It is Friday night, nearly Saturday morning actually, and I do feel better - another architect has arrived, and another one will be here on Monday, and they will take some EDs from Sasha and me.

To answer the question about what an ED is, it stands for external design. People may understand what that is, bit for the (fortunate!!!) ones who do not, it is a document about a change or a development that we will do in our system for a specific client. Of course, our system cannot include everything for every client in the world, because everyone's business is different, so we have to do some special things. I write a description of what these should be, and it is quite detailed - I imagine how the new function will work, what it will look like, for example, diagrams of screens and what users will enter on them. These external designs can be quite long, 30 to 40 pages of great detail, and the thing about them is that they are totally prescriptive - if you make a mistake or leave something out, it can have dire consequences. And, for some reason, there is always a problem about the timing, or how many you have to do, or something, or someone goes mad and you end up with some horrible situation. So it is practically always stressful.

But I escaped from the stress tonight, we all went (minus Snowflake, who has of course jetted off to Paris to see Monsieur Snowflake)to an Italian restaurant where we ate and drank copiously. Even our project director - who has been asking everyone all week whether it is possible to buy tickets for Euromillions in Estonia - was quite cheerful.