I'm in ZZZ for a week. So far going fairly well socially, but didn't get any billables done yesterday (though I did catch up on business email and reading), as I spent what time I had trying to get Eric (the Python IDE) installed. It's way too cold to sit outside working, so the puppy and I (Fluffy (a.k.a. Bear)) are sitting on a living room couch as I work.

The puppy is a black Chow, which is nice (I don't really like the burnt-orange colour that's characteristic of the breed). Unfortunately, XXX is giving him back to the previous owners, likely tomorrow when she drops YYY off. Poor lil' puppy, he's not really been trained at all (I say puppy, but he's probably a year old). A little too playful and high spirited for this household. He needs to be out playing in a field somewhere to work off some of his energy. He's got a game rear leg, incidentally, doesn't really seem all that serious to me, but every once in a while I'll see him bite the leg, as if he's trying to massage it with his teeth.

Saw a movie which (I think) was called Flying Daggers on Wednesday night. Interesting for me, as its aesthetic sense was closer to opera than Hollywood movies. Probably 80 or 90 percent of the scenes felt like they had been chosen primarily for their beauty. Kept thinking about the various implications of that as I was watching. The (Chinese) aesthetic sense seems to be much closer to the traditional beauty-is-king ideology than I would be expected this late in the game.

Today's work is, I guess, going to be documentation. I was intending to work on killing bugs while I was here, but the documentation needs to get done, and without an IDE that has my key-bindings working I'm not going to be particularly productive at coding.