Last week was mostly insane. This month, I'm working 7:30am-3:30pm - someone on our team does this each month so we can send out system status reports by 8:30 every day. Last week I was on call on top of that, which means doing extra system checks from home at 5:45am, and I got called on two mornings just after midnight. And then we were building up to a release on Friday of the main application that the sub-team I'm in supports, which meant the working hours were slightly frantic and involved far too much time spent on phone conference calls with colleagues in London. Still, the release went in, I escaped the office at 9:30pm on Friday (fortunately, they let me start the day nearer 11am than 7:30am; unfortunately, I got one of the midnight-ish calls that morning), and after getting the Saturday morning work out of the way, I had a weekend to recover.
On Saturday afternoon, we wandered along to Kelvingrove - along with, it seemed, half of Glasgow. We may have started with bold intentions to see all the galleries, but I vagued out after seeing two-thirds of the ground level, so we skipped straight to the arms and armour exhibit before heading home. Ooooh, shiny swords ! Rapiers, smallswords, backswords, broadswords, claymores ... so much shiny. Also a display of halberds, glaives, partisans, billhooks, and all the other variants I vaguely remembered from some ancient D&D manual. I can see that we'll have to spend more time in there,
On Sunday we headed out to Callander, hired a couple of bikes, and rode up a bike trail by Loch Lubnaig. It's the first time I've ridden a non-stationary bike since some time in 2004, when I sold my bikes in preparation for the Big Move. Everything went quite smoothly, until just after turning around at Strathyre to head back to Callander, when