I tried to be good today and stick to the plan. I think I sometimes have trouble with priorities. The interesting and important have a struggle on their hands with me. I tried to balance them today and I think I had a qualified success, but only just.

At work there was the choice between pressing on and completing some task of my own, or interfering with the work of other people. I chose the first. As a result, I am going to need to do some major course correction tomorrow to bring everything back onto track. Then there was also the choice between the urgent presentation and the matter in hand. The urgent presentation could maybe be avoided if I found a way to delegate it... in truth, it couldn't wait. I also had a very vague brief, so I just put something together that I thought should be interesting in the hope that it fit the bill.

Then there was the prioritisation of DIY versus gig. I was quite good. I saw the gig advertised on Chortle and I said to myself "No. I said I'd do DIY tonight, I'm not going to go and look for something to do instead." I'm paraphrasing and I'm also putting it this way to explain why what happened next happened next.

I got a phone call, I got a couple today, one of which was from the credit crunch to tell me that I am not immune (don't sell a house in a recession!). Anyway, the other call offered me a gig in Oxford, the gig I'd decided not to apply for. I don't, generally, like to say no. I like to be asked and I like to be asked back. You don't get asked back unless you've done the gig in the first place. So I went to do the gig.

I also broke another rule, which is that I don't mix work and pleasure. In this case, I decided to invite a member of my team to join me. This was a chance to get to know each other a bit better, and also a way to acknowledge the hard work of the other person without having to be all formal about it.

I'm not sure I can be bothered with yet another gig story that ends with me telling how I did well on the stage and won the auidence over. Essentially, I had a nice time on there and not much happened that couldn't be described as performing in some way or another.

I tried to explain a lot of the process of going to a gig to my workmate. I described the car as my equivalent of Superman's phonebox. He goes into a phonebox to swap from one identity to the other, so I go on a long car journey and do much the same.

In this case, the long car journey was fairly local. Of course, there's bound to be something that uses up the free time that that should give you. In this case, the gig started late, ran late and was, overall, late. Thus, I'm on the outside of some soup and toast and ready for bed, rather late in the day.

What of the DIY? Well, I didn't do none. I'm quite behind on the plan at the moment, but plans are afoot to do a fair bit more. I'm ready for my radiators to go back on, which is nice. I painted two radiators and a door frame before running out to the gig tonight. Not a bad use of an hour or so's work.

So, I managed to get work done, pet projects and stuff I'm meant to be doing. I even managed to turn a gig on a school night into a mini-team outing. The perfect crime.