autumn plumage

The hitherto-beardless TFP has been bearding it up for just over a month now but doesn't yet seem to have stopped and was noticeably longer-whiskered this week than at the beginning of last week before I went on holiday. It has to be wondered if he's just going to let it keep growing to the extent of others of his kind or if he'll settle around the Episode II level through the autumn and winter when the addition of the deployed hood of an hoodie lends a beard a slighty Jedoid appearance. Unfortunately it seems that our similarly recently freshly-bearded colleague has since lapsed. Perhaps recent talk of doing some sort of community-involvement thing at work can be expanded to include some fund-raising sponsored events including beard growth on other team members' faces.

After a nice and quick meeting-free day with few distractions and lots of getting-things-done I was able to slightly reduce my flex-pile in line with management requirements in order to get to the blood-doning centre before they shut. They're now using the electronic haemoglobin-assay machines they were testing a year or so ago and so don't have to squeeze the finger nearly as much as they did to fill a capillary tube in order to fill the small cuvette the machine accepts with the result that the small bit of cotton wool given to let the finger bleed onto is almost not required. I had a n00b attending to the removal of the cannula and the attachment of the plaster to the elbow and she seemed to do things in a slightly odd sequence, sticking the plaster over the cannula before pressing some gauze on top of the plaster then removing the needle from beneath both then attempting to stick the plaster down even though one side of it had already doubled-over onto itself and was no longer sticky enough to stick to my arm, though I had a spare in my bag in order to be able to get home without looking like a smack addict.

On the strength of his appearances on Newswipe we'd bought tickets for Tim Key this evening. Very good... most laughed-at thing this year so far. By the time of writing this up he'll have won the Best Show award in the Awards Formerly Known As The Perriers so there's zero chance there'll be any tickets left for his last show on Sunday night but remember the name and book early next year as he was very good and very silly.