Doors Open Day

DOD continues to surprise me, usually in relation to things I thought I knew.

I saw inside the City Chambers for the first time: the 10 storey staircase, the view over Princes Street, the gaudy gifts presented by visitors and twinned towns. They have a great statue outside, of Alexander and Bucephalus, which is public, but I don't usually have a reason to pause there.Of course, the subject is reason winning over animal passions (the horse was afraid of its own shadow). No chance of a moral lesson will be passed up.

Best interior of the day was the Royal College of Physicians. Their main hall contains columns that are masterpieces of the decorator's art, made to resemble Sienna marble, and so good that they are probably worth more than the real thing. Two beautiful libraries too, filled with leather-bound volumes with titles that I could spend all day browsing through (The Atlas of Skin Diseases, anyone?).

Old job, new job

My current job is the sort where you can be very busy for a bit, then have nothing to do. For the last couple of weeks, things have been very thin, and I've been writing some training documents. As an ex-tech writer, this should be right up my street of course. To be honest though, the experience has made me glad that I (mostly) do something else now. Although I got some vague satisfaction from tracking down that comma splice, or systematically eliminating all passive verbs, my main feeling was of boredom. I mean, who's going to read this stuff anyway?

And today, I got to do some programming, which felt like a delight.