A couple of busy and hot days. Set out early to see my father's exhibition at Nantwich Museum:
Some of the paintings I can't recall seeing before. A few were (are!) regularly hanging on our walls, but some are stored in the garage, or under beds and various other hidden places. The dates tended to state 1980s, though I think many are from the 1990s, at around the time of my father's Art A-Level studies at South Cheshire College.
After that, we had a tea break in the bookshop and met John and his mother there, always a nice encounter.
At home I worked furiously on both Argus and SFXEngine. I've been updating both to use the same Options system, the same start-up and shut-down order and way of working, and the same text processing system. This was a lot of work. Both started the same, but Argus drifted away, using strings primarily to make it easier to program, but that made it harder to change external text. The way it started/ended was better than SFXEngine, so this meant a lot of changes to SFXEngine too. One change, for example, was detecting an [ENDTEXT] bracket in the text file because until yesterday, the end was considered any use of a square bracket, '[', which may cause problems in future.
The process was/is extremely stressful, taking up many hours of exacting work with little to show for it except software which hopefully works just as before.
John asked me what I do all day. I wondered what too. I seem to work non-stop all day and achieve little, but no! I do manage to create things, bit by crawling bit.
Still, there was some good performance news: Fall in Green is now set to appear in this year's Nantwich Words & Music Festival in October. More on this later as I'm not sure how much I can say and when.
As well as preparing for the SFXEngine release, I'm busy at home helping my parents today. Mum wants a spare part for the washing machine but it seems that they are out of stock everywhere except in one German stockist (it's a Miele machine), and dad wants to apply for a passport. When he can prove his identity, my brother (and then myself) can apply for an Irish Passport to which we are entitled. As E.U. Citizens we would be granted far more travel rights than mere British ones. Though I was born here and have always lived here, I've never felt British or at home here. I like the idea of living in Ireland - or indeed anywhere else.
