More general looping

My friend Carole the Photographer is going to loop-the-loop in a small plane, with two aims in mind. Motivating her to scare herself witless in this eye-catching manner, rather than by one of her more regularly extreme activities, is a collection for a children's cancer charity - basically it provides bicycles, adapted tricycles and tandems to sick children. Cycling is often possible when walking and running are not, and it gives them mobility and exercise, which helps recovery. You are, obviously, invited to donate some modest sum. I have.

There's also a remote theoretical possibility that the company who made her breast replacement (after surgery for breast cancer) might give her some money for proving experimentally that it doesn't explode at 4G. Which apparently no-one has done before, can't think why. Perhaps I'll tell you who they are afterwards, assuming she survives. Follow her adventures at Going Tits Up.

I really miss it

That feeling when I've spent all weekend dancing - 24 hours of dancing and about half that of sleep. And never a bad one. I do so much less; I try so much less; the temptation to do too much, disappears. I have more time in every step. Smooth and powerful, focused and totally into it. Better connection, totally relaxed. Tanda after tanda with no sensation that I missed a lead. Suspension and road-holding for the fieriest milonga with as many missed leads as you need. That blurring of sensation, such that quite a big part of my brain no longer knows whether I'm dancing or not.

I lose it over time, I grieve for it, I miss it as it wears off. It can last a couple of weeks, if I'm careful. My partners, when I get back home, can certainly feel it on me. I avoid those who won't notice it. I'm careful. I want to let it fade, if it must, slowly and naturally. Like trying not to knock the eyelash extensions off.

Blessings

Sometimes it seems to me, that the life of a well-educated single woman, with a decent job, a good salary but not enough to make her fortune, with no children, in good health, approaching middle age, in a reasonably orderly liberal democracy, in the first or second decade of the twenty-first century as they are commonly counted these days, is possibly the most enviable life that there has ever been for a human in the world. And perhaps the most enviable life that there ever will be (I've always been the sort to feel disaster is just around the corner, even as a little girl).

I am so glad that this young woman looks like she might be OK.

[Although a pile of free money is always good in theory, in practice it's hard to show how it could reliably make me much happier, at least for long. In moderation it does have advantages, but they are not all that easy to make use of.]

Unrecommended books

There are such things as books about how I.T. ('Information Technology') ought to be done in ordinary companies. This genre is known as "ITIL", and you don't need to care what that stands for. I have even attempted to read one or two: as a genre, they are inane, with diagrams worse than the text.

It came into my head today that one of them, to which I had been foolish enough to refer after reading the title, was so entirely useless and unrelated to how anything actually happens, that it seemed to have been written by someone from Mars.

But no; this is nonsense. A person from the planet Mars would have written a much better book, because they couldn't have based it on anything but observation of reality.

Anyway, I'm off now for another long weekend, and very happy to be out of the office. I had one colleague - a database administrator - who wrote his out of office message in the form of a rhyming couplet. I didn't manage that today.

Smirking survey

CALLER 

Hello, I'm Linda from T.N.T. Research, we're doing a survey about smirking and brand awareness, would you be able to answer a few questions? 

HEDGEHOG

... From what, sorry?

LINDA

I'm from T.N.T. Research. We're doing a small survey about smirking, and brand awareness?

HEDEGHOG

Smirking? As in ... a small smile? And what, sorry?

LINDA 

Er, smirking, as in smirking cigarettes. 

HEDGEHOG
Oh! Smoking. Er - I don't smoke, I'm sorry.

LINDA 

Is there anyone in the household who smirks?

HEDGEHOG 

Er, no, sorry. No, thank you. [Puts phone down].

I don't even know anyone who smokes, any more! Extra points if you can tell me where Linda was from. And I honestly wasn't taking the piss out of her accent - my brain was a bit tired, and without any context I just couldn't rearrange the sounds into anything I recognised from life.