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I've moved my blather to blog:24 ?, just a pity it's not number 42...!!

25 November 2004 - 10h03

Feel the power of my voodoo-like cunning! ...or don't.

It being pay-day I'm in a slightly better mood - not that the amount I'm getting paid has put me in a better mood. I did have a couple of days warning though, since it's my job to sort out salaries with the accountants. If finally galvanised me to do what I've been threatening for the last four months to do, which is book and appointment to get my NI number. It's set for 10 Decembr, so maybe if I'm really, really lucky I'll get my number in time to get taxed a sane rate in January.

I also got to chat to Richard on Tuesday, he's still determined to get here sometime soon. Which makes me happy as well, since I've missed the boy. I've also formulated a PLAN to start an enterprise with Richard combining our skills. It's my big hope for actually making something of my time here.

I guess it one of those big steps in life when one goes from being a part of someone else's business to trying to create your own. For the first time though the idea doesn't fill me with a certain level of low grade terror. I really looking forward to it. Also the idea I've got will utilise a sufficiently broad variety of Richard and my skills that I doubt we'll be bored for a very long time if it works. I won't go into what it is, since, well, a tiki is not the place to annouce a business plan befoe it's been implemented.

Tragically it's not really even a new idea - it's just a niche that's been filled in SA, but I've noted has not been filled here. At the moment though I just want Richard to hurry up and get his butt here so we can start. Shnell, Shnell!

Oh, yeah, and with my knowledge of local geography and place names, it's not surprising I'll get names horribly mangled. Plus they have a bad habit here of leaving of the end of certian place names - for instance "Herts" north of London is something like "Hertsford" or "Hertshire", but I never really know...

Good luck with The Big Plan - I am sure it will be a success! And yes, its Hertfordshire, one of the Home Counties (expensive commuter area). Not to be confused with Herefordshire, a county near Wales (rural farming area). :)

23 November 2004 - 09h31

Rainbows and jellyfish, not round here...

Has anyone noticd that I've been dating this blog a year ahead? I've changed it back now, but wishful thinking on my part that it's 2005 already.

It scares me to think that I've been in London for just short of seven months and in that time I have not left the city once. All my grand plans to travel and see this country and the rest of Europe have utterly failed to come to fruition.

I'm going to try rectify that though - athough at the moment I really don't have the funds for it, especially with christmas coming up and all. However, at least, Claire and I have been invited by another friend of ours to go down to Devonshire for the first weekend in December. The intention also being to go via Salisbury & Stonehenge. And I'm really looking forward to the trip and getting out of the city.

At the moment my outlook on this place is so bleak, and I know it's coloured by the fact that, well, it's winter, my career's going to the dogs and my personal life has pretty much flat-lined. I won't go any further into my muddle of angst and insecurities. Yep, I think I really need to get out of London.

Oh, and Bu, I'm missing you already. I hope everying's getting sorted with the minimum of issues and stress. You know you have all my love and support, little as that means being stuck in the UK.

- Cheer up, its just the winter blues that are making you sad. :) Things will improve! And, erm... its Devon, not Devonshire. There is a Duke of Devonshire, but he lives near Derby. :)

19 November 2004 - 11h53

Lies, damn lies and winter mornings

I'm coming to admit that it probably is better to see morning sunlight on the way to work than afternoon sunlight on the way back.

Sunlight in the morning, well, it always looks like morning sunlight. It doesn't matter at 08h30 that the sunlight is just a bit weak and low in the sky, it's bright and cheery and it holds promise. It says, look, I'm the start of a sunny day! It doesn't matter that you know it'll be gone in a mere eight hours, it's unlikely to make much of a difference to the day time temperature and it'll sped the day fading from the potential of watery morning light straight into the disapointment of watery afternoon light, pretty much skipping anything that could be called 'real daylight' those blessed enough to live closer to the equator.

However, that doesn't stop me from taking some comfort from the false promise of the sunny mornings the last few day - they remind me that summer will come again.

Although I do miss sunsets.

15 November 2004 - 17h16

Little rays of sunshine

Well, I'm in a slightly better mind-state that I was on Friday. We had blue weather this weekend, even if it was fridged, so I saw and eensy weensy bit of sun. Plus I had a quiet time so got to do a bit of hibernating, before I spent Sunday morning basting portions of my hair with hydrogen peroxide. The results were amusing enough to send me into fits of giggling for a few minutes, I now know how the tiger got it's stripes - it's even about the right colour - although not so much with the black. It doesn't look quite as startling when it's dry though, fortunately.

I've also come to a surprisingly easy agreement with the lad I was sort of seeing, that we're no longer sort of seeing each other, and we're happy to be friends. And you know, I think we will actually be friends.

I'm slowly getting to know some of my housemates better. Good, since I hate not having anyone to talk to when I come home - well, all of the time, I can deal if it's only some of the time.

I went and spoiled myself on Saturday with a few items of clothing I sort of needed, and rather wanted. ;-) And then I made myself horridly broke this morning by purchasing tickets to watch Rammstein in February.

Oh, and apparently I don't have a tooth-ache as such. The dentist reckons I'd bruised the nerves beneath / in that tooth by clenching my jaw too hard when I slept (something I do almost always, and badly when I'm stressed). However he wants to give a new filing in place of an old one that's not looking so good, and then give me a gum-guard for when I sleep, which is going to set me back a whopping £170. I'm thinking I going to ask if that's NHS rates, and if not, I'll cancel the appointment and get it done in March when I go home.

Oh, and d@vid, you are soooooo wrong! I have a couple of pages of GM's notes on the back-story behind the plot, plus a couple of other bits and bobs, including a spreadsheet GM's check-list of events. Just let me know where to email it all. And if there's any further confusion - which there may be since this is a GM labour heavey LARP, just ask!

11 November 2004 - 09h53

I don't think I'm well...

Bah humbug to daylight savings. It's driving me barmy(er?). Sure, the sun is now rising at a reasonable time bearing in mind that it's still about six weeks till the shortest day of the year, but the sun sets at 4:30pm! It's awful!

And it's so low in the sky. Yesterday was a actually clear and nice, so at about 1:30 I decided to go for a walk, just so I could be outside in the sun for a while. But by that time already, not only does the sun just not get very high, but it was also heading on it's way down so the sunlight felt more watery and terminal than it does at 4pm on a winter's day in JHB. I'm also now 2 hours out of synch with home rather than just one.

Although I knew this was going to happen, and honestly, as any regular readers will know (I love you guys! <sob sob>) not coping with it has been my biggest fear with London.

It doesn't help that I haven't had a really good night out in months, as I mentioned I seem to be cursed to failure every time I try to organise a night out (as has happened again for tonight - and this time it was nothing to do with Slimelight!)

Ah, well, at least I'm settling into the new house, which is much more conveniently located, and the people there are nice enough. And after days stressing over the bank losing my money, they found it and I could pay rent, so I now have money to live on and no debts.

Oh, and I've got toothache, so I'm going to the dentist today.

Don't mind me, I've just got a lot of other stuff as well on my mind. To-gether, with the wea-ther, I'm not a Happy Bunny! De dum!

here's something to brighten your agrarian-time-altering northern-hemisphere day - um, okay, distract rather than actively brighten - Ian says he has all of Farrago except the GM notes, except that the committee concurred that it's likely the GM notes were scribbled on a napkin with lipstick (my question is, what colour was the lipstick?) - anyway, if such notes are existent, can you email them to him, otherwise he's coming/going over soon, so you can just speak to him then - and believe it or not I am going to click "minor" but it won't make a difference on the Last changes list - d@vid November 12 2004

(oh, and what's up with allegedly happy bunnies anyway?)

http://people.cs.uct.ac.za/~dseaward/hateeverything.gif

05 November 2004

(well, it would have been for Friday, if our firewall hadn't died and taken out internet connection with it)
!Ain't it just typical? I never actually believed that I was ‘Murphy touched’. Somehow I manage to gloss over that aspect of my life in any self-accountings I make.

I was actually quite surprised on the Wiki a little while ago by GeekDotNeo’s comment about me being “so familiar with Murphy”. No, I thought. Richard Hensman is familiar with Murphy, I just have an occasional wave from across the street. (Although it bears to recall that Richard, for while, went by the nickname of Murphy, because if it can go wrong, it will for him.)

But now, I am forced to admit, he may be right. Although it’s not so much Murphy, as Irony.

After weeks of miserable search, we will recall I have finally found a place to stay. I have put down the deposit, and I’m getting set to move on Saturday. We even went out to Clapham last night to celebrate at our usual haunt, Revolution.

I got home quite late and found Ian and Alex still up – probably not unusual, but for the last while they would have been in their rooms with their respective women, rather than haunting the lounge. The words of greeting I got out of Ian’s mouth were, “Guess what? I’m single.”

Yes, last night Ian was officially dumped by the lone and sole reason I’m moving our of the house I’ve lived in for the last six months. And it’s just too late.

Ian, as I’ve always been aware, didn’t personally want me out the house. Alex definitely doesn’t want me out the house. I really enjoy being around the boys, we got on very well – the last two weeks without those ‘respective women’ have been great since we sit up in the lounge chatting and the boys play some Baldur’s Gate 2 side-game on the X-box, and occasionally when Alex leaves to phone Michelle, I’ll take over his character and Ian and I forge on. It’s been fun. But it’s still too late.

However, the real person shaking hands with Murphy in this situation is Ian. Not only has he lost his girlfriend and a house-mate, but he now also needs to find a new housemate to cover the portion of the rent that neither Sara, nor I will be around to pay. Now doesn’t that just suck?

3 November 2004 - 11h36

It's a mystery, I tell you...

As I'm certain you've all heard (if you haven't in fact experienced it first hand) London is not Brittish. At least 50% of the people who live here are not Brittish. Most of them definitely do not speak with a Brittish accent of any form or kind.

And this is what I find so difficult to fathom about the local radio stations I listen to. While I only listen to Capital (pop-charts), Virgin (easy consumption rock and alternative) and occasionally X-fm (everything from indie, classic rock to funky jazz on Sunday evenings), I have noticed over the last 6 months that I hardly ever hear a non-Brittish accent speaking on the radio - and I'm not just talking about the presenters. Most of the lot run endless competitions or 'call in' events of some kind and ever person who's at the end of that line sounds as Brittish as Sunday footie or scones and tea.

This boggles my mind. From listening to local radio you may as well think that the radical's got their way and shipped everyone who isn't at least third generation British off back to wherever they came from and left this 'green and pleasent' land empty of foreigners of any kind.

I don't know if this is some sort of conspiracy on the part of the radio stations to refuse to let people on air who aren't 'native', or if it's because there is some substantially cooler 'antipodean' radio station that I haven't found yet that southerners (in the hemisphere sense) shun the rest for. Although, one wonders then what all the thousands of Europeans (Eastern and Western), Orientals, Indian's and Carribeans have for their radio listening reqirements?

1 November 2004 - 15h03
!It's all over at last!!!

I'm slightly crazy on a heady mix of anxiety, guilt, stress and triumph!

The story runs that on Sunday night, after I'd got back from looking at a pretty decent place in Clapham South, I got a phone call from another place I'd been to see earlier in the week. Well, it was a bit out the blue, since, long story short, I'd been told the room wasn't avaliable. However, there'd been a stuff up and it was now available again, but the guy had less time to get the issue sorted so he put me under some pressure for an answer. I'd been cooking at that exact moment, so I asked him for some time, he wasn't keen on giving me a day, but he would give me that evening. After supper, a glass of wine and talking about it a bit to Reg and Alex I decided to say "yes", since well, I didn't think with my record so far I'd get the place in Clapham, and I needed to get my life sorted at some point. All cool.

Except not so cool, since the place in Clapham phoned me back today and said "Do you want the room?" and I replied, "Sorry, I can't." And then I put the phone down and felt like I'd just made a bad mistake. So I agonised over it, and then I phoned Kait, since she's known me waaay too long, and is pretty impartial in this matter, and she told me I had made a mistake too. So, I then tried to get a hold of the Clapham people - no small task, since I had wrong numbers (well, one wrong, one right), no air time, and a yahoo email addy, none of which was for the person I'd spoken to earlier.

However, after an hour of having my nerves running on edge and my guts feeling like they were on the spin cycle, for after all, if they didn't get back to me I kinda needed to keep my promise to this other lad which involved a long mission to banks before they closed lugging large wads of cash around Hackney, the phone finally rang! Yes, the room was still available, they're happy to have me, and the other lad, Paul, will live. Although I feel like a right shit, and I told him so.

Somehow, though life seems soo much better now. (Despite the awful let-down of a weekend. I swear I'm jinxed and I should just give up ever trying to organise to get to Slimelight.)

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