blogging like a twitterer

I have precious few brain cells rattling around up there at the moment, but it's been a scandalously long time since I've posted, so here goes nothing.

I've just come back from five days up in Newcastle, visiting folks at Culture Lab, attending the Culture Shock! conference, meeting a new PhD student at Northumbria University, and chilling with the cousin of a guy my ex-husband used to play music with in New Orleans. Yeah, that's not the way I had expected that sentence to end, either.

The Culture Lab folks knocked my freakin' socks off. I can't even process the ways in which my socks are tumbling across my living room floor, in a sort of anti-gravity mode, continuing their knocked-off-ed-ness from hundreds of miles away.

(Someone explain to me why it is that I buy a ticket online for the 11:58 to King's Cross, yet when they decide to cancel that train - weeks ago - nobody thinks to shoot me an email saying my reserved seat is as valid as a tutu on a hippo, and I could have had an extra half hour's lie-in?)

OK, time to test the theory that the purpose of sleep is to make sense of our waking experiences. If it's true, I'll bound out of bed tomorrow morning with a brilliant new take on my thesis. Either that or that hippo ballerina will be back.