Life is really fucking trying me out at the moment. First day back at work today after the whole body spazzing out thing and then dropping down with Shingles. Got home to find the house has had a brick put through one of the back windows and my TV, 360, Wii, PowerBook, Camera and other bits and pieces have been nicked. I’m fucked off. After two solid weeks of being entirely housebound it’s fucking weird that this happens the first day I’ve left the place. Coincidence? I don’t fucking think so.
Fucking gutted.
Looking back at the last entry I see that by now I should be into a position of running various lengths of distances with ease. Well, it didn’t work out quite as planned as at the end of the second week I’d knackered my knee and wasn’t able to run on it for a couple of weeks afterwards. So I gave up with that idea and have yet to return to the running plan, it may have been a bit too much for my feeble knees. Since that point a good few things have happened, lots good and some bad…
Continue reading ‘Infrequent Blogging Continued’
Sticking with the usual pattern of irregular updates I thought it worth noting the fact that I’m on a drive to get back to some reasonable level of fitness for the summer. Since moving “over the water” from Dundee I’ve not been able to walk into work and the daily drive has left me with little to no real or regular exercise habit. It has become increasingly embarassing that I’m slightly out of breath when I walk up and down the stairs at work. It’s only 1 floor, albeit a bit bigger than a normal floor height, but it’s enough to make me cringe. So it’s back on my bike for me. Or not.
On saturday I wheeled out the bike and gave it a bit of a clean, it was sunny but cool with a gentle breeze and led me to believe it was ideal cycling weather. Setting off up the hill out of the village and turning left by the bus stop I am confronted by a freezing gale in my face which is doing everything it can to stop me making forward motion. I struggle on for nearly 2 miles and realise that I’m freezing cold and my legs are dead weights, so with my chest gulping in painfully cold air I turned back to give up. I nearly passed out when I got home, I’d overdone it and travelled less than 4 miles. It was embarassing so the whole plan to get fitter again needed a complete rewrite.
Tonight I’ve done my second 3km jog/hobble. It’s part of a 9 week plan that’ll see me back into a form capable of running 5 km regularly. With three sessions a week I’ve only got 25 to go and I feel pretty good so far. I’ll be pleased to get through the first week and before too long I’ll be on the home straight to that first 5km run. Actually rather pleased with myself and if it helps shed a couple of pounds from the tum then all the better.
In other news, work sucks.
Back home and having a bit of a jetlag recovery day. Got home on sunday afternoon UK time after leaving SF on saturday morning, promptly had a 3 hour nap followed by a hot-choclate wake-up break and back to a solid 12 hour sleep. Great sleeping but I’m exhausted.
San Francisco is an amazing place, GDC was a combination of fun, work, boredom, a bit more work and not enough beer. Even so, managed to do a little bit of sight-seeing thanks to Richard and his local knowledge combined with a hire car. The higlights of the trip for me will mostly be food related, the food was generally amazing. I’ve certainly put on a bit of weight and following the trip to Korea in January where I did the same this is a pattern that needs recitifying with plenty more exercise than what I’m getting. Anyway, I had the best steak of my entire life and a really excellent burger among other excellent things and I am very happy about that indeed.
Really pleased that Crackdown won Best Debut game. A complete surprise but a very well earned and appropriate one for me. Had a good evening that night but not a great one; thinking back to Crackdown the one thing I’m sad about is how many of the people I worked with that are no longer around and they all sat heavily in my mind that night.
Haven’t done blogging for a long time. Lots of stuff has happened in the interim, some good, some bad, it all seems to be equalising around a middle ground of just keeping on. C’est la vie.
Wasn’t well on Friday, I’ve caught some nasty cold or other, so I came home sick and get ready to lay up for the weekend to recover. On saturday morning I was feeling a bit more spritely and in faffing around the electric got tripped off and on again. The burglar alarm went mental. The burglar alarm that I don’t have the code for.
Woop! Woop! Non stop.
Try to get hold of the landlady and she’s in Edinburgh out of mobile reception. None of her family know the alarm code. I sit still for an hour and watch shinty on the TV to avoid detection by the room detectors. Until that point I’d tried a few alarm codes as suggested by landlady’s family. Including various combinations of birthdays, years and, stretching things by this point, various combinations of the buttons that looked most worn. No luck, so I sat still until the alarm shut up. And all was quiet but then the police turned up, forcing me to open the front door. Which set the alarm off again.
Police reassured I embark on covering the alarm sensors in the rooms I could get to without detection with aluminium foil, which enables me to move around a few of the rooms. In the meantime the landlady had made contact and couldn’t remember the code and we’d already tried the only number she could vaguely remember. After a few hours of being prisoner in the living room and dowstairs shower room / toilet (which I was quite relieved to find didn’t have a sensor nearby) the alarm engineer was reached and his conclusion was the the control unit had gone faulty. However, he advised against a visit until Monday, otherwise there would be a huge callout bill as he couldn’t access the service contracts until Monday. So, I went to sleep on the sofa in the safety of the alarm disabled living room.
All has been mostly well today, I gaffa taped and detached the magnetic sensor on the front door so I could get outside again without the alarms going off. I’ve still had to keep out of the rooms I can’t enter but I have at least got access back to the bedroom as the control unit has decided to start ignoring that alarm zone. All day the alarm has still been armed, which is a small fact I forgot as I just went to get a beer to settle down with Top Gear. The beer is stored in the snug and I forgot there’s a sensor in there. So I’ve set the alarms off again. 
I do feel like I’ve spent half the weekend in some sort of Hudson Hawk role play. It’s funny in retrospect but I’m going to have to take tomorrow off so that the engineer can come and replace the control unit. My old age doddering isn’t improving any, sodding electrickery.
I think I’ve finally got proof that I’m past it. At work today I spent the morning sat in darkness because I couldn’t figure out how to turn the lights on with the fangled new switches. I gave up with that and someone came along in the afternoon and turned them on - annoyingly by using the same switch that I’d already been pressing. So to make things worse, I get home and I have an electric bill waiting for me and I don’t understand the meter because it’s some three rate thing that I just don’t understand. Or rather, the bill is for a three rate meter and the meter itself is just a baffling array of nonsensical numbers. And there’s no instructions for it on the supplier’s website. So there we are, I’m fucked from this point on.
Finally managed to arrange a housewarming party, albeit in the second house I moved into. Enjoyed the day a great deal but it was a lot of work in preparation. Slightly nervous about how many people would turn up and be dressed up fancily but I think that was just stress ahead of the event and spending all afternoon in the kitchen making food. Nerves soon went and we had a brilliant turnout of costumes with Superman seeming to be a popular choice.
I’ve still not got any pictures of the new place, must get around to doing that, but there are plenty of pictures of the housewarming party up on Flickr now. Some good ones and I was dead chuffed with my own get up. 
Apple have won. The iPod Touch is the future of all portable electronics. It’s the first thing that’s clearly a generational leap ahead in years. The form factor, style and the way it simply works has killed everything else dead.
Of course, the new feel might wear off and few niggles will creep in, but, you can Colour my Flabber Ghasted because even this far in, it’s the best bit of consumer electronics that I’ve used. Ever.
Everyone else has lost.
Took loads of piccies of The Jim Inn last night but then discovered I’d packed my card reader. So it’s somewhere in a stack of boxes spread across two houses. Doh.
Meanwhile, Transit Van Get! All set for the boxed remains and big stuff tomorrow. BT line has transferred without hitch, should have ADSL switched over by the time I get home and I’m off to buy some of those fangled oil radiators tonight. I’ve been experimenting with the wood burner the past few nights and it pushes out loads of heat but eats logs as if my carbon foot print is size 14. Cracking for the living room but the rest of the house needs the chill taken off.
Oh, also managed to get the bus into work today. First time on a bus in, ooooh, I can’t remember. Took me ages to find the timetables on line (why are bus companies so appalling with visibilty of timetables?) and the first bus drove straight past me without stopping. So I had to wait an hour for the next one. Still, at least I now know that the bus does exist and does get me into town. 
I was supposed to be moved into the Old Jim Inn by now but unfortunately I’m not. I’m partly there, all my kitchen stuff is in the Inn and all my clothes etc. are here in the mansion. It’s a bit of a pain caused by a van rental company being a bit shit and letting me down on friday just gone. Could be worse as I’d left myself this saturday as a buffer for anything going wrong, which it did. Phew.
Getting there slowly, another van booked this coming friday and a bit of a dash to move all the big stuff down the road. I’ve spent a bit of time in the inn but not slept there yet. I’m really liking it, it’s got loads of character and I feel really homely with it despite not actually living there entirely yet.
Not got a great deal else to report at the moment. Stuff is generally ticking along nicely.
