Out of the way

Five days in the Dominican Republic. A holiday with Mi Elina - something we have been needing. I got to read a lot of books, which is one of the things I do to relax - Eva got to sleep a lot. No internet connection meant that we did virtually no work. I did try at first, but when even mobile connections were unusable - operator incompatibility - I succumbed to the inevitable and relaxed. Which turned out to be a good thing.

Most days we didn't get any further than the swimming pool in the backyard - although we did make it out to test the Shanghai theory in Romana...

When I got back to the internet the mail had been building up. This is what I dread most about going on holiday - it will take me at least a dozen hours of work just to make my way through the backlog and try to catch all the things I need to know. Fortunately, Europeans in particular take Easter as a real holiday, so it was less serious than it might have been - only about a thousand messages gathered for me, and half of them were spam I could just delete. So now I am back, and catching up as best I can while trying to move forward, since it seems work doesn't actually stop. (If I missed your mail or message while I was away, I am sorry. If I seem to have forgotten, feel free to send it again - unless it was spam... )

Of course, having rested up so well, the first thing that happened was a night where I hardly slept. Still, the batteries should now be strong enough to handle that easily and let me keep my brain switched on. That is the real value of a holiday - letting my brain stop running around the urgent things at work, which gives it a chance to slowly turn over the important things in the background, and allows me to come at them fresh.

So I hope you all had a good Easter too. I also have to catch up on the cricket - the Dominican republic is almost as close as I have ever been to where the World Cup is being played, but cricket is as unknown to them as Gaelic football or cauliflower cheese. (I made one that was a bit too salty, and I tried to explain the basics of cricket. I don't know that either of them is going to catch on there...)