Friday, 2 September 2011

another day missed

So obviously there was no bloggage post yesterday.

Hopefully the reasons are pretty obvious.  Having had very little sleep on the Tuesday night, Wednesday was a bit of a right off, so stuff got pushed forward to Thursday.  I also had two meetings on Thursday, so they sucked up loads of time too.

And of course I was still pretty tired on Thursday, so I pretty much went straight to bed when I got home.  I certainly wasn't up for writing my blog post in the evening.

So work has been horrible just recently.  It feels a lot like I'm just managing to keep my nose bobbing above the water as the flood comes pouring in.  Luckily I've not had to sacrifice any other weekends, but if any more stuff comes in for me to do I'm really going to struggle.  And it's pretty fortunate that one of my colleagues is now back in the office and she's super competent and has helped by picking a load of stuff up that I might have had to be more involved in.

But what else has happened?

Well, I lost another pound at the last weekend, which was a very nice surprise.  However, my guess is I'll have put it back on, as I've really been eating badly this week.  I'm not beating myself up too much, though, because with work being really heavy and the whole lack of sleep it's probably a natural (but obviously not desirable) knock-on effect.

Also there was the Spa Grand Prix last weekend, which I've not really talked about.

It was okay.  I have to confess I was a bit disappointed with the outcome, and for some reason the latter half of the race was a bit dull.  If I'm honest, though, I was a bit distracted when I watched it.  As I mentioned before I'd watched loads of telly and I think I was reaching overload by the time I sat down to watch the race itself.

The biggest disappointment, though, was Lewis, who managed to crash into Kamui Kobayashi.  IT looked like he basically wasn't paying enough attention and thought he was fully past Kobayashi.  However, he wasn't so he essentially drove into him.  It happened right at the end of one of the fastest straights, so was a big accident and took him out of the race.

It's a cleaning weekend coming up.  I'm not entirely sure if do the cleaning myself is really saving me money.  The problem is that I'm pretty sure the machines in the local laundrette are more expensive than those where I used to go, so where I save in some ways, I loose out in others.

I think long term there'll be a saving, but it's not going to represent a massive windfall of cash.

And I could do with one of those - I got a letter the other day that my electricity is going up by 11%, which is an enormous price hike.  Yay for capitalism, right?

Wednesday, 31 August 2011

insomnomnia

Horrible night last night, as I think I got about an hour's sleep.

The worst aspect of it was that I don't really know why. My best guess is that it was a combination of factors; these being eating too much, not doing any exercise, spending all day driving and a meeting.

Basically, I had a meeting all the way down in Dorchester, which meant I spent around 5 hours on the road yesterday. It was a useful meeting, but it did mean all my usual routines were blown apart.

Also, by the time I got back it was so late I did the classic of going to the supermarket to get something to eat and, being starving by that time, bought a load of crap. A load of high calorie crap. High calorie crap I then ate a loads of. And of course, having been sat down driving all day I didn't do any walking.

So I think the insomnia was brought on by a load of energy (both nervous as a result of the meeting, and physical as a result of high calorie food late at night and nothing to burn it off.

It's a pretty flimsy bit of reasoning, but certainly the more traditional causes of my insomnia (nervousness, excitement and late night caffeine consumption) weren't present at all, so I don't have any better reasons.

Anyway, upshot is I'm shattered today and am barely able to concentrate on my work, let alone proper blog posts.

Tuesday, 30 August 2011

three double u's

Does that make six u's or three w's?

Anyway, my entire bank holiday weekend can be summed up as Watching, Walking and... er... Scanning... Widiculous amounts of scanning?

Er, yeah, no, it doesn't really work. But it's still true.

On Saturday and Sunday I essentially spent all my time watching stuff. It was the Belgium Grand Prix, so that involved loads of hours of watching practice, qualifying and the race (I'm going to miss this depth of coverage when it's gone).

But I also had loads of stuff recorded from the past week that I watched. If I'm totally honest I'm not entirely sure how I managed to stack up quite so much unwatched stuff last week. I mean, it's not like I watched loads of anime DVDs and I didn't do any scanning during the week.

I think the honest truth is a high degree of fatigue brought on by work. It's been so manic these last few weeks I think basically I was getting home quite late, having something to eat, doing only a little bit of stuff and then going to bed. Either that or somebody shaved a few hours off each day.

Going for more extended walks is something I like to do at weekends, but I figured this weekend would be a good chance to really pump in the steps. As I've discussed before I use a pedometer to try to keep an eye on the number of steps I do.

This weekend I went for three long walks - one each on Saturday, Sunday and Monday. The Saturday and Sunday walks were two of my normal walks, but on Monday I did one of the super long/hard ones that I'd been doing before I went to the British Grand Prix.

It was quite knackering, I have to say. The Monday walk on its own was about 8,500 steps, which is quite a way. When you add in the steps I do as part of normal weekend stuff, I was a good way above 10,000 steps each day.

I think most people have heard of the 10,000 steps thing before. To be frank, it's actually a huge distance - if each step is just 50cm, it's around 5km, which is a big way. My steps are about 60cm, so that's more like 6km, which is a long way. Also, I walk at about 100 steps a minute, so it's about 100 minutes or 1h40mins of walking.

I think you can pick up from the above that the suggestions of doing 10,000 every day are a little unrealistic in the modern world. Spending more than an hour and a half every day walking is quite unlikely for anyone who works in an office and has to commute to work. I therefore use 10,000 as my guide for the weekends/days off and 5,000 for normal days, which I (roughly) manage to achieve.

I hadn't actually thought I'd get round to scanning at all this weekend. And if it had been a normal weekend I wouldn't. Basically, I spent a good number of hours at it on Monday, having managed to watch most of what I needed to across the weekend. I could have watched torchwood, which I've been recording but not got the chance to start yet, but I was a bit sick of watching telly so scanned, instead (where I obviously watched anime while I scanned... is that ironic or just me being daft?).