eeek! LJ in non-compliant HTML shock

I have been having a completely insane week. Working 8, 10 and 12 hour days, running from one end of London to the other, and teaching A2 chemistry at 9.30am. Argh. My brain doesn't even come online until after lunch...

So I have had absolutely no time for lj and have no idea what anyone is up to. Also, trying to catch up with my friends list is impossible because every single entry on my friends page looks like this:

( horrible html mess )

I take it lj's finally got round to starting to complain about non-compliant HTML in LJ styles (hardly my fault, as S1 Generator uses about a billion nested tables, and my kludgey version only uses a hundred), which should give me the incentive to get off my arse and finish my S2 style, only that would take effort... hrm. And we are going on holiday tomorrow. Ish.

a holiday

Hey, even my own LJ entries come with an Irreparable invalid markup ('<font="verdana">') in entry tag! I feel sooo special ;)

Tomorrow the boy & I are going to Brussels. It's extremely last-minute. To cut a very long story short, he has been "ordered" to take 2 weeks off work. He spent 5 years working for a small company where he was the only sysadmin, and one of only about 3 people (out of ~30) who had A Clue about anything. Thus, he was always too afraid of going on holiday in case the whole place fell apart without him. I have vivid memories of going to the Ontario Science Museum and him being stuck on the phone for over half an hour while I wandered around on my own, and of sitting in a cafe in the Anspach Centre in Brussels while he tried to connect to his company's computers to fix something using his Palm Pilot and mobile phone (at 900 baud). Argh.

Now he works for a large company where they have 8 sysadmins, most of whom have A Clue, but he's still stuck in the habits from before. However, being A Subsidiary Of Kodak, they have rules about these things, and they don't like you not using up your holiday allowance. So he was told in no uncertain terms that he had 2 weeks to use up before the end of the year, and he'd better take them Or Else.

So we are going to Brussels for 4 days (because I can't have any longer off work at the moment :/) and then he will have 1 1/2 weeks at home, which will hopefully be long enough for him to write his alternative to Twonkyvision. It might actually get finished(!) I might die of shock if that happens - Richard never finishes anything! ;)

If you want a postcard from Brussels, better email me quickly at the usual address - will be leaving in the morning.

nothing new to say

I feel like shit.

Principally because I ran out of vitamin pills on Saturday and only got some more this morning. Going without them for too long does extremely bad things to me. I get depressed and my allergies go haywire. I don't know why. I swear it's not psychosomatic.

I also have a very bad sense of anticlimax about going away, and I haven't even gone yet. Just this litany of "oh, we're only going for 4 days, why are we even bothering to go?". And also "you remember what it was like trying to find _vegetarian_ food in Brussels... vegan'll be even worse"*. Yes, I _am_ anticipating living on falafel & chips for 4 days, why do you ask? Heh... no... I've got information about a place called La Saga which is apparently a vegan paradise, with amazing dairy-free desserts, and a few others. (Will post links when I've fixed my LJ so HTML doesn't garble hideously.) The only problem is that most of them don't open on Sundays or Mondays, and we'll be there from Saturday round to Tuesday.

* I stopped eating egg a few weeks-months ago because I realised it was making me ill. Since then, my IBS has improved to the stage where I can actually eat vegetables in sensible quantities again, including small amounts of salad!! Frankly, if the choice is egg & bad stomach, vs no egg, a non-bad stomach and all the vegetables that were previously trigger foods, there's no contest.