Catchup

Bleh, sorry for the silence, but last week I was sick - came down with something respiratory on Friday, spent Sat/Sun in bed, tried to work from home Mon/Tues (but mostly back in bed), then crawled to work and worked at about 40% capacity the rest of the week. The most debilitating thing about it was that I couldn't seem to stay asleep for more than a few minutes at a time, so I spent several days living in this twilight haze of overtiredness without sleep, a very strange and uncomfortable state.

To make matters worse, that was the week leading up to our handover of work for the contract I've been hired to work on, and after months - literally - of people dawdling or simply not responding to my requests, requirements, urgings, attempts to plan, and general frustration, all of a sudden it was panic stations: just what I needed when I'm feeling so wretched :/

On the bright side, I got the database monitoring working as designed, with a couple of days to spare - and then when the Security team decided this design was going to overstrain their communications channels (and why did they not think of this 3 months ago? oh well), I got it redesigned and implemented by the due date (Midnight Sun/Mon), with a whole 90 minutes to spare in fact.

On the down side, I had to guess at where to host it, and chose the wrong host (too busy really), but when you don't get answers to your questions, you sometimes just have to stab blindly in the dark.

Enough of that, anyway.

Before I got sick, we had another sparkling Wednesday night at Bridge, getting top place again, but after a weeks' break, our performance this Monday was just woeful: Cat was bidding OK, but her play and cardsense was woeful, and while my play was accurate enough, if not inspired, my bidding was absolute rubbish, both overoptimistic and overpessimistic, both at the wrong times. Last night was considerably better, tho, and we were much sharper - we didn't place, but that was (after examining the results) due to an A class pair slumming it, that we had to face over 3 tricky boards, and a certain amount of bad luck, rather than any egregious decisions on our part.

Perhaps the classic example was when we were sitting EW, and N (Dealer) opened 2C. I checked to make sure this was 23+ as I thought, then surveyed my 13 HCP and passed. S passed (!!!) as well, then Cat (with 16 HCP as it turned out), also wisely passed - well, wisely if N wasn't lying about her hand.

North had of course meant this as a weak 2 (despite their not playing this), but it completely killed our bidding chances, and she was very fortunate that her partner did not respond as she was required to! As it was, we took her down 4, for a 200pt score ... but of course all the other EW teams scored game in spades or NT, for 600+ pts, so we came out bottom ... hard to see what to do about it tho, altho in Cat's seat I might have doubled for takeout, if I'd worked out that N had misbid egregiously.

And this weekend we've got dinner out with a couple from work, and Sunday playing D&D to look forward to :)