In the last month, I’ve somehow managed to lose all four hubcaps from my car. I know one went when I had the blowout, and another one disappeared soon after.

But I’ve lost the other two in the last three days. I haven’t hit anything, gone into any significant pot-holes, haven’t heard or noticed anything of them coming off. There’s no sign of them along my route to work. They’ve just disappeared.

Fortunately, when I had the blowout I’d ordered a couple of replacements from QuickHubs, and ended up getting a set of four as that cost me the same as two individual hubcaps. So in this case it’s fortuitous, as I now need all four – I’d have been mightily narked if I’d paid for two, and now needed two more, as that would have doubled what I’d paid.

At least now all four will match.

And I’ll be attaching them with plastic cable-ties as well, so they should stay put this time round…

Over the last two (nearly 2½) years, I’ve been banging on about my five-year plan, and the work that’s been going into it. The project is still going on, but I think I may need to add a year to it.  That’s annoying to me – it means that I get it done by the time I turn 41 instead of 40 (and fuck me, does that really mean I’m going to be 40 in 2½ years? Shit) and thus lose some of the nice roundedness of the idea. It also means that I don’t live up to the ‘five-year’ part of the title.

The thing is, since the inception of the plan, there’ve been things going on that have delayed some of the work I planned on doing.  The house purchase – and the ongoing work on the house – has had a significant effect on some of the plans, as we’ve been doing one hell of a lot that wasn’t really in the initial plan as such.  Yes, they’re in the original set of planned tasks – but I wasn’t realistic about how long they’d take, or how much work would be involved.

So that’s one thing that’s kind of superceded other plans.

But the other one has been far sneakier, and far harder to get to grips with. It’s one I’m familiar with (and it’s mentioned in the categories up there) but that I don’t always see without some hindsight. Yes, I’m referring (of course) to Ye Olde Depression. Again.

I still don’t know if I’ve actually been fully depressed – but I do know that for the last eighteen months or so my motivation has been pretty much non-existent. The ideas have still been there, and some things have sparked some desire to work on them, but the real motivation to work just hasn’t. I’ve let things drift, or not started them at all. OK, the bits for this year are coming on, and there’s a couple that can be checked off, I still feel like I’m lagging behind.

I’m working on it – things this year have started off OK, and the motivation appears to be on its way back – but right now I’m not sure whether to add a year to the target, or leave it as it stands for now, and just see how I do.

I suspect that for now it might be the latter plan – I’d rather do the five years and see where I am at that point, to be honest – but it’s something that’s worth thinking about as time goes on.  I’ll most likely review it come November, when there’s only two years left on the list.

But of course any ideas or suggestions are welcome in the meantime…

One of my own favourite authors, Charles Stross has a piece today about the convoluted mechanics behind writing sets of novels – talking about his own experiences and those of George R R Martin (whose book I freely admit I just can’t get into at all) who is apparently very late on the next installment of his epic work, and has written a blog post about it, and (as Stross says) “issued a comprehensive response to the vocal and annoying fans who think he can pull a quarter of a million words out of his ass on demand”

It all makes for interesting reading – I must admit, I’d never really thought about the intricacies of writing these epic novels – most likely because it’s never been likely to be the sort of thing I ever wrote – but the insight Stross gives makes it worth the effort.

Reactions to the newly installed cat flap have been varied – and in some ways, quite funny.

Psycho Cat still has significant issues with it, for reasons known only to himself – he doesn’t like going out through it, but is fine with coming back in through it. Go figure.

Personally, I suspect that he just likes it now that he has people who’ll let the little git out, and he doesn’t want to let go of that.

At the same time, Hound thinks the cat flap is great. It’s magic (in her opinion) when the cat walks through the door – but because it’s also a transparent flap we’ve found that she will sit outside and look through it so she knows what’s going on inside at the same time.

Finally, the neighbourhood cats think it’s great – they’ve got a new place to visit, and they do so. Yesterday we had a visitation from one of them (who we call Bill – there’s two cats, Bob and Bill – no good reason, just seems to work) and he slept the entire day on our bed. Psycho Cat wasn’t amused by this, and Hound did absolutely sod all – she’s a shit guard dog.

With luck, Psycho Cat will soon decide to go out the bloody flap as well as come in through it – and then we’ll be happy.

Today we’re getting the new cooker installed, and finally getting rid of the old shitty electric one.

We’ve opted for a gas cooker, as it’s infinitely preferable to electric. But because there’s no gas supply to the village at all, it means it’ll be fired using LPG bottles outside the house. We’ll see about the efficiency of it, but by all accounts it should work out pretty well.

It’s going to be interesting though – normally Hound would go in the car while this kind of work’s going on, but today my car’s in the garage, getting the brakes checked. At the last service I was told they’d need doing before the MOT comes up – and that’s due in the next couple of weeks as well, so it’s best to get it all out the way before the MOT.

So I’m not quite sure yet what I’ll do with Hound, but I’m sure we’ll work something out.

Today, there’s supposed to be two places that I’m at. Only I’m not actually at either of them.

First of all, there’s the usual – I’m supposed to be at work.

Secondly, I’m supposed to be on a course in London betwen now and Wednesday. A course that’s utterly irrelevant to what I do, and that I don’t even understand (and no-one at work has been able to explain) why it’s deemed necessary to be on it.

The other part of it for the course is that, due to it being in London, I’m supposed to be staying in a hotel – I don’t fancy leaving home at 5.30am in order to get the train down there to be at the course for 9am, nor leaving at 6ish and not getting home ’til 8.30 or 9pm. Only work hasn’t been able to confirm that I’d be paid back for my expenses on staying in a hotel. Nothing from HR, from my department, or the manager. “Probably” was about the closest they’d come to an answer.

So in short, fuck that. I’ve got better things to do with my life that screwing about with possibly getting paid back for staying in a hotel in order to take part in a useless course with no relevance whatsoever to my work.

As for normal work – for once I got up and simply couldn’t be chuffed to go in. It’s not often I have days like that – but today is definitely one of them.