I know it's almost been a year now, but I keep being struck by just how much I'm enjoying working for myself.

Many people who know me well have commented how much happier I seem (and I am!). More than one such person have observed (diplomatically) that I seem temperamentally better suited to answering to me, rather than to someone else. I think they're right.

That said, I don't think I'd be enjoying self employment nearly so much without the support and synergy I get from mine and Derek's joint venture [gawr-juhs]. So often in creative work you need external feedback to get something clear in your head... or at least I do.

I feel very lucky to be enjoying the best of both worlds.

We lost!

In however long we've been going to the Quiz (over two years if my poor excuse for a memory serves) two things have never happened: we've never had the Quizmaster's Two*, and we've never come last.

Last night we came last.

Happily last night's consolation prize was a bag of Rolos so our unprecedented poor performance was well timed.

*Nobody ever scores less than two on any given round at the quiz, if a team gets fewer than two points they're awarded two by default - hence Quizmaster's Two.

I really really love setting my own hours, even though some days it means that I start and finish later than is entirely sociable.

Missed the pub quiz tonight - my choice, but if I'd got more done during "office hours" (9:00am to 5:30pm) I might have made a different choice.

Then again the work I'd have done during the early part of "office hours" (9:30am to 1:00pm) probably wouldn't have been as good - my brain seems to work best in the afternoon/evening.

When I worked on a salary I used to have this recurring disagreement with my boss about what why it was important to be in the office. I maintained that doing the work and doing it well was the main thing. Being available to clients when they needed me was often cited as justification for being at my desk in the mornings...

... 20 minutes ago I received (and immediately responded to) a query from a client. Haven't done that during the day in... well I can't remember how long.

Just sayin'.

So the weather got nice again, Anita and I resumed our plan to go and feed ducks... and by the time we set out it was snowing.

What the hell. We fed the ducks under a bridge in a blizzard and came home to warm up with coffee. Sometimes you just have to accept that you live in Scotland.

So this afternoon Anita and I had plans to go feed the ducks on the canal (they were rescheduled plans from yesterday, in case anyone's cross-referencing with Twitter). we were meeting at 2pm, 20 minutes ago the persistent rain turned into snow. 10 minutes ago Nete called and (very sensibly) suggested we not go and feed ducks today because it was snowing and horrid outside - I agreed. 2 minutes ago it stopped snowing.

Weather is taunting me!

Also I'm having an unusually animal-ey day. This morning my dreams were full of incongruous and wrong-sized animals: a teeny tiny deer got into my parents' house by mistake and we had to try and get it out but it kept hiding under the furniture. Then we did get it out into the garden and (for no clear reason I can remember) I then had a conversation with my Dad while on a rope swing (which never existed) over a pond (which was filled in years ago) in which were a family of 1/4 scale crocodiles. Later in the same dream there was a hamster the size of a dog at my friend James' house.

Strange.

Weather's cleared up too but now Anita's working on setting up her new computer instead so the ducks will have to wait.

Funny thing happened the other day.

I've spent (most of) the past year feeling sorry for myself. Feeling loss. Feeling bereaved. That's all understandable, but not bring able to move past it was worrying me until the other day.

Somehow it struck me that I'd been waiting for something that couldn't happen. I'd been waiting most if last year to feel "OK" again, only my definition of "OK" was skewed. I was waiting to feel OK by standards that no longer apply.

I am OK. Just as much as I was before I met Joe. It's a helluva comedown from where I was *after* I met Joe ;) but it is... OK.

Back to normal then.

Could be worse.

13 months ago I first reported an intermittent fault with my telecoms to Orange Home. I had a working voice line, but only an intermittent broadband connection, and much slower than it should be given that I live around the corner from the exchange. At the time I suggested that the problem might lie with the rather ropey wiring inside the flat - specifically the old style GPO phone point (broken) where the line entered my flat.

Just to reiterate. That was 13 months ago.

Today I finally got a BT engineer sent out. He took one look at the GPO phone point and confirmed my diagnosis (on closer inspection the wiring inside was so corroded and loose that it's a miracle I was getting any connection at all). He's replaced it with a modern master socket, and now - for the first time since I moved in - my broadband is operating as advertised.

Now in fairness to Orange, part of the reason it's taken so long is that this was an intermittent fault. So when I got disheartened arguing with tech support bods insistent on investigating unrelated problems, I'd give up for a while and put up with it. Had it been simply unusable it would have been fixed ages back. That said, it's both heartening and infuriating in equal measures that I'd correctly identified the fault on day one myself. If the tech support bods at Orange had listened to me and done what I asked then, this would have been fixed for over a year by now.

Instead they sent me a stream of unnecessary replacement equipment, and performed idiotic remote tests that shed no light whatever on the actual problem (as well as repeatedly asking me to connect equipment to a master socket which I'd told them wasn't there!) All because we have an idiotic deregulated telecoms industry here in the UK (thank you Thatcher) which discourages service providers from investigating issues in the infrastructure because the infrastructure is owned and managed by another company. Bah.

Still. At least now my broadband works.

Yes I know I'm late - I was busy celebrating.



Among the many many things I love about living in Edinburgh is that Hogmanay is a 3 day festival here - we kicked off with the Torchlight parade (above) on the 30th and finished (personally) with a chilled gathering chez Chris (thanks again for the delicious curry buddy).

No fireworks on the 1st (for me) but lots on the 30th and even more on the 31st. NYE itself was great this year - Sonja and Ivan hosted at their lovely flat over the East side of town, with handy access to Calton Hill for watching the fireworks (both overhead and looking down Princes Street toward the castle). I'd never watched from up there and (I gather) this year's secondary display was bigger than it's been in previous years. It was certainly impressive.

Today I've been getting back to work. A far happier state this year than it's ever been before. Lots to do, but all of it good.

Here's to a splendid 2012 eh?

...gotta love Victoria Wood, even (especially?) in parody.

I have had a fantastic xmas break. Lots of mild over-eating, fine food, fine drink, toys and great company, and of course the deep joy of having got presents right (I think).

Just wrapped up the tail end of Boxing Day with my sister (after everyone else had pooped out and gone to bed) finding things to laugh at on YouTube. She's been having a hard time this year - putting my rough 2011 into perspective! - and we'd had a helpful but saddening serious conversation... capped off with videos of (amongst other things) cats leaping through boxes, "is this offensive?", "hell no!", inappropriate muppet parodies, and a glorious dual-homage to Victoria Wood and Russel T. Davies.

Yeah, all told I think we Robertshaws will be welcoming 2012 with open arms. One thing and another 2011 has not been entirely kind to us. Could have been worse, and things are headed in good directions (albeit painful ones in some cases) but it's been one of the less happy years in memory all round.

So far though the year-capping holiday has been a real antidote to all that. It's never all smiles: 3x kids under 6 under one roof is hard work and (for three of the six adult clan members) kids are a taxing (and hugely rewarding) novelty... the balance though has been recharging, rewarding and memorably lovely.

Personally I've been hugely enjoying the nostalgia this year - which is new for me - my nephew and I spent all afternoon building a gigantic Lego set, then this evening my brother and I immersed ourselves in unexpected net-nostalgia when I found this place*.

An unexpected boon of my new freelance lifestyle has been being able to enjoy a longer festive visit to Yorkshire: having time to catch up with more folk, and really enjoy the family... all signs that 2012 will be better...

* One of the many many things Mum seems to be enjoying about being a Grandmother, is having time and energy to play even more than she managed as a young working mother (which was already a lot) and Lego falls squarely in that sphere. So I find myself in the privileged and happy position of teaching my Mum to play with Lego, and so finding an archive of instructions for the mountains of bricks I bequeathed them is invaluable

So I've not used Siri much - for all that it's the headline feature of my phone, I find the camera more useful, and I'm a bit... British, and self conscious about talking to my devices... at least when people are around.

Still there's something compelling about having a real world device that I can talk with naturally, and which understands me (albeit limitedly) It makes my inner sci-fi geek giddy! So now and then something grabs me and I try it out. The last thing I played with for any length of time was the spooky but fascinating Wolfram Alpha aeroplane trick which - disappointingly - then refused to work when I wanted to show it to my Ex over dinner the other night (happily he has a 4S too and understood how fickle Siri can be - it is still in Beta after all...)

Today I stumbled on another thing, less spooky but more useful than asking about planes overhead. I was writing my Niece's birthday card and (since I can never remember the post code) wanted to look up my brother's address. In the privacy of my own home and with the phone right there I held down the home button and said "what's my brother's address" Siri asked me my brother's name, then asked if I wanted it to remember he is my brother, then supplied his address. Neat! I thought. OK so (in spite of the fact that the word "brother" is in my brother's address book card) there's some learning involved in that function. Fair enough.

... and (it being Sunday) off I went asking Siri for credentials from as many family members as I could think of, all went swimmingly until I reached my Aunt:

Me: "What is my Aunt's address?"
Siri: "What is your Aunt's name?"
Me: "Anne Robertshaw"
Siri: [displaying "Robertshaw"] ... thinks ... "do you want me to remember that Patrick Robertshaw is your Aunt?"
Me: [sigh] "cancel"

fair enough I thought, "Anne" can be misheard as "an", and faced with an apparent ambiguity Siri's little brain picks the primary Robertshaw from its database and (naturally) pulls up me! Fail.

So, I think, on with the experiment:

Me: "What is my Uncle's address?"
Siri: "What is your Uncle's name?"
Me: "Colin Robertshaw"
Siri: "Calling Anne Robertshaw, which number?"
Me: [incredulous sigh] "cancel"

I'm a bit baffled by this. If it can hear "Anne" in the context of placing a call, how come not in the context of assigning metadata to address book entries? Still more perplexing is its refusal to recognise Colin's name as anything other than an attempt to call his sister! (I tried several times.)

I'm not complaining. I live in the future, and while I may not have a flying car or a robot housekeeper, I do have a quite amazing pocket computer which (mostly) understands natural spoken word commands... but the name thing has me baffled and amused. So I thought I'd share.