Bad Back

You're supposed to rotate your bed mattress 180 degrees every 3 to 6 months.  I rotated mine last weekend, and now I'm suffering from a bad back and lack of sleep.  What a mistake.  I think I'm going to rotate my mattress back to how it was this weekend.  This is not the first time this has happened.  I don't know why one side of my mattress is so messed up compared to the other.  I've even tried sleeping on the other side of the bed, but that hasn't helped.  I think I've just created that perfect, comfortable depression in the mattress on one side - and nothing else will do.     

Spiders

Do spiders hibernate?  Apparently they must do, because after a winter of inactivity I've been seeing loads over the last few days.  It really is quite unsettling.  Like they've been biding their time over winter until a certain temperature is reached again and they are reactivated.  All of them.  At once.  And not uncoincidentally we have had some nice weather this week.  Disturbing.

Balrog

It should come as no surprise that I've been building a Lego set to help deal with the current stresses of work.  I've just completed this one:

Happy Easter!

No Easter eggs for me this weekend.  Disappointing.  I'm teased by the presence of Cadbury Creme Eggs at the grocery stores - but I'm not tempted because the ones for sale here are made by Hershey and taste significantly inferior to the ones back in the UK.  Just like all the other Cadbury-branded products they sell here.  It's an absolute disgrace.  No wonder that whenever I come back to the UK, I'm forced to return to the US with loads of chocolate in my luggage.  Which inevitably doesn't last as long as it should.    

Sunday Roast

I had a really bad craving for a Sunday roast today.  Like I could drive a ways just to get one.  It's kind of tragic that there isn't anywhere in the Seattle area that I can go - at least that I'm aware of.  There are a few British/Irish pubs - but most of them are just British in terms of decor, and don't offer British food.  And the few that do, I don't see Sunday roast being offered.  They are the kind of places that offer shepherd's pie, but made from beef so they are not really shepherd's pie but cottage pie.  I just did a Google search, and I see somewhere in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle that offers a traditional Sunday roast.  But it looks to be a fairly high-end restaurant where reservations are necessary, and the price of the roast dinner is definitely on the high end.  Not exactly the British pub type roast I really desire.

Hummingbirds

I haven't been seeing, or hearing, many hummingbirds recently.  I didn't think much of it - it's that time of year when there are plenty of other food sources for them.  But they must be around because the levels in some of the feeders have been going down.  So I went to refill my feeders yesterday.  And was devastated to find a dead hummingbird on the ground by one of the feeders.  No idea what the cause of death was or how long it had been there.  But if this was the dominant hummingbird controlling the territory around my house, then no wonder things had been quiet.  It'll probably take a while for other hummingbirds to return.  And let me also say there is something fundamentally sad about seeing such a small and lifeless body of a hummingbird.  You realize just how fragile these creatures are, and what a privilege it is to have them around.   

Not So Good Friday

A rough day at work to end the week.  Or, to be more accurate, another rough day at work to end the week.  The usual culprits - too much to do, too little time to do it, blah blah blah.  I wouldn't say I'm suffering from burnout just yet, only that the job is causing me stress and I'm not handling that stress very well.  But I think I've said all this in previous posts, so I don't need to repeat myself.  I just hate the fact that Easter Monday is not a public holiday here, so it's just a regular weekend before back to the grind on Monday.  Sigh.