unhappy

I've been feeling down for a while.

I'm finding work to be quite an unpleasant experience.  I find the lack of any clear direction, the lack of common sense and, in particular, the lack of any ability to make change for the better very frustrating.  I have known for a while that I disagree with some of the things they seem to have decided on, but even then I'd be happy if stuff was actually happening - I'd kinda be happy to be proved wrong, but the whole "limbo" aspect of things is just not fun to be involved in.

Of course I've also been more proactively looking for a new job again.  This hasn't been going too well.  I clearly have a good CV - at the least it is good enough for me to get interviews.

I've now had a total of 5 interviews, though these have not been all they could.  I'll hopefully blog about it separately, but I don't really see myself getting/wanting those jobs.

And of course I'm back to the old situation of no apparent prospect of a salary improvement at work (it's now getting on for 2 years), despite my rent and various other costs going up, so I'm struggling financially again.  Particularly since I desperately need to save money for the Canada trip.  This last month or so I've had to spend a fortune on my car:

£450 for a complete new set of tyres
£200 on a service & MOT (plus some replacement parts)
£250 on insurance
£175 on Car Tax

So that's over £1,000: I only take home about £25K a year, so I've had to spend nearly 4% of my entire year's salary in one month!

I've also been struggling with the weight thing.  I decided I was going to lose a few stones in preparation for the Canadian Grand Prix and blogged about the "progress" here, but just recently ti stagnated and then, while I wasn't blogging, it actually went into reverse - I gained 1 pound a few weeks ago (although I lost it again the following week), but this week I'd gained 2 pounds.

The problem - and it's been a problem all my life - is that when I feel down I eat.  I am the very definition of a comfort eater, and since I feel down quite often, I eat quite a lot.  Of course it's a vicious circle - when you get very big and find it difficult to do things like walk up flights of stairs that becomes a source of unhappiness, prompting me to eat more.

The other problem is I've not really gone about it by sticking to a proper diet.  I've increased the amount of exercise I do, which has been helping to keep the last few weeks of not eating well in check, but I've also slipped back into some of my weirder habits.  In particular I've been "multiple buying" again - this is where I buy several meals worth at one shop, then for some reason buy stuff for the same meals at another.

So, specifically, while I was away I had several meals to buy for and bought cheese on toast, hot cross buns and some mini-sausages plus buns as meals.  Only if you do the maths while I needed 4 meals worth I had therefore actually bought 7 meals worth.  Since none of it was particularly long lasting, that meant I had to eat more meals than I needed and for those meals to be bigger.

And to be honest, I didn't really need to buy any of them - I have stuff in the freezer and cupboards that I really need to get rid of (and, of course, would, therefore, effectively be free meals instead of spending more money).

I think I need to introduce some will power and/or start actually thinking about stuff more.

fuck this shit

I'm in a really bad mood today.

I don't think it's lack of sleep, because I'm not really tired, as such.  I mean, I'm a little fatigued, having put in some hefty days at work recently (both time-wise and effort-wise), but I've been sleeping okay.

I think part of it is that people haven't really been doing what I've been asking them to.  It's been weird - I think we've agreed something or to do something in a certain way or by a certain time and then they just go and do something else.

I mean, on most of the things I don't mind that they've done it differently or at a different time or whatever, but why agree to what we had agreed if you're going to do something else?  Why not just say what you've got in mind?

I just let out a big sign then.

Roll on my long weekend!

bad mood

I've been a seriously bad mood just recently.

Yesterday and today it's been particularly bad, for some reason.  The real problem is I'm not entirely sure why I'm in a bad mood.

I think a big part of it may be difficulty with sleeping.

My difficulty sleeping is mainly a reflection of the time of year.  You wouldn't really know it from what's been happening with the weather, but it's very close to the summer solstice, which is the longest day of the year.

This causes me problems because I've always found it difficult to get to sleep when there are bright sources of light shining on me.  This isn't helped by the fact that bright light in the morning is a well-known cue to wake up and of course at this time of year it doesn't get late until very light and then it's bright early in the morning.

As such I've been struggling to get enough sleep recently and this is something I know makes me cranky.

The other thing is I've been really frustrated at work.

I've obviously discussed how I'm searching for a new job and this last few weeks have really underlined some of the problems with where I currently work.  A lot of the systems and processes we use are either massively inefficient or, to be frank, non-existent.

What makes this worse is that I know if I tried to change them then I'd hit the barriers I always do.  It makes things very frustrating.  It's particularly annoying at the moment because of all the activity there is at the moment and the lack of control I have.

I'm also a little frustrated with the job hunting.  I mean, it's going okay but I get a bit annoyed with the agents and sometimes with the companies and what they expect you to be able to do.  It's blatantly obvious that I have a job currently and I'm quite key to it, but they keep phoning me up at stupid times when I clearly can't talk.

And in particular, why not just send me an e-mail?  Almost none of the conversations I've had on the phone couldn't simply have been quickly dealt with via e-mail.

I also find it frustrating that they don't get back to you.  I mean, they must look at all the CVs for the jobs - a quick "thanks but no thanks" only takes a few seconds.  And it is their basic point after all.

But more frustrating is when the agents do get back to you and ask you all these questions and then weeks go by with nothing but silence.  If the company aren't interested then tell me.  If it was always going to take weeks because of their timetable then set that expectation up front.

It's also annoying that many companies engage multiple agents, but because the agents don't then reveal who their client is in their adverts you have to work out that it's the same job or you end up submitting yourself multiple times, which is just a gigantic waste of everybody's time and effort.

It's also annoying that they clearly just chance their arms a lot of the time.  I've had a few contact me with opportunities that actually I've already seen and rejected because they don't match (usually because they're looking for someone a bit more senior) and then of course the company reject me because I'm not a match - wow, what a surprise.  Which goes back to one of the problems of using the agents - they don't really understand what the job is most of the time, they're just regurgitating a spec that they've been given.

My bad mood is pretty obvious isn't it?

only thursday?

Wow - it's only Thursday.

I feel like yesterday should have been Friday. I'm getting to the stage where I could really do with a break from work. But my last day at work isn't until next Tuesday.

In fact, to be honest, I'm not sure I can really be bothered to write any more today.

a better mood

So I'm feeling a lot better today.

The problems yesterday were a bit of a collective coming together. I think if it had just been one or two I'd have been okay, but all together meant I wasn't impressed.

First off, I was tired.

The tiredness stretched back into the weekend. Basically, as mentioned last week, my landlord wants me to move my stuff into his shed. However, he'd utterly failed to clear the shed and didn't seem to be progressing it at all - I even had to prompt him to actually do anything.

This was particularly annoying because it was them banging on about fire hazards. Anyway, he eventually finished on Saturday and knocked on my door. He then had the cheek - the very temerity - when I said I wouldn't do it then, because it was too late, to basically imply I was dragging my feet. Fucking cheek of the man.

Anyway, I therefore decided I would do it very first thing Sunday morning. It would serve as quite good exercise and needed doing and would also help get him off my back. However, I was a bit shocked at just how much there really was to do.

I've been careful not to overload the boxes as much as I can and had also worked out something of an order to put them in to avoid to many unnecessary problems as I e-bay the stuff, so it was pretty quick and efficient, but man it was hard work.

And to be perfectly frank I'm not actually finished - there's a whole bunch of stuff that really also needs to go out there. However, the problem has been that I've not had any room to manoeuvre. But the point is I moved everything I needed to at that time and it was bloody hard work.

But then, in the afternoon, I had a shed load of stuff to put on e-bay. And I'm not kidding here - I currently have 73 active auctions on e-bay. And that's with me having had 20-odd on from last week.

The 73 is a long way from representing everything I need to e-bay., but it represents probably 90% of the stuff that I can e-bay right away. A lot of the rest of it either needs me to watch/read/play it or actually needs throwing away.

I've actually been a bit surprised that so many of the thing I've put up have been selling. Especially the old comics - I mean, a lot of them are incomplete runs of comics from the best part of 20 years ago, and yet they're selling. Okay, they're not selling for good prices - most are going for 99p, which is on the borderline of being a loss - but they are selling.

Anyway, so all that was why I was tired - I did loads of stuff on Sunday. And that was on top of going for a really long walk on Saturday.

A really long walk that had resulted in a second blister. I don't know why, but when I started with the walking I didn't get any blisters, but then last week I got quite a bad one on my heel.

I decided that I should therefore switch shoes, as the blister might have been due to rubbing. I say might have been because sometimes I get blisters for other reasons, and I actually suspect that's what caused this one. Anyway, it turned out that the shoes I switched to rubbed one of my toes and caused a blister there too.

So yeah, the weekend was a bit rubbish from all those points of view. Especially as the time I spent doing all that crap meant I didn't really get any time to relax or enjoy myself.

So when Monday rolled around I wasn't feeling great due to the above, but I thought work would be relatively smooth.

But it wasn't smooth.

See, I've been rewriting a report that someone else did. The report she produced has good content, but the structure was poor and she has a rather... formal approach to language. In other words, she tends to write these enormous, run on sentences full of overly-syllabic words.

So I'd started rewriting it on Friday, which, by the way, we can't really afford to do as she's blown loads of time already (annoying, much of it on format and format is the thing we need to worry about least at this stage) and got in on Monday to find she's basically read the being-edited version and has sent a whiny, overly-anal e-mail about how we've messed it all up.

This is highly unprofessional behaviour to say the least and also meant the whole process took ages longer than it should, and as noted, we didn't have the time. Plus it put a cloud over the whole thing as it's not nice when you're halfway through a job like that to have the person look over your shoulder and tell you you've made a complete arse of it.

Not least of all when that person has, to be frank, done a piss-poor job in the first place.

So yeah, wasn't really feeling jolly and happy yesterday.

If the person hadn't been working remotely, cross words might have been exchanged.

unf

Not really feeling in the mood today.

Bit of a shit weekend and work is being a bit shit.

Plus (or perhaps, explaining the above a bit) I'm feeling tired and I've got a couple of blisters on my foot.

miserable

I'm feeling really miserable today.

I don't mean I'm ill, and I'm not particularly tired or sleep-deprived.

Plus the weekend didn't go badly or anything like that - indeed, if you set aside my utter failure to do any scanning, the weekend went positively well.

I'm just not in the mood for anything to day.

It's like a general feeling of... I dunno, dislike.

It feels as if at any moment I could snap. Like there's a tension; an fierce anger bubbling away below the surface. Like one small thing will just puncture the taut, balloon surface of my ego and BANG I'll go snap and shout at someone.

I feel like the whole world is against me; that no matter what I do I'll never win.

It's like I want to stick my middle finger up to the world and tell it to just go and fuck itself. Me, I'm going back to bed and tomorrow it better have sorted out its problems, or there'll be hell to pay.

So yeah, I'm not feeling my bright and chipper normal self today.

Not that my normal self is ever bright and chipper, or course, but you get the point.

mehness

I'm a bit meh today - I kinda can't really get going on anything. I even kept coming here, starting a new entry and then quitting out :/.

I think this is because I pushed myself a bit hard to get a report done and I've sort of burnt my brain out a bit.

The reason I wanted to get it done is there's the potential I may be working on a contract over the next month or so up in London. Problem is it's all a bit p in the air. I've never seen such twoddling about in all my life :/.

Not much else to say, really. Well, there is, but I can't be arsed to type any of it out - that's kinda my point.

Doldrums

I've been in a bit of a funk lately.

It's not particularly good timing - as previous posts have indicated I've already got lots on my 'to do' list, but I've been struggling a bit with getting on with stuff.

My dad suffers with depression and he's explained what that's like and it's not that bad, but it's a bit like a mild depression. It's like it's difficult to get started with things, like there doesn't seem to be any real point.

I mean, I do stuff like my hobbies because I enjoy it, right? And I know that, but it's just getting started on them becomes like a chore. It's like instead, sitting down and just staring at the walls is far more appealing than having to do anything.

I dunno - it's a bit difficult to explain, tbh.

The risky side of it is that I can go on binges. Now that isn't the normal booze binge or something you might think, for me it would be an over-eating binge, which I need like a hole in the head, or maybe a spending binge, which would just be a disaster.

So I'm trying desperately to push myself over the hump. I'll come out of it eventually anyway of course, but maybe I can distract myself until then or something.

Lost Season 4 turned up the other day, so maybe I should focus on actively watching that and see if accomplishing watching that (eh?) will give me kick up the backside.