Head Down
Today flew by. I spent the majority of it up to my ears in source code – in case you missed the tagline, I'm a software and web developer in the daytime.
The universe has this weird knack of delivering a working chunk of source code late in the day. You can head-butt your desk all day long and get nowhere, and then somehow the planets align with minutes of the day left, and you slide backwards away from your desk, with your head tipped back, your eyes closed, and your fists clenched in celebration. You make a celebratory cup of coffee, and wander off around the building to see what others are doing... or at least I do.
While working on problems I invariably forget to stop, which sounds ridiculous. Today I skipped lunch because there was “just one more thing” I wanted to take a look at. The “one more thing” ended up taking all afternoon. I ate over the keyboard – I dread to think how many breadcrumbs are inside the keyboard of my work computer.
As always, Thursday nights are a living nightmare. I raced home from work, dropped the bike in the shed, got straight in the car, and went to meet our younger children that had just finished their dance class (they are rehearsing for a show at the weekend – modern and street dance). The youngest went off to Brownies with my better half, while Miss 11 walked into town with me to buy something for dinner.
Pizza. Thursday night is rapidly becoming Pizza night in our house.
A little while later everybody returned home, and myself and my other half raced to the nearest polling station to vote in the general election. It struck me earlier that most people outside the UK have no idea how our parliamentary system works, so I'm going to explain it in very simple terms (it's very similar to the US, just with different words for things).
Each area around the country votes for any of a number of politicians to become their “member of Parliament”. The elected person will spend the next few years (until they are voted out of office) working mostly in London on behalf of the constituents of their area. The party with the most members of parliament is said to have a “majority”, which means they can push through any changes to the country they like – as long as they can get their own party members to agree, and vote. The leader of the party with the majority is the “Prime Minister”.
Before you ask, no, the Queen doesn't have any involvement in making decisions of state any more. The country is run by the Parliament of elected officials (actually, that's not true – the country is run by the civil service, who have worked their whole lives behind the scenes – the elected members of parliament are really just public relations). I'm being cynical already, so I'll shut up.