Andy's Blog

Somewhat quiet week, with the usual routine; Gym, Swim, Karate and inevitable home-based dramas.

So it was on with the happy face for the outside world whilst desperately trying to sort out those home-based dramas.  Unfortunately some people are blessed with a keener sense of other peoples underlying emotions.. or an anti-bullshit detector, call it what you will.

Therefore the “Are you OK Andy, you seem a bit…. down?” question threw me somewhat.  I think the mumbled, somewhat incoherent, reply didn’t fool anybody.

Remind never to play poker with that particular person!!

Yesterday was an interesting day, bumming around in the morning doing not a lot and then off to a First Aid course in the afternoon as part of my Sensei accreditation.  Unfortunately these courses don’t take into account that 9 times out of 10 it is me who is the injured one as sparring new yellow belts is DANGEROUS!

Pretty much all the Northampton Senseis were there, and a fair portion from Milton Keynes.  It’s always nice to see and chat to colleagues from different regions, and measure them up in case of upcoming competitions

Went through all the usual DR ABC (Danger, Response, Airways, Breathing, Call) procedures, doing CPR on the adult, child and baby dummies and creating slings, etc.  All fairly standard and all pretty much taken in my stride.  However…

Now in my defense I am not afraid of the sight of blood.  I am not a fan of it, but neither does it faze me much.  Jagged nasty wounds, however, are a different thing altogether!  Therefore when the first picture of sliced open fingers appeared on the PowerPoint presentation I was not entirely happy… but I tried to look clinically at them. 

Then the next set of pictures started appearing…

OK, time to look away.  Then the others in the room started with the “Oooh! Errrr! Yich!  Oh Shit!”, and for some of those you just have to look.  Bad, bad mistake.

Jagged nasty open wounds and objects embedded in places they really shouldn’t be embedded.  It was at this point the tinnitus in my ears got noticeably louder, and peripheral vision started to cloud. 

Shift position in seat, lean forward and make out I am leaning forward to take a non-existent sip from the empty orange juice carton under my seat.  Beads of sweat start to break out on the brow and looking down at my arms I noticed they also seem to be coated in a thin sheen of sweat. Oooh shit!

I consoled myself that at least no-one else had noticed.  “Are you OK?” from the person on my left, “Ha ha don’t faint on me” from the person on my right… Alright revise that, at least only my neighbours had noticed.

Suddenly a Mars bar looms up beside me, attached to Sarah who has come up from the BACK of the class.  “You look like you are going to drop, do you want to eat this and get some sugar down you?”.   Apparently I was *SO* grey, I was actually drawing all the colour from the room, like some wussy black hole! 

Oh dear, I don’t think I am going to hear the last of this for a long, long time.  As Sarah helpfully noted on facebook later; “Yeah you didn’t look too clever, I almost felt a little sorry for you!”

Almost..

*HUGELY* tired today, I really should go to bed much earlier than I am doing currently.  I think I didn’t hit the sack until 1.30 this morning – stupid really.

It did at least give me time to sort out some of the new music I have “acquired”, get rid of some of the duplicates albums I had misfiled, sort out some of the tags that were wrong and copy them to the external hard drive ready for others to “review”.  Annoyingly the first thing I noticed when I fired up the laptop at work, ready to listen to some music, was a whole load of mis-tagged tracks which have also found their way onto my iPhone.. BUGGAR!

Work was abuzz this morning with the news of a planned 2,100 job cuts announced on the BBC News website, and literally as I am typing this there’s news of a *further* 2,100 job cuts.. DOUBLE BUGGAR!

Probably not the best time to be feeling tired and looking lethargic at work.  Unfortunately the swim this lunchtime hasn’t helped much either, and I still haven’t managed the 20 lengths without stopping!

To add to the tiredness, peevedness and alarm I can now add “lonely”.  Online friends seem to have disappeared and chats and updates from MSN and Facebook have dried up to a trickle.  This could, of course, just be a by-product of me trying to be offline a little more and keeping to my ‘talk only when talked to’ policy, which I am hoping will make me a little less annoying and let others actually lead a life. 

Time to venture out maybe?

Ah well, I need to wake up before my Karate class tonight and mentally prepare.  The Wednesday class is always a tough one and I need to work on my Kukutsu Dachi and Shuto Uki, before my students arrive, if I want to attain my next belt.

Methinks it’s time to hit the coffee again, or if things get too bad; to pop a caffeine bean and suck on it for the remainder of the day!

Edit 1: Update -  The 2 x 2,100 job cuts aren’t within my section of the company, which hopefully means I won’t be invited to a meeting to “discuss my career options” anytime soon.  

Thanks for the words of concern though guys n’ gals, much appreciated

Edit 2: Just to prove me a damn neurotic liar, about 10 minutes after posting this little update; up pops two different people on MSN for a chat, and three messages on facebook!

I find myself uninspired this morning, and late yesterday afternoon in fact.  This little post has had several titles and even more first paragraphs, and still I can’t quite find the words to type!  I *was* going to put something about the new design, etc., and how this will allow me to put new stuff on the blog, but after the twentieth edit and rewriting… I kinda gave up!

Forgot tea bags for work this morning, and the gym session was spoiled by having to take upto 30 minutes to park the car in the works multi-storey car park (strange mutterings were heard from my car regarding the car parking monkies who were not exactly doing a sterling job in getting the traffic flowing).

On the good news front, I have finally found the P45 from my previous employers so I should hopefully stop being strangled by the taxman on my next wage packet – woohoo!  I have also remembered to bring my Christmas pressie, a copy of the book “Bringing nothing to the party: true confessions of a new media whore” by Paul Carr which I blogged about earlier. 

I shall give you a review of the book when it has been consumed.

Apart from that, I can’t think what to type.. as I said, completely uninspired!

Tis the first full working week of 2009, and all is quiet when I finally step out into the new years morn’ at 6.30am and crunch into the first settled snow of the year!  It’s hard to dispel the childlike delight when you see the winter wonderland spread out in front of you.. or at least it is for me; I am still a kid at heart trapped in a big gangly body.

I even managed to chuck my first snowball of the year!  I don’t think my mate expected the snowball to come flying over the 6ft fence, let alone at that time of the morning, or even saw from whence it came.. but the cursed whimper as it went down the back of his neck was most satisfying

Resolution Watch:  The ‘Get Fit’ resolution is still on track, hence the being up and out at 6.30am this morning and have managed to get to the Gym on alternate days as planned, and swimming every lunchtime.  So far, so good!

The ‘Two Belts’ resolution doesn’t really kick off until Tuesday when the Senior Karate classes start back up, but I am already in line for a couple of beatings from fellow Sensei’s.. Not entirely sure that’s gonna help with the resolution.

Unfortunately the ‘Get Offline’ isn’t going too well, am still online far more than I should be and have also started twittering – so that’s not a good sign.  I am trying to stay off MSN a little more than usual and not post so many facebook updates, but it’s *soooo* hard!  A geek’s addiction is never appreciated.

I was thinking of adding another resolution to the already long list, that of ‘Stop being so damn shy!’.  Unfortunately this is one trait I have had for the longest time, and is one of my bigger burdens (amongst many other competing burdens).

The online ’me’ is a lot more confident than the physical ‘me’, which can sometimes make for fractured conversations and a lack of eye contact.  Unfortunately some people read that the wrong way and think me stand-off’ish.  I think the online ‘me’ is the more truthful version, I just need to work on bringing that out into the real world a lot more often!

Edit: For some reason I have the song “Reason’s to be cheerful, Part 3″ by Ian Drury and the Blockheads running around my head as I write the shyness section.. I think that’s a good sign :-/