Independence?

Not yet; they're still under the watchful eye eye of Mum. All four cygnets have survived so far, though we do worry about the picnics they take on the wrong side of a busy roundabout.

Busy and tiring sort of day. In the morning I worked from home - one of the advantages of a software job and a flexible employer. This enabled me to visit the dentist and become just a little bit more 'cyborg', with another crown.

To be efficient, while I was there a plumber was dealing with a leak in the downstairs loo. All a bit of a "Ceramic Meets Metal" time of a morning.

The afternoon was spent dealing with the fall-out of some major software merges the days before. Software-in-progress is dangerously easy to clone; and notoriously un-easy to take the two separately-evolved clones and create just the one animal again.

The evening was the latest episode in the Meeting's Committee Reorganisation. It was an uneasy mix of zeal and reluctance and not easy to find where the next forward-moving steps needed to be.

The late evening was spent wrapping presents...