We're 'vannin', so it's a rainin'

This evening we are off to Sandy Balls for three nights in the 'van.

Sometimes a picture really does paint a thousand words.























So, business as usual for the winter 'vannin' experience.

In fairness, tomorrow is going to be better weather, and the day after, better again, just in time for the rain to return as we are packing up Thursday morning.

And . . . relax

Today is the last day of the first half of Spring term.  This term is named, I am convinced, more out of hope than reality, since there is nothing particularly Spring-like about the weather.  True, it is not cold particularly, though we have had a few rounds of hailstones falling on our skylight, but boy is it wet.

This is therefore the perfect time to go away in the caravan.  We are leaving Monday evening and returning Thursday lunchtime, using up the last two and a half days of holiday I have remaining until April.  We are going to Sandy Balls, which has hard standing pitches and a little centre, so perfect for Winter 'vannin'.  We are also off to see War Horse on Wednesday, something I am very much looking forward to personally, even if I am just a little bit worried about how it will be received by the two youngest members or our party.  Time will tell.

This weekend, it is us lads alone together, since LO is off to Bristol for two nights to see her good friend, who lives down in Cornwall.  The weather may well yet play a part in their arrangements, but fingers are crossed and general safety measures are being taken.

In fact, for half of Saturday, even Maggot 1 will be off, swimming and pizza eating with a school friend to celebrate their birthday.  This will leave me and Maggot 2 to do the clubs early, and then to do whatever takes our fancy.  I want a bit of a tidy up on the garden, including, I am ashamed to say, our Christmas tree, which I dumped there at the start of the year, and then promptly forgot it.  There are also a few leaves and wotnot that can also go in the organic waste bin.  Maggot 2 loves to be outside, so he will relish it, I hope.  We may also get a bit of Fifa 14 in on the PS4.

The other big task this weekend is for me to do the final steps in the re-decoration of the front room, in anticipation of the new sofa arriving early March.  Indeed, I cannot believe that even a visit from the Queen would have caused more cleaning, painting and polishing.

The final step is to varnish the floor.  To be precise, to re-varnish the floor.  Over the previous weeks I have sanded it (so that the new varnish has a key), hoovered, cleaned with white spirit (to get the worst of the gunk off the floor) and cleaned round the edge which had lots of tiny little paint splatters.  The work tonight therefore is a final hoover and white spirit clean, then varnish once the maggots are in bed, so it can dry overnight.

Varnishing the floor is a tedious task, but now is the ideal time to do it, so I am doing to get it done and then hopefully won't even think about it again for several years.  Someone did ask me why I did not just use Danish oil, then it would be just a matter of layering on more oil every so often.  That would have been a very good idea in hindsight, however when I originally did it, I wanted a gloss finish, and I wanted the boards, which were very light once the grime had been sanded back, to have a bit more colour, so the first round of varnish was oil-based, known for its "yellowing" effect over time, and indeed they did bring a lovely deep and darker hue to them.

The other change we have made is to revert to gloss for the woodwork.  We currently have the whole house done in a silk finish, which is much easier to put on, but does not have the longevity or toughness of gloss.  We are therefore reverting to the classic look, and I have to say we love it.  The woodwork looks finished, and our internal doors look the best they have in living memory.  The only negative, albeit a small and bearable one, is that now we have the front room done in gloss, LO wants it everywhere, and now.  To be exact, we will re-decorate the new extension in the spring/summer when furniture can be on the lawn for a day, and that will be a matter of a quick run over with white matt on the ceiling, the chosen off-white silk on the walls, and gloss on all the woodwork, of which there are two four-panel doors, two window sills and perhaps one hundred feet of skirting.  Yowzer.

I hope you have a great weekend, and speak next week.

Mixing

Some of you may know that one of my hobbies is remixing.  I search for likely tracks on a remix website, and go for any that take my fancy.

Over the last few months, I have remixed an old Tears for Fears track, a relatively (to me anyway) obscure Moby track, and the most bizarre of the lot, the Deutsches Symphonie Orcheter Berlin rendition of Antonín Dvořák - Symphony No. 9 [3rd Movement].

Now I know that a journey of a thousand mixes must start with the first rejection, and that Edison had 20,000 steps to success with the light bulb, but dammit man, it would be nice to do something people actually like.  As an example, the Dvorak has had 315 plays and ONE LIKE.  The Tears for Fears has had 135 plays and 2 votes, and they are only from people who have obviously decided I won't win, so are voting for me so I vote for them, since votes get you to the top of the queue, and that gets you in the eyes, and ears, of the judges.

A lesser chap might start to consider taking this in as constructive criticism, and maybe I could have a go at blaming my equipment (old desktop with average sound card etc etc etc), however in truth, I do enjoy it, and by entering the competitions it does give me access to vocal tracks that I can use, and abuse, in my remixes, so I suspect I shall continue ploughing my lonely farrow in the hope that, when I am dead, I am proclaimed as the next George Martin or something.

And . . . relax

Another perfect week slowly draws to a close, and a chap can take a moment to reflect on the triumphs of the week.  And they have been many.  Honestly.

I am starting to get a shape on what I am doing next with my career.  This sounds mysterious, and I would rather not write about in case I jinx it.

This weekend we don't have any clubs, since Maggot 2 is doing a poem at an inter-school poetry competition.  His poem is entitled "If I were a teabag", a question we have all asked at one point or other in our lives.  We then plan to try the fairly newly opened Wagamama's restaurant in town, a small challenge as to whether their menu and Maggot 2's very narrow tastes have any overlap.

I am in to the undercoating on the front room.  I am hoping that today, a local charity called Stone Pillow will turn up,  a charity who provide for free furniture to people who cannot afford to buy.  We just want to get rid of them, so I am really hoping they are good enough for them to take away.  They have the fire labels, essential before any charity will take furniture, and I have plumped the pillows and removed several jelly babies from under the seats, so here's hoping.

Once the furniture is gone, I can crack on in earnest finishing the under-coating and glossing, and then a couple of coats of varnish on the floor, re-waxing the fireplace support, painting the old mirror with copper paint (more on this if it is successful) and we are then ready to take charge of the new sofa.

We have also visited a local upholstery company, a husband and wife team, in their sixties if they are a day, in a small unit in farm buildings, next door to the oak furniture place where we got our table, sideboard and TV corner unit as it happens.  They were a lovely couple who will, we hope, make us a bespoke footstool - old-fashioned, but very fashionable, button top, casters, in a fairly bright dark pink, to complement the colours in the rug we also bought last night.  It is fair to say that it is all go in Scobi Towers.

Just realised that it is actually only Thursday today.  I am breaking the usual routine of being in the office Tuesday to Thursday, and as I am at home my brain has obviously made the mistake of thinking, perhaps hoping, it is Friday.  Oh well, better early than never, or whatever the saying is*.

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* Whatever it is, it is not that. Ed.

And . . . relax

I wanted to share a small story that made me chuckle.

You may know, from previous blogs, that we in Scobi towers have a rather unhealthy love of Reality Shows, the crack cocaine of modern televisual delights.  Our latest iteration, presumably as a taster for the upcoming Winter Olympics, is Jump.  Jump is a show where six men and six women of varying levels of fame - from Anthea Turner, (who surely has a full-house on reality attendance awards) to some guy who is a designer - compete at various winter sports, such as giant slalom, luge and bobsleigh.  The slowest two each night then have to compete to stay in the competition by doing a ski jump, on what has become known as the three bears, with baby bear being the 15m run, mummy bear the 24m run, and daddy bear of unknown length, because no-one has tried it yet.

The show is hosted by Davina McCall and Alex Brooker.  The first I am assuming is someone of which you have heard, the second perhaps not.  He was part of the Paralympics presentation team, and also on The Last Leg, with Adam Hills and Josh Widdicombe.  We find him a very amusing presenter, genuine and funny; perhaps not as polished as Davina, but all the better for it.

Anyhow, on one part of the show, the winner each day gets to share a shot of Schnapps with Alex.  On the evening in question, the winner was Kimberly Wyatt, a former Pussycat Doll*.  The humour around this section is that Alex feels a bit of a fraud getting the shot with a winner, they having done some kind of miraculous thing, he just presenting.  On this night, he picked up his shot and proclaimed "how lucky am I, drinking Schnapps with a pussy girl . . . er, no, sorry, I mean a Pusscat doll".  Oh how we laughed.

We have a fairly quiet weekend.  Clubs, stuff, and we are out at a fiftieth birthday this evening.  Sunday has not been planned yet, but it will be just what is needed.

Hope you have a good weekend, and speak next week.

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* A popular pop combo girl group from the early noughties

Diets

I have to admit, that from 1 January 2014, it would have done me good to be on an effective diet, to help me to lose the weight gained since about the Summer Holiday.

Good schmood, of course, coz that is easier to write than it is to do.

Consequently, the old* weight has not done much in the way of shifting.

I had a long, hard talk with myself, and have redoubled my efforts, and by way of a kick-start only, coz there is no way I could continue forever like this, I am trying the new, and very fashionable, Five-and-Two Diet, where you eat normal, healthyish for 5 days, then on 2 days you eat very low calories, down around 600 for a male.

To be honest, I am behind the curve on the science, but Uncle Google informs me that:

The science behind its theory is compelling - even if it’s been subjected to extremely little clinical testing. The diet’s potential lies in the affect it has on our genes. Regular, intermittent fasting activates a gene called SIRT1. Often referred to as ‘The Skinny Gene’, it is involved in the repair and maintenance of cells to promote survival during times of dietary scarcity. Conveniently, SIRT1 also inhibits fat storage and is thought to deliver anti-ageing benefits. Not a bad package - especially when combined with the DAF 16 (or ‘Sweet 16’) gene, which has been shown to switch on during fasting tests on animals, keeping them younger for longer.

I have not read it anywhere, so therefore it is unlikely to be true, but I also ponder the thought that usually, if you just stop eating, your body says "uh oh, better hold on to the fat coz we don't know when this sucker is gonna eat again", so maybe stopping then starting ensures your body never enters defence-mode on fat retention.

There is also more woo-woo science** around how fasting can give your body a rest or something, but that is nothing I would want to utter in public.

Anyhow, this is only the first week, and I have probably taken my "2" as two-thirds over three days, but on those days I have been pretty good.  It is therefore no great surprise that I feel a bit less bumpy in the gut region.  Friday is weigh-day, so I can confirm then whether it has actually had any effect on the weight as well.

What is nice is that I am in the zone now, wanting to put good things in to my body.  What I don't need is a Saturday night with friends probably having a takeaway.  That, is appears, is what we have planned for this Saturday.  Doh!

I will let you know how it all goes.

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* Old is used advisedly since we do feel like long and old friends
** therefore not science at all

And . . . relaxed

So relaxed I forgot to blog.

Life is good, though I am pretty tired at the moment, and while my drive back to fitness (fitness being a journey not a destination with me) is going OK - my knee is holding up well - I am rather finding the idea of eating less calories to be easier to define than it is to implement.  There just seems to be too many of those nasty little temptations.

Have a good week, and speak soon.

Good service

If you want to know what good service looks like, then go no further than Keuco.

We have a bathroom cabinet from them, a pretty good quality one that we bought from a bathroom shop about nine years ago, a shop which has recently gone out of business.  It includes 2 lights with a pull switch on the underside, and the switch had broken.

I wrote to Keuco just to see if they could advise where I could get a replacement switch, having taken it apart to identify the problem.  I was expecting perhaps a supplier or part number of something that would enable me to track down the part.  What I got was an offer from them to provide the whole switch part at no cost.

It arrived today, and has been fitted and successfully tested.

What fantastic service.

And . . . relax

The first full week under the belt* and things are starting to feel like normal now.  I am still not totally convinced this working thing is for me, but I am keeping that to myself as I re-double my efforts to make this the "year of the career".  Having been driven in to last place by Brad, I really need to pull something out the hat lest I become the lonely old career spinster with the cat and the shopping trolley.

I bumped in to an old colleague from the <<Public Sector account name removed>> days, and we spent a very convivial lunch together catching up on the last 4 years, and talking about our plans for the future.  Interestingly, for us at least, our thinking has all been going in similar directions, so I have made a mental note to keep in touch with him lest he find the illusive "next thing" that has so far eluded me.

What I am clear on is that I need to be more decisive, in as much as I need to make a bl00dy decision, and I need to stop prevaricating and wafting round telling everyone that I want a change.  I need to make a change happen, and my plan, still in its infancy, is to cast my net wider, but at the same time have more focus on what it is that I am looking for, since a vague "I think I am maybe looking for something" is not cutting any ice, mustard or, frankly, getting me anywhere useful.

Having given myself that stiff talking to, I plan to take it easy this weekend.  Perhaps a bit of DIY and general house-shaped stuff, and the Maggots have their various sporting activities Saturday morning, but other than that, nothing very specific planned.

Have a great weekend, and speak again next week.

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* which must be the explanation for the tightness of the trouser

Mobility

Just need to share a slightly amusing tale.

Maggot 2 and I went to a local Co-Op (seems to be lots of these mini-marts opening up round our way at the moment) to get some cash and a paper.  As I was approaching the door, I noticed an elderly woman in a mobility scooter.  She had parked against the front wall, nose in, and when I saw here she had returned to her mobility scooter to go home.

At the point I joined her story, she was preparing to reverse out of the space so she could head home.  She was obviously a nervous driver since she took several looks behind her, over both shoulders, to check all was clear, before fiddling with her controls and then, after another couple of checks behind, she pressed the go button, only to go straight forward in to the wall.  Luckily it was a low-speed accident that required no intervention, so I was able to chuckle to myself guilt free.

And . . . relaxed

What with the holidays and all, time really has become an abstract concept, and so here I am on Sunday doing my end of week write up.

First two days at work were fine.  Slowish, but fine.  I know that this coming week will be nearly up to full speed, with a rare visit to the capital on Wednesday, when I will have to try and remember all those things us country folks need to stop doing, such as mumbling to ourselves, saying hello to strangers and eating raw meat with our hands*.

We have put away the Christmas decorations for another year, and in doing so we have also given our loft a much-needed tidy up, since it was messy and disorganised, just like everyone else's loft.  After a couple of hours it looked half decent, with us having cleared out a bunch of rubbish, tidying up the rest and ear-marking several items for eBay*.  There is something cathartic about a clear out, probably some Feng Shui thing.

Today, with Maggot 1 away at a birthday sleepover, the rest of us will be batch-cooking (mostly LO) and probably going swimming (Maggot 2 et moi).

Enjoy the last of your weekend, and gird your loins for a full week next week.

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* Actually, having worked in the "square mile" for a while this bit is probably still allowed.
** In these austere times, sometimes the only disposable income a chap has.

Happy New Year

A happy New Year to you all.  I hope you had a great break over Christmas, and have not made too long a list of New Year's resolutions.  I have decided not to have any resolutions, but rather some strong thoughts, since I feel the pressure can impair one's performance in pursuit of any such resolutions. 

I am also planning not to document any of my strong thoughts this year, again to ensure that there is no unnecessary pressure on me, so that I may be free to perform at the highest level.

Well, that's this year's excuse perfectly laid down, so let's get on with the year.

I am back at work today, and that is not a good feeling.  I have decided, after much market research and the ingestion of large amounts of mince pies, that the real world can be pretty busy.  Maybe we should be chilling out a bit more.  That may well be one of my strong thoughts.

I hope you are as ready as I am for the onslaught of a new year and all that it brings.