Shabe Yalda Mobarak

Iranians and Afghans are celebrating the longest night of the year tonight with watermelon, pomegranate, nuts and poetry, and my Iranian colleague who usually works 21 hours a day went home at lunchtime. It shouldn't have been a working day for him, but it was. It wasn't a working day for me but I went into the office before dawn (that's not saying much on Shabe Yalda) to swap my hard disks round in the borrowed disk reader attached to the borrowed PC because the first one should have finished overnight. 

Except it hadn't. For reasons I don't understand, various of my own personal files needed the office systems admin password inserted in order to copy. So I set the copying going again and commandeered another PC to get going on the second of my four disks. I'd hoped to be out and gone by the time my colleagues arrived for work but as it turned out I spent most of the morning with them. Since I had to sit over the machines typing in the admin password over and over and over again I changed tack slightly and deleted loads of the duplicates and triplicates as I went along. So now what I want to keep is on one disk at home that my Mac can read and my four old disks are ready to reformat for anyone else who would like to use them.

Not a bad way to spend the solstice in a culture that doesn't really celebrate it. 

Shabe Yalda Mobarak, everyone. And enjoy the moiré.