. He said he was the guy off all those daytime DIY programmes. I said that I could get a whole new door complex for three grand and told him to piss off.

I went back to sleep.

So went to bed at 4AM after a fun day kicking the fuck out of an xbox that kept wanting to reboot. Started at 9AM after searching for Sasha who had escaped. No food for her and no walk. Worked on HDR all day and finally got it finished. Went for a run, did just over a half marathon, first one of the year. Not exactly rocket speed though. I’ve done over forty hours this week and it’s only Thursday.

I won’t go into work details as it was a very long day sat on a wooden floor staring at a TV. Still, was quite a nice day though weather wise, it’s going to get shite again now though. Went to Combat, all good. Trying to work out where to go for our anniversary, got dogs booked in. Looks like it will be this country, I’m tempted by Brighton, get a nice hotel, nice restaurant, low key, but something together at least.

Bit of an odd day I guess. Woke up early but decided to milk the bed thing a bit to catch up on some very long days in the last week. Eventually had breakfast and gave JKHT a call. Managed to get a late afternoon slot. So walked Sasha, was planning on going into town but had to curtail that as I needed to bring flight forward a bit due to Shobdon closing earlier. Got there and James thought I was doing a self fly hire, I thought I’d booked for duel. He was out on an instruction flight so left me a bit knackered. Ewan a commercial pilot (not an instructor) was there so James said, ‘Just take him for the ride if you want company’. So off we went. The wind had actually picked up well beyond self fly hire levels and was up to 19Kts. James actually sent a text to Ewan and said to be very careful in the pickup as it was one hell of a cross wind. I picked up into the hover, it was somewhat challenging, but I failed to take out the fuel bay so all was good. Took off to the North. I asked Ewan if all was okay and if he was happy, he replied with, ‘Anyone who can pick up in that wind that smoothly I’m perfectly happy to fly with’. We flew to Shobdon, somewhere new but within about half hour, nice flight. Ewan is training to become an instructor so was nice for him to be in the left hand seat and see what it was like, he did point out a couple of bits about trim. He actually found it really useful for himself, having plenty of bandwidth to be able to spot some of the more obscure problems. We had a brew and cake at Shobdon and then flew back to Gloucester. So I’m all good and ‘flight ready’ again. It was good fun and great weather, even if a tad windy. Came back and did a short run, had a bath and watched the start of the new F1 season. A nice day, don’t get many of those.

Yesterday was fun. Went to Combat, walked the dog and then spent the rest of the day painting the bedroom. Finally had a bath and cooked. Today I had a load of bottling to do, which I eventually finished at about 10PM after doing everything else. I’m off to a meeting tomorrow and then a conference for a couple of days, I’ll be glad of the break!

Finished off all my light map stuff. Back on to console HDR which has its own set of fun issues. It’s gone bloody cold again. Still, popped out while it was still light and did a 15Km run. That’s 29Km this week. Not sure why people find 10K’s challenging, that’s like down to the pub and back.

Finally finished that task. All looked quite nice in the end. I won’t go into the internal politics, I just kept my mouth shut. First day of the year when I’ve walked Sasha without using a jacket. Even had to change t-shirts as the current one stank, hasn’t even done half a week yet. Walked to Pump, again a very pleasant evening, just want a bit more light now

So ended up scrapping the bulk of my ellipse stuff which was annoying but one of those things. Got something else to work in the end, but a great waste of my time. Weather has been nice last few days, almost like spring is here. Went for another 14Km run.

Put my weekend thoughts into action and failed. So had a look at the equations again and couldn’t work out why it was about twenty meters out. Then while debugging it I spotted a twenty that was from another calc. Sure enough adding the offset of that one finally gave me the correct results. Then I made the mistake of taking the limits on the axis to form the bounding box and ended up chopping half the bloody thing off. Still, once I’d produced the corners it all finally worked. So that’s about twenty hours on one set of equations.

Didn’t get to bed until gone 4AM. Was I out partying? No. I fell asleep on the couch after letting Dillon out. Got up at 9AM with one hell of a headache, I think I consumed more wine than I thought, about two bottles more. Still, walked to Combat, did that and walked home. Walked Sasha. Then came home, Jamie was back now. Continued with decorating the bedroom. Then some very sad news. My dear friend died in my arms. We’ve had a long relationship. We’ve covered many walls. But her heart started strong and slowly faded. First it just murmured, then eventually it stopped completely and she was dead. Goodbye Emily the sander, RIP.