So, first week of the year is over.
It's really been a week of "plus sa change?", which is to say, I went back to exactly the same shitty issues that have been getting me down over the past couple of years.
It's weird - staying was clearly a mistake, but then going to the company who made me the job offer I had would have been a mistake (I can't really say in the blog, but take my word for it). The real answer would have been to take the pay rise and just keep looking, but instead I thought stuff would change.
I was wrong, and, indeed, stuff got worse. It felt quite a lot like getting shat upon, so not I just want to go. Problem is I'm a bit trapped.
Anyway, weekend ahoy and next week I will definitely explain all about the big event next year and how it's left me not sure what to do about stuff like moving and finding a new job.
Friday, 10 January 2014
Thursday, 9 January 2014
rest of christmas
So what did I do over the rest of christmas, then?
Not much.
I had quite a short to do list:
I saw most of the friends, but unfortunately the weather poxed up some of my plans, with cancelled trains and blocked roads. The weather also poxed up the walking plans, obviously. I've put on 4 pounds across Christmas - obviously this was mainly due to the over-eating, rather than not being able to walk, but this won't have helped things.
I did an "update" file back-up, rather than a full one. this was mainly because I decided that the gaming machine problem was software based and the cleanest solution was to wipe and re-install. This was fine and appears to have worked perfectly, but of course it took well over a day with all the updates and putting the games back.
I did make a significant dent in the PVR, though it still groaning with stuff. I now have about 35% of the drive clear, with about 65 programmes to watch. I know this is a lot still on there, but you have to remember that over Christmas there was a lot of stuff to watch and none of this was left. Also, I focused on things that didn't have ad breaks, so although the programmes are mostly 1 hour, there are a lot of adverts that will reduce the actual watching time.
I also watched a chunk of anime fansubs. If I'm honest this was one of the least successful areas, though, as it wasn't a big proportion of all that I've got. However, I also had a sort out and there's stuff I could take off for other reasons (OAVs of series I didn't like, have been licensed so I only need a 2 episode sample, rather than the full series, sequels so might as well burn them to disk for later, etc, etc). I still need to attack them, but I've certainly created a bit of breathing space.
I also did the full clean, though this seemed more hard work than I remember from last year. It took me 2 full days (one for the Kitchen & Bathroom and one for the living room / bedroom) to do the actual cleaning, but the impact was more extensive - they weren't consecutive days, as I was shattered after doing the kitchen. After the bedroom I was basically crippled - I'd put my hamstrings through so much that I could hardly walk the next day. This was due to the hoovering, mainly - I go at it with a special attachment and it's really effective, but also inconvenient to use and so I end up bent over in a bad way.
The "plans for next year" was the really big failure. I've not really got a plan, and will have to give it some thought - there's a big event that I'm not really sure how I'm going to work around.
So the holiday was pretty mundane - nice to not be at work for an extended period, but not exactly exciting, and mostly poxed up by the awful weather where it might have been.
There was also some unpleasant stuff. My landlord has decided to put up my rent by 5%. This is particularly annoying as it now means the bedsit is uneconomical, but I'm left in a quandary as to moving, owing to the aforementioned unclear plans for the year. I also scratched one of my alloy wheels on my car - some penis pulled up in the station in front of me at the petrol station rather than wait the 10 seconds it took for me to pull away and in going around him I caught the curb. There was also a break-in where I live: they only got into the garden, rather than the house or shed and didn't take anything, but another reason for me not to stay.
Not much.
I had quite a short to do list:
- Couple of friends to see.
- Do my file back-ups.
- Sort my gaming machine - it had developed some problem where it crashed constantly.
- Try to make a dent in all the recorded stuff on my PVR.
- Watch some anime - preferably downloaded fansubs in order to clear the hard-drive I use, which is full.
- My traditional New Year's "full clean" of the bedsit.
- Do plenty of walking.
- Work out plans for next year.
I saw most of the friends, but unfortunately the weather poxed up some of my plans, with cancelled trains and blocked roads. The weather also poxed up the walking plans, obviously. I've put on 4 pounds across Christmas - obviously this was mainly due to the over-eating, rather than not being able to walk, but this won't have helped things.
I did an "update" file back-up, rather than a full one. this was mainly because I decided that the gaming machine problem was software based and the cleanest solution was to wipe and re-install. This was fine and appears to have worked perfectly, but of course it took well over a day with all the updates and putting the games back.
I did make a significant dent in the PVR, though it still groaning with stuff. I now have about 35% of the drive clear, with about 65 programmes to watch. I know this is a lot still on there, but you have to remember that over Christmas there was a lot of stuff to watch and none of this was left. Also, I focused on things that didn't have ad breaks, so although the programmes are mostly 1 hour, there are a lot of adverts that will reduce the actual watching time.
I also watched a chunk of anime fansubs. If I'm honest this was one of the least successful areas, though, as it wasn't a big proportion of all that I've got. However, I also had a sort out and there's stuff I could take off for other reasons (OAVs of series I didn't like, have been licensed so I only need a 2 episode sample, rather than the full series, sequels so might as well burn them to disk for later, etc, etc). I still need to attack them, but I've certainly created a bit of breathing space.
I also did the full clean, though this seemed more hard work than I remember from last year. It took me 2 full days (one for the Kitchen & Bathroom and one for the living room / bedroom) to do the actual cleaning, but the impact was more extensive - they weren't consecutive days, as I was shattered after doing the kitchen. After the bedroom I was basically crippled - I'd put my hamstrings through so much that I could hardly walk the next day. This was due to the hoovering, mainly - I go at it with a special attachment and it's really effective, but also inconvenient to use and so I end up bent over in a bad way.
The "plans for next year" was the really big failure. I've not really got a plan, and will have to give it some thought - there's a big event that I'm not really sure how I'm going to work around.
So the holiday was pretty mundane - nice to not be at work for an extended period, but not exactly exciting, and mostly poxed up by the awful weather where it might have been.
There was also some unpleasant stuff. My landlord has decided to put up my rent by 5%. This is particularly annoying as it now means the bedsit is uneconomical, but I'm left in a quandary as to moving, owing to the aforementioned unclear plans for the year. I also scratched one of my alloy wheels on my car - some penis pulled up in the station in front of me at the petrol station rather than wait the 10 seconds it took for me to pull away and in going around him I caught the curb. There was also a break-in where I live: they only got into the garden, rather than the house or shed and didn't take anything, but another reason for me not to stay.
Wednesday, 8 January 2014
christmas
I thought I'd give a bit of a wrap-up of the Christmas holiday.
We had the company christmas lunch quite late this year, but then the positioning of Christmas Day is a little unusual, so it wasn't as late as it seemed in terms fo the acual date. If I hadn't had quite so much leave left over I'd have had to work some odd random days or bring them forward from next year. I guess the flip-side was that I got over two weeks leave and have only used up 3 days of my 2014 leave.
I had so much leave left over for several reasons - one was that I carried a couple of days over from the previous year, but the other was that I kinda saved it up with the anticipation that I might be attending interviews, but in the end it was quite late before I properly went back on the job market and then had to effectively stop looking a long way before Christmas. Anyway, I'm goign to need that leave this year, but more on that another day.
We used to spend Christmas at my Dads, down in Deveon, but he seems to have decided that he doesn't like doing this anymore, and my sister hosts. I find this really quite unsatisfactory, particularly as she lives ina tiny flat, which she shares with her flatmate, so it also becomes a double-Christmas thing with the flat-mates family too.
I don't really like Christmas, and spending it with someone else's family makes it quite uninteresting. The biggest problem is that they all know each other - the flatmate is a long term friend fo my sister, and my dad knows her and her family quite well as well. This leads to long periods of them rabbitting on about people I don't know "Did you hear Fred has moved in with Brenda?" "I have no idea who Fred and Brenda are, and care even less."
It would be far easier if they just put the telly on and then I could watch that and they could natter.
It doesn't help - and I'll be upfront that this is not a nice thing - that they're not my sort of people. I mean, I'm a nerd. They're not. I wouldn't have anything to talk to them about, even if they weren't twittering on about people I've never even heard of.
My hope is that by next year my life will be sorted out and I'll have moved somewhere where I can play host to my family.
Having said that, there is another less-outspoken reason why my sister hosts, which is that she's tight. By hosting she doesn't have spend the petrol money to drive down. Instead my Dad pays for a hotel for me and him (her place is too small for us all to stay and he knows I would refuse to pay for a hotel) and we both drive to her. There's even a bizarre situation each year where he then takes her to one of her friends "on the way back" (it's nothign fo the sort as it's at least 100 miles out of his way).. and then a few days later drives her home again.
She kinda has him wrapped around her finger, as she's always been his favourite. Note that I don't care as such, but ti woudl be nice if he at least realised she was doing it because she's tight - Indeed, I think he'd be pleased, as he's of the "careful with money" persuassion himself.
Well this wasn't so much a round-up of Christmas as a moan about the day itself!
I'll try to cover the rest in another post (if I can be arsed), although one thing just to note - the joruney down to my sister has been horrendous both years. Last year it was because it was on Christmas morning and kinda poxed up the day, but this time it was because of the horrible weather.
The A31 was closed on one part as a river had burst its banks, so they sent us down a diversion to rejoin it about 2 miles further down. This distance took me 3 hours. The whole journey took me 5 and a half hours. Not fun.
We had the company christmas lunch quite late this year, but then the positioning of Christmas Day is a little unusual, so it wasn't as late as it seemed in terms fo the acual date. If I hadn't had quite so much leave left over I'd have had to work some odd random days or bring them forward from next year. I guess the flip-side was that I got over two weeks leave and have only used up 3 days of my 2014 leave.
I had so much leave left over for several reasons - one was that I carried a couple of days over from the previous year, but the other was that I kinda saved it up with the anticipation that I might be attending interviews, but in the end it was quite late before I properly went back on the job market and then had to effectively stop looking a long way before Christmas. Anyway, I'm goign to need that leave this year, but more on that another day.
We used to spend Christmas at my Dads, down in Deveon, but he seems to have decided that he doesn't like doing this anymore, and my sister hosts. I find this really quite unsatisfactory, particularly as she lives ina tiny flat, which she shares with her flatmate, so it also becomes a double-Christmas thing with the flat-mates family too.
I don't really like Christmas, and spending it with someone else's family makes it quite uninteresting. The biggest problem is that they all know each other - the flatmate is a long term friend fo my sister, and my dad knows her and her family quite well as well. This leads to long periods of them rabbitting on about people I don't know "Did you hear Fred has moved in with Brenda?" "I have no idea who Fred and Brenda are, and care even less."
It would be far easier if they just put the telly on and then I could watch that and they could natter.
It doesn't help - and I'll be upfront that this is not a nice thing - that they're not my sort of people. I mean, I'm a nerd. They're not. I wouldn't have anything to talk to them about, even if they weren't twittering on about people I've never even heard of.
My hope is that by next year my life will be sorted out and I'll have moved somewhere where I can play host to my family.
Having said that, there is another less-outspoken reason why my sister hosts, which is that she's tight. By hosting she doesn't have spend the petrol money to drive down. Instead my Dad pays for a hotel for me and him (her place is too small for us all to stay and he knows I would refuse to pay for a hotel) and we both drive to her. There's even a bizarre situation each year where he then takes her to one of her friends "on the way back" (it's nothign fo the sort as it's at least 100 miles out of his way).. and then a few days later drives her home again.
She kinda has him wrapped around her finger, as she's always been his favourite. Note that I don't care as such, but ti woudl be nice if he at least realised she was doing it because she's tight - Indeed, I think he'd be pleased, as he's of the "careful with money" persuassion himself.
Well this wasn't so much a round-up of Christmas as a moan about the day itself!
I'll try to cover the rest in another post (if I can be arsed), although one thing just to note - the joruney down to my sister has been horrendous both years. Last year it was because it was on Christmas morning and kinda poxed up the day, but this time it was because of the horrible weather.
The A31 was closed on one part as a river had burst its banks, so they sent us down a diversion to rejoin it about 2 miles further down. This distance took me 3 hours. The whole journey took me 5 and a half hours. Not fun.
Tuesday, 7 January 2014
happy new year... i guess
I'm finally back to work.
Big inhale... huge sigh.
I think I lulled myself into a bit of a false perception over the holiday period, which is to say the crappy bits seemed to dull and become less "urgent". Of course as soon as I got back it all swam back into focus, which is to say that there's basically nothing but crappy bits.
This is partly why I stopped blogging towards the end of last year - I'm a bit stuck for anything to really say apart from how I'm really not enjoying work, and that's such a big part of any given day/week/month, it doesn't leave me with a lot else to talk about. I was also getting a bit fatigued, so the idea of writing anything became a bit of a chore.
Actually, there was one specific thing with the work blog posts that gave me a bit of a scare (shock might be a better word) and was probably the main catalyst for stopping. I posted a blog entry that let a few of the "cat's" out of the "bags" - in other words I gave a few specific details about things that previously I had only really skirted around or touched on.
You could possibly have worked some stuff out and certainly got the general feel from what I said, but this post was quite specific. Now usually my posts get around 5-10 hits. I take this to be one or two people who read the odd post or click on it via a google search and the rest to be bots crawling the blog for indexing.
I've had a couple of posts that got significant numbers of hits (there's one I've actually blogged about to do with BMI that's obviously ranked highly in a particular search as it has hundreds of hits), but this one posts had well over 100 hits in the space of two days. This worried and puzzled me so much that I moved it into drafts - particularly as I can't see what about it might have caused it to get so many hits, but the content is a bit sensitive. If/when I move on from here I'll take it back into normal circulation, but it was also a big part of why I cooled off with blogging.
Note, I'm not sure I'm going to start properly again, but I figured I should at least post a "happy new year" type post.
Big inhale... huge sigh.
I think I lulled myself into a bit of a false perception over the holiday period, which is to say the crappy bits seemed to dull and become less "urgent". Of course as soon as I got back it all swam back into focus, which is to say that there's basically nothing but crappy bits.
This is partly why I stopped blogging towards the end of last year - I'm a bit stuck for anything to really say apart from how I'm really not enjoying work, and that's such a big part of any given day/week/month, it doesn't leave me with a lot else to talk about. I was also getting a bit fatigued, so the idea of writing anything became a bit of a chore.
Actually, there was one specific thing with the work blog posts that gave me a bit of a scare (shock might be a better word) and was probably the main catalyst for stopping. I posted a blog entry that let a few of the "cat's" out of the "bags" - in other words I gave a few specific details about things that previously I had only really skirted around or touched on.
You could possibly have worked some stuff out and certainly got the general feel from what I said, but this post was quite specific. Now usually my posts get around 5-10 hits. I take this to be one or two people who read the odd post or click on it via a google search and the rest to be bots crawling the blog for indexing.
I've had a couple of posts that got significant numbers of hits (there's one I've actually blogged about to do with BMI that's obviously ranked highly in a particular search as it has hundreds of hits), but this one posts had well over 100 hits in the space of two days. This worried and puzzled me so much that I moved it into drafts - particularly as I can't see what about it might have caused it to get so many hits, but the content is a bit sensitive. If/when I move on from here I'll take it back into normal circulation, but it was also a big part of why I cooled off with blogging.
Note, I'm not sure I'm going to start properly again, but I figured I should at least post a "happy new year" type post.
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