Andy's Blog

Popularity is always a nice thing, however it’s a little unsettling when the people you’re popular with are only after your blood.  I tried interesting them in my body, but no joy.

It also seems a little strange that being negative is an absolute positive, at least in the minds of the aforementioned Vampires that I appear to be so popular with.

You have to hand it to the National Blood Service, they know exactly which buttons to press to get my full attention, and the lovely female Gaelic lilt on the end of the phone certainly pushed the majority of them; so, on the 9th March, I am off to give my usual armful of red go-go juice.

Truth be told though, I hate needles… Really, really *HATE* needles!  So the thought of voluntarily going to a place where I’ll be jabbed and drained is somewhat of an anathema to me (I think I may have ‘intimated’ in previous posts about my slight squeamishness).

But, seeing as the Blood Services website tells me my blood (O-) is ‘very special indeed‘, it would seem churlish not to gift them some of it for the greater good; especially after such a nice compliment.  Usually when people tell me I’m “special”, I get the distinct feeling it’s not in quite the same way I imagine they mean.

Another reason I go is precisely BECAUSE I hate needles so much!  I am hoping that one day all these visits will finally get me over this little phobia.  It’s this vein hope (get it? get it? vein, rather than vain… forget it!) that I also volunteer to do Kata at each Karate Tournament that comes along.  One day, maybe the one coming up on the 27th February, I won’t be my usual mitigated disaster and complete it without looking like I have swapped feet with my 8 year old son!

It’s a hope, however vein or vain, and until it’s realised I’ll just have to be content with being “special”.

It’s true, I have reached a kind of prolonged brain-fart.  The brain is whirring around, as much as it ever does, the fingers are itchy to put something down in words, but all that comes out is some slightly stale air.

As much as I want to jot down the daily doings of me, in some kind of narcissistic ‘dear diary’, the truth is that not an awful lot of interest happens.  Life certainly isn’t in any shape or form as life-and-death as Ann Frank’s, or as tally-ho-trousers-down-and-up-the-constituents as Alan Clark’s.

So I find myself, during lunchtime at work, again within one of the music pods, sitting in front of this blog wondering what the hell to write down?  Life, as I see it, is pretty much consisting of the following;

1. Work is work.  I work in a Bank designing computer systems, how exactly exciting do you think that can get?   Of course, the slightly annoying element of me being no longer required come 31st December does cause some concern… but 31st DECEMBER?!  That’s like a lifetime away! (feel free to point me in the direction of this post in 2011 and rub my face in it if things don’t entirely work out the way I hope)
2. Karate is still providing the source of me getting beaten up in various, and intriguing, ways by multiple peoples.  Just as an aside a new lesson has been learnt; do NOT do leg exercises at the Gym just before a karate lesson later that evening.  The results are not impressive and the scowling by ones Sensei is something frightening to behold.
3. Home-life is home-life.  Trying to resolve the latest home based dramas; house, heating, repairs, family arguments, money, etc, etc. is starting to feel like work.  In the spirit of holding my hand up though, this is no different than anyone else.  However the feeling of just throwing the arms up in the air with some of the new drama’s and say “Fine, I give up, have it your way!” is just too strong at the moment.
4. Sleep is not sleep.  ‘Nuff said.
5. Go back to step #1

In my actual verbal self I am a person who doesn’t mind not having something to say.  I am completely comfortable, when I have nothing of interest to say, in saying nothing at all.  I don’t have the gift of the gab or have a hundred and one amusing anecdotes with which to regale friends and colleagues alike, and as seen from the above there’s nothing of note to bore the poor person I happen to be with about.

I just wish I had the same control when it came to blogging, although why blog in the first place if that were to be the case?  Here’s as good a place as any to dump any brain-fartage and it’s not as though anyone reads the thing!

There, “ramble” done and dumped onto the t’interweb along with all the other rubbish that inhabit it.  No violence (or at least none seen), or porn (that would be too terrifying a vision to dwell on) or conclusion to this post….

…just a faint stale smell, depending on how long after I posted this you read it, and a slightly relieved feeling on my part to expel it albeit somewhat publicly (which is very rude).

Meh, you know what?  I had sat down with the absolute intention to try and list some resolutions for this year, but after faffing about without typing anything at the keyboard have come to the realisation that I really can’t be bothered to set any.  This is not actually 100% true, I do have some goals that I have set for myself, but these are the same I always have;

• Get better at Karate (at least one grade better this year)
• Get fit (also interpret that as ’slim’)

But that’s about it.  I also can’t be much bothered to review last years, apart from; I did achieve the two belts, but didn’t get fit.

Ever so slightly uninspired today.  However the cartoon below did brighten the day somewhat…

I looked at the ‘langostinos’ and rather disturbingly they looked back.  I’ll give most things a try, but not when those ‘things’ are able to look at me, with more than a little recrimination, and have more legs than foodstuffs should have!

“Look Dad! Buggly eyed beasties!” the boys bellowed across the table at me, knowing that the unofficial name that I gave this favoured Spanish dish gets me in more than a little trouble with the natives.

I also can’t help but feel a little queasy when said natives are ripping apart the aforementioned buggly eyed beasties and leave what looks like a slaughter of the cast of fingerbobs.

The Christmas meal just doesn’t seem the same without an obscene amount of roasted turkey and a feeling afterwards that you’ll be pooping feathers for the next few days.

This year I thought that, rather than ask for my usual ‘useful’ gift, I would get something completely impractical and feed the big kid in me.  Santa didn’t disappoint and I am now the proud owner of a mini Apache AH-64 remote controlled helicopter!  The little devil fits in my hand and buzzes around the room menacing all that are within the vicinity… mainly due to my ineptness with the remote and the fact that it’s an absolute bastard to control.

In fact the full danger of me being behind the controls of the helicopter meant that I was banished to the spare room to try and perfect my skills without taking out a family member.  The “you’ll take somebody’s eye out with that!” argument wasn’t won by myself when I pointed out that it *WAS* an attack helicopter.

Push the controls upwards and the helicopter shoots up and nearly hits the roof. Suddenly letting go of the control lever to stop it hitting aforementioned roof and it slams into the floor.  Buggar!  Push controls gently upwards and the helicopter lifts 4 foot off the floor and starts rotating in an annoying circle.  Looking down at the remote control for the “rudder trim”, as I remember the instruction sheet mentioning something about this, and the little bastard exits stage left and out the window onto the balcony.  “Ooooh shit!”

The little helicopter was never designed to fly outside, and it certainly wasn’t designed to hover from 6 floors up a block of flats.  As I run to the balcony it gave me one last look and started its rapid descent downwards.  I think the roadrunner type “meep meep” was of my own imagination.

Lunging over the plant pots that lined the balcony and desperately pointing the remote control at the gravity aided bit of plastic I managed to at least check the descent to a plummet.

I don’t think the shouted “Sorry!” to the bouffant haired old dear, tottering along the street outside, did much to calm her nerves.  I don’t think she appreciated the last desperate act of skill that changed the kamikaze dive bombing into a crash landing into the bush next to her.  I also don’t think the liberal sprinkling of potted plant dirt in her face as she looked up was also much appreciated.

My grasp of Spanish is basic, to say the least, but I got the gist of her feelings.  “Yeah, yeah, and that’s for the armada” I muttered after her angrily retreating frame, and started the long trek down the stairs to retrieve the errant present.

In a particularly low point at the moment, so have decided to wallow in some self pity and retrospective angst.  I think I’m turning into a Goth, or worse, my sister when she was a teenager!  (..that particular joke will have some severe repercussions).

My karate, as with other things, has stalled.  Despite putting in what I feel is 100%, the execution seems to fall far short of the expected standard and the appearance of going backwards more than forwards is somewhat disheartening.

Maybe it’s just a recurrence of what a good friend once called “Blue belt blues”.

T’would seem my old managers favourite dictum, muttered every pay and bonus review time, has come back to haunt; “Remember, Andy, that 100% of nothing is still nothing”.

Wallowing, angst and other inglorious forms of self pity will of course be accompanied by some very loud music, in the Marilyn Mansun and Iron Maiden flavours methinks, and occassionally interspersed with some comedy genius.

…buggar!  Still not sorted this out either!

Tis always the case, I start listening to a new album and my next few blog posts contain references, links and other sundry musings based on the content of that.

Postings have been a little thin on the ground lately, largely due to me being in a kind of cruise control;  I go to work, I come home, I go to Karate (and generally get battered; my right hand thumb is somewhat suspect at the moment), I eat, I sleep and re-start the process the next day.

Not the most exciting post you’d ever read, not that I am suggesting that any of my previous blog posts could be categorised as such, but you get the picture.

Now this track by Nickelback, music and lyrics below, has gotten me wondering and cogitating on the question it poses.  I don’t have a full answer as yet, or nothing that could fill a blog post, but I think at some point I will have to answer it and try and kickstart life a little.

…and very possibly ‘develop some’ as my trusty Glaswegian friend has told me on many an occassion.

Continue reading

“Someday” indeed..

“You have to do a blog post when you get home!”

Unfortunately, and almost bizarrely,  NOTHING had happened at the point of exiting my usual Tuesday visit to Senior Karate Class.  There has been a couple of Incidents within the carpark, after the Senior class had finished, which almost makes me sound like some kind of pervert hanging around dark car parks at night.. not helped by the fact that both incidents seemed to involve at least two female colleagues from Karate.

“Tart” as a friend called me, and no matter how much you protest your innocence; it only seems to make you seem more.. more… something-or-other!

However, it was incident free.  Nothing extraordinary had happened, apart from me not making some kind of arse of myself as usual, and no unintended double-entendre’s had been uttered.  How uneventful.

I was just musing on how quickly a holiday can fade into memory, and even more on how much you get out of shape during said hols!!  The evidence m’learned colleages;

• First karate lesson after coming back from hols and I managed to completely destroy my hard man of karate persona (self delusion is a wonderful thing); Shouting Ichi! Ni! San! Shi!… and then squeaking like mickey mouse on helium “Go”, “Roku”…
• The Alfa Romeo has decided to act all Alfa Romeo’y and decide it wanted 450 of my finest english pounds to be spent on its lower regions (brakes, disks and bearings)
• My sunburnt head has now turned to a peeling head.. I look like a “shoulda used head-n-shoulders” disaster advert.
• 563 work emails on the first day back is never a fun thing to behold.
• The holidays are not even a week old and I feel like I need another one.

Ah well, there was always Senior Karate?  Unfortunately I was bloody awful!  I felt like somebody had strapped lead weights to the ends of my arms, which wasn’t clever as Sensei was not in a very forgiving mood today.  I think I caused at least one of the press-ups that were metered out as punishments, but not all the others.  I was sweating, heaving and panting by the end of the lesson.  Nice!

I wouldn’t mind all that, but it didn’t look like I had even BEEN on holiday.  I stood next to Libs and looked all wan and pale next to her gorgeously tanned self.. Even Sarah looked more tanned than me, and as far as I am aware she spent the past two weeks in rainy England.  *sigh*

..and then to top it all off, as I stand in line at a BP Station to purchase some much needed cold beverage to throw down my parched throat, I hear from the two young teenage girls standing behind me; “Eeeerrgh! You’d think he’d be too old to need those!”.  I look down at the pack of chewing gum I have also decided to impulse buy.

I look up at the two girls, who look back at me like I’m the perv as described in the first paragraph of this blog post.

“Whoah, hang on…”

But it’s too late, they wander off.  So now it’s official, I am now too old for chewing gum, or worse.  I woulda given them a reverse shuto to the heads, but I was feeling my age and couldn’t even if I wanted to.

*double sigh* time to check the calendar and figure out when the next holiday is…

I am sat somewhere in the Toledo countryside with a killer view, a sunburnt head, arms which I am trying to convince myself are going a nice shade of oaken brown, the ubiquitous iphone playing random tracks, the bikes parked close by and the bustle of mi compadres finishing off their meal and starting to chill.

The complete lack of light around means that we have an unimpeded view of the stars above, which makes for a heck of a view whilst supping on the cold cans of beer that have magically appeared from somewhere.  Trying to decide whether to get under canvas tonight or just stay out in the open; Neither option seems to deter the mosquitoes from using all of us as snacking boards, at least outside is a wee bit cooler (temperature is apparently about 26c tonight!).

Tomorrow we’ll see how far we get on the bikes; there’s no particular route or plan, we just point ourselves in a random direction and see what’s around the next corner.  Probably not the most efficient way of getting from A to B, but it’s a damn site more pleasant and is loads more fun when it’s time to figure out where we are – the shrugs of “I dunno, does it matter?” makes for a more interesting holiday.

As for tonight, somebody is moaning “what are these?” as they scratch at the itchy, red mosquito bites that are starting to appear on all of us.

“Love bites?” comes an unhelpful reply.

“It certainly does” floats in from the dark somewhere.

…and suddenly the holiday is getting noticeably shorter and “normality” closer.

Well, I have hit that big milestone in my life which, depending on who you talk to, is either all down-hill from here-on-in or where my life begins.  I am of course talking about reaching my 40th year of life.

To be honest, and to great disappointment in some and relief to others, I haven’t had any major wobbles or mid-life-crisery with this particular milestone.. or in fact am particularly bothered by it.  For some reason I had a major wobble at 25, as my erstwhile friend in Scotland will avidly remember, and that’s it. 

Apart from giving me an excuse to eat copious amounts of cream cakes and doughnuts, plus a damned good reason to demand gifts with menaces, I have entered my 40th year of life with a non-committal shrug of the shoulders and a “meh”.

That said, and despite all the gifts I received and which were gratefully received, I think the best presents I received were from my sprogs.. although I don’t think they intentionally went out and got these for my birthday.

My youngest managed to get a handful of 3A’s *and* a 4 in his SAT’s (which is in the ‘beyond expectation/exceptional’  range for his age) and my eldest got straight-5’s in his SAT’s (which again is in the ‘beyond expectations’ range). 

A bit of a last huzzah from #1 son in his last year of Primary School, as he also received the School Governor’s award for excellence!

There’s nothing quite so soppy as a proud parent …apart from, possibly, an old soppy parent!