Just because I was named after a famous violinist shouldn't mean that my life has to be up and down like the proverbial fiddler's elbow, but just lately that's the way it's been.
I'm now about to start week two of a bitch of a cold, which I caught after a pleasant evening of beers with Nick and Steve. Personally, I blame the guest brew. Other may well be more specific and blame the quantity of the guest brew, but I couldn't possibly comment. Either way, it's having a prolonged effect. I've missed so many things over the last fortnight that I'm considering rebooting the calendar and starting again at Jan 1st, and giving it another shot.
The first "miss" was Titan's transit of Saturn on the 12th, which couldn't be seen directly here but which I was going to watch from an antipodean site via the web. Titan transits like this don't happen very often, as they only occur when Saturn's equatorial plane is roughly in line with the Earth, and it'll be ages before I get another chance. If you're interested, there's a pic and a cool movie of the Feb 24th transit over at http://heritage.stsci.edu/2009/12/index.html, reproduced here (with permission):
After four days of living under a duvet, I managed to crawl out to attend a family get-together on Sunday to celebrate the 80th birthday of my mother-in-law, but the day after that was spent undercover again.
On Tuesday I had no choice, as I had to spend most of the day at the local A&E due to "unusual circumstances". Wednesday was pretty much the same.
Thursday and Friday were more duvet-days, which meant that I missed my chance to don the "Father Jack" costume at what turned out to be an excellent fancy-dress birthday party for a good friend, but there was no way that I was going to miss Saturday's pool-party celebrations for our Annabelle's 10th birthday:
Mother's Day was spent at home feeling rough, which meant that Chris was a bit short-changed when it came to celebrating her day, and I didn't get over to see my mum either, so I've a lot of grovelling and catching-up to do this week. 😐
Anyway, I'm on the mend now. Even the boiler-fixing man says that I'm on the up, and he should know - he's been here three times during the last few weeks wrestling with (and losing to) our unruly Halstead Quattro, which has decided to play up now that it's a teenager.
Let's hope that tomorrow's better, and that the boiler gets fixed soon thereafter.
Of course, all this means that dates for our annual wildie, originally scheduled for sometime during the next two weeks, have had to be reconsidered.
I'm off to do some more coughing. Bye for now. 
