Andy's Blog

Sunday was very much a “Grand Ol’ Duke of York” day; When I was up, I was up.  When I was down, I was down.  Today I’m neither up nor down.  I was going to title this post “Four seasons in one day, part II” for pretty much the same reasons as the original post.  A rollercoaster of emotions varying from pain, joy, sadness and pride although not necessarily in that order.

The joy of getting my students to their next level, especially all the new brown belts, was tinged slightly with the realisation that I wasn’t going to be able to make my own progression.

Despite eminently wise words from Sensei, and other friends, about priorities; one can’t but feel that the ‘ongoing buggerage’ has won this little round just before I deal with it ultimately.  As noted to my Sensei, “at least it gives me more time to practice my sanseru and sepai“.  Although truth be told my heart really wasn’t in it.

I think, if nothing else, the two weeks “off” I’ll be having will give me time to charge up the ol’ batteries.  I have already started to fill up my media player with an almost obscene amount of musical tracks and the kindle is starting to groan under the weight of books that have been loaded on there.

It’s also good to know that friends “have your back” and that if nothing else things will be ticking along whilst I’m not there.  The hugs have been rather lovely too :¬)

I won’t be online though.  Recently, and I mean very very recently, it’s almost been too hard to keep things in check; grading, as I said, was too much of a rollercoaster – and funnily enough I think Sensei was very much aware of that fact… as did my tough love guardian angel (as always)!

you can’t go on thinking nothing’s wrong
who’s gonna drive you home tonight?

The answer, as always, is ultimately “me”, but you can’t help but wonder somtimes…

A new month is upon us and.. oh my tis gonna be a full adventure packed one this year!  June, it has to be said, definitely had quite a few more downs than ups and really took a nose-dive as it approached its ultimate whimper.  The blog, as ever, suffered from a lack of updates but sometimes life is very rude in its attention grabbing; and these really weren’t things I could ignore.

So I start the new month off looking for some ‘new adventures’… let’s leave it at that for the moment, and contemplating a month of pain(s)…. of various unique flavours.

The little buggerage that is cancer is having the local quackery peek, poke and “hmmmm” at it first thing with a view to finally giving it its marching orders;  scalpel and eye-watering equipment at the ready!

Before one can even clench one’s but-tocks at that thought I shall be throwing myself, and number one sprog, into the competitive art of funny poses and grunting in a japanese accent.  I would call it Karate, but that really is doing the fair martial art a disservice… at least on my part.

What’s more worrying is that I shall be pitting my questionable skills against a large number of other practitioners, with some very VERY dark coloured belts, all in the name of becoming world champeeen!

Get that over and done with and I will age an extra year almost immediately… literally!  Nope, not in some abstract sense of the word, I will actually have aged another year.  That is if I haven’t already aged prematurely when number one sprog officially enters his teenagedom the week before.

There’s a bit more to tap out into this post, but I can’t seem to compose the correct combinations of letters and punctuation marks into something vaguely coherent.

Ah well, cometh the end of July and I’ll be pretty much offline for a few weeks; no on-line presence, no work, no karate, no updates, no cancerous lumps bumps ‘n other stuff? no idea… we’ll cross that bridge when we get there though.

First day of the month!

Risk is something we manage every day on an almost unconscious level; Do you pull out from the junction now, or wait until that red car passes by?  Sip upon the blessed caffeine bean straight away or blow on it to cool it down just a tad?  Stand and block an attack or step forward and sideways to go on the offensive?

All made fairly quickly and without being verbalised as a series of competing options and therein lies the rub, the verbalisation.  When the risks are said out loud it’s suddenly a decision that cannot be made unconsciously as it sits in front of you with a quizzical “so?” on its face.

“If you don’t do x, y could happen.  However there’s a risk with doing x that may result in y”

It all looks a bit like a mathematical formula at this point, especially when percentages are thrown at you to “help”.  Risk now moves from a personal set of choices to an impersonal set of numbers with some unpalatable consequences attached to them… or not… maybe.

So now I am left to face the calculation of “could” vs “may” and all that entails.

There’s a lot to be said for ignoring the whole issue and just throwing yourself into the elsewhere, delaying the inevitable and concentrating on those things that you can influence.. but the quizzical face is still there.

So?  Block vs Strike?  Could vs May?  Do vs Die?

T’was a 6am start this cold bitter morn’, not a creature was stirring… apart from yours truly in a bleary eyed funk as I had work to do and needed to be in the West Midlands before 8am to fart around with a number of websites of various flavours.

Search and ye shall find plenty of whinging on this fine blog about my absolute loathing of the early hours, and today is no different.  Laptops of varying sizes slung around my person and boldly step outside to greet the day with a heartfelt “Fookin’ hell it’s COLD!”

This lad is ugly (er) without the blessed bean coursing through my veins so a visit to the nearest Starbucks is always a must have pitstop as I potter up the M6.

I like Christmas, I really do.  However walking into the Service Station to be greeted with a profusion of Christmas decorations, Christmas themed goodies that can be purchased (complete with snowflakes, snowmen, santas, and the like) *AND* cheery Christmas songs blaring over the speakers IN NOVEMBER is extracting the urine somewhat.

I can’t help but feel that by the time Christmas ACTUALLY comes around that the 8 weeks of relentless ramming down my throat will perhaps have jaded me to the whole thing.  Of course this could just be my caffeine retarded body having an early morning gripe…. nah!

Bah-Feckin’-Humbug ya bastard shops!

…I feel somewhat better already.

There’s a mental image running around my head that would speak far more volumes than any number of words could convey in how things are at the moment.  Sometimes, and only sometimes, words are easy

…but not enough.. or way too much.

I’ve spoken before about how a song, a snippet of lyrics taken out of context, an image, or some other medium, provide a far more accurate and personal reflection of self at a point in time.

I won’t try and put into words what the mental image is, inoffensive as it is, as that seems counter intuitive. Maybe later, when I have some personal time, I will search for something that matches it on the big, bad, t’interweb… or, god forbid, put my artistic abilities to the test and actually translate from mental image to physical medium.

Until then I’ll share one of the ‘lyrics out of context’, that I mentioned earlier.  It’s from a song by Madness and perversely it’s probably the one bit that makes the song sound darker than it’s actual intent – which is exactly the opposite;

Standing up in the falling down
In so much rain I could almost drown.

If I ever do manage to scribble the image down I’ll make sure to add it to the blog… maybe.  However now seems a perfect time to plug in some headphones, hit ‘random’ on the playlist, and see if I can either create some new audible monuments or just lose self in the moment.

…not a unique sentiment at the moment!

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).

Awww buggar, t’would seem that the powers-that-be have finally swung their Sauron like gaze towards me and wondered; “WTF does he do?”

So I now find myself, just before Christmas, in the position of having my role officially classed as “at risk”.  As my manager helpfully put it at my 1:1 interview; “It’s not you, but your role that’s at risk”.  I think I feel better.

However, I am taking this rather positively and am not *too* down.  It doth give me the opportunity to see what new adventures are available out there and I have about 6 months in which to do it in (or possibly 12 if you read the rather vague HR document in another way; head slanted at a jaunty 30 degree angle kind of way).

That's me that is..

So I am currently calling upon the mighty powers of Web 2.0, and sacrificing my first born upon its altar (sorry Alex but the Internet is a cruel, yet just, deity) to see what can be found for a jobbing IT Guru without actually getting up from my seat… well actually this blog post comes more from a Pod than a seat, but I’m painting a picture here…

…fin!

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

“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*

Chewy condom anyone?

..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…

*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!