Moving Around
Posted: Sun 11 November, 2007 Filed under: Domestic, Introspective, Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »In one way (OK, at least one way) the last three years have been quite odd, in that I seem to have gone back down the ‘town-size’ ladder. I think some people (mainly estate agents and the like) call it downsizing, but that’s not true either – this is about the size of the place we live in, not the house we live in. Ah, I know what I mean, anyway.
The basic premise is this – I grew up in a small market town. Not a bad place to grow up, I admit, if boring as hell. But since then (and we’ll cut out some of the jogging about) in order I’ve lived in…
- Woburn : (Another) Small market town
- Rugby : Large Town
- Whitstable : Small Town
- Burnham Beeches : Village
- Worcester: Town
- Weymouth: Large Town
- Oxford : City
- Manchester : Large City
- Bracknell:
Utter fucking dumpLarge Town - Attleborough : Small town
- Current Location, just outside Attleborough: Village
So all told, I’ve lived in most types of city/town/village. Those are just the main places, I’ve done a lot of shorter terms in places as well, so they’re just the bullet points really. (Now there’s a phrase I never thought I’d see myself saying) But definitely the last four places have been a defined order towards living somewhere like where we are now – and it suits me just fine.
In a lot of ways, I feel I’ve kind of “done” my entire city-living thing, and now while I don’t have the things I used to love about city living in easy reach, instead I have other things that really work for me now – peace, no traffic noise, proper darkness, lots of cracking photo locations, and all that jazz. Oh, and also the gardenm and all the potential that holds.
Would I go back to living in a city? Probably not, unless I absolutely had to. Circumstances may change over the years, but I definitely far prefer being in a village for life things in general.
Book Intake
Posted: Thu 25 October, 2007 Filed under: Getting Organised, Introspective Leave a comment »As I’ve observed before, I’m normally a pretty voracious reader – I get through (on average) two or three books a week, and normally have at least two on the go at once. Actually, that’s an improvement from (to some perceptions) on how I used to be, where I’d have four or five on the go – when I worked in Oldham it wasn’t unknown for me to have one book upstairs, one downstairs, one for the bus/train, and even (on occasion) one that got left in the office for me to read at lunchtime.
As it is, I now tend to “just” have one at home and one for work and travelling to work. (depending on my mood on the train, and how crammed it is – a laptop isn’t always the most convenient thing to use) I’ve also got a whole library of eBooks I could/should be reading, but just can’t be arsed to get round to ’til I actually need them.
This week, though, has been a bit odd. While I was away, I started on the new Peter Hamilton novel doorstop, and that’s something I just can’t be arsed with lugging about on a daily basis. I didn’t have anything else on Tuesday, and I forgot to put a new one in my bag for Wednesday.
And I’ve actually missed having something to read – particularly at lunch time, when I normally go out, grab a sandwich, then sit somewhere in the sun (or at least in fresh(ish) air) and read for half an hour before heading back to the fray. As it is, I need to go into the garage this weekend and open up one of the boxes of stored books – I want something “new” to read, and it’ll be fun to rediscover some of the bits that’ve been packed away for a while. In the meantime, I’ve got something from the current bookshelves so everything is back to normal, but it’s definitely been weird over the last couple of days, not having that reading matter available when I want to read it.
Get Up And Go
Posted: Wed 24 October, 2007 Filed under: Introspective, Thoughts, Travel 1 Comment »Or the last couple of days, I’ve been thinking (again) about the way my body and brain work in the mornings. It’s interesting to me because the way I work just doesn’t appear to be the way most other people do when it comes to this early morning guff.
First of all, I know that my body-clock is deeply screwed. ‘Twas always thus. The main part of it seems to be that I actualy get proper sleep between the hours of 7am and 9am – which is obviously fairly unfeasible with regard to work, for obvious reasons. If I get to sleep between 7 and 9, I’m pretty good for the rest of the day. On the other hand, if I’m woken up in that time, I’m like a bear with a sore head for the rest of the day.
As a result, I tend to get up earlier than 7am. About 5.30, for the most part. In many ways it actually suits me – I get the 7am train to work, I’m in just after 8am, I leave at about 3.45pm, get home for about six, and all’s good. In some ways I would say I’m on autopilot for the first few hours, but that’s not really true. Admittedly when I’m getting up I do use/need some form of routine, so I can do stuff while gradually waking up.
But the thing is, the alarm goes off, and bang, I’m awake and moving. I don’t do this thing of lying in bed, I just get moving. I’ve always been like that to some degree – even at school age I would get up ad go, rather than trying t stay in bed. It’s just the way I’m wired. It shifted up a gear when I was running shops, pubs and hotels, because of having to be able to deal with alarms in the middle of the night, and all that joy.
I’ve never really lost that ability. I’m sat on the train while writing this, going to work. It’s 7am, and a good 80-85% of the other passengers are asleep while I’m writing stuff for D4D™, and also doing other stuff for clients, writing web pages, database migration bits and the like.
I was thinking about this yesterday morning too, while driving to work. I’d woken up at half five, and was on the road by six. Not tired at all – although God knows, I should’ve been- and absolutely fine to drive. Admittedly, I stopped off for a quick break at about eight, just for breakfast, but that was it – no tiredness and no hassle.
I don’t know why I’m wired this way, but given the choice of sleeping an extra hour on the train, or getting work and writing done, I know which I prefer.
Weight Loss- Motivators and Demotivators
Posted: Fri 14 September, 2007 Filed under: Cynicism, Domestic, Health, Introspective 3 Comments »After the general success of my weight loss over the last two years, I’ve kind of slacked off so far this year, and I’ve seen the effects of it. Of course, I can chuck up a number of excuses, all of which are at least fairly valid – we’ve been busy with the entire moving (twice), total relocation from Berkshire to Norwich, buying the house, working on the house and garden, blah blah blah. All true, all valid.
But at the same time, well, I just couldn’t be chuffed with going to a gym, or whatever. We’ve still been eating sensibly in general, and all the usual dog-walking stuff and the like, but I still just can’t be chuffed with exercising. The other part was that I was leery of joining another gym after the Holmes Place farago at the end of last year. (And even though they’re now owned by Virgin Active, they’re still a bunch of useless shitbags who keep on calling me to go in and try out the place again now it’s been taken over)
I’m working on it again now, mind you – we’ve just joined up with a new local(ish) leisure centre that’s got the gym, the pool, so on and so forth. As yet we’re just trying it out, and bought what they call a “Leisure Card” which’ll give us about a 20-25% discount each time we go, rather than signing up for a year’s contract again. We’ll see how it goes.
I’m also getting the bike repaired and serviced – as I posted over the weekend, I finally got it in to the local cycle shop, so we’ll see how that does while it’s there.
Working on my motivation is something else entirely. I know I need to lose some weight again, but I can’t deny, I find it far too easy to lose motivation on that score – and the main reason for it is something to do with vanity.
You see, in my head, weight loss should equate with changing the size of one’s clothes. I should be able to go from (for example) a 50″ chest to a 40″ – over time, of course, we’re not talking ‘in four weeks’, or from an XL shirt to an L . That’s what weight loss should do – according to my brain, anyway.
But with me, regardless of whether I lose weight or not, I’ll be in the same size clothes. My build is large anyway – my shoulders can’t change or lose weight, neither can my basic chest-size. The majority of my fat is on my stomach, so even trouser sizes won’t drop – the lower half of my body is actually pretty fit, due to lots of walking, so there’s not a lot to lose there either. Yes, I know I’m shallow and all that, but that simple fact of not changing clothing sizes is enough to demotivate me on the entire thing. Pathetic, isn’t it?
Intellectually, I know I need to lose weight again – my stomach region has grown, and I do want to lose that or at least reduce it significantly again. I know I need to do it, and to increase my fitness at the same time. But I also need to change my perceptions or motivators – I need to find something that makes me want to lose weight, because when all’s said and done, my clothing size isn’t going to change for the better, regardless of how much work I do.
Writing Ambition
Posted: Sat 18 August, 2007 Filed under: D4D™, Introspective, Thoughts, Writing 1 Comment »Having seen D4D™ hit its fifth birthday recently has made me start doing a fair amount of thinking. Well, it’s more the combination of D4D™ being five, and watching “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip“. Which just makes things even weirder.
One of the things that I wanted to do with D4D™ when I started it was to build up my writing. I used to do a lot of writing of other stuff, and along the way I churned out two novel-length (OK, if I’m honest, one novel-length, one novella-length) pieces of work. At the time they were more about therapy than anything else, but they were OK – and Herself had copies of both of them from when I initially did them. I re-read them recently and while they’re not good exactly – there’s stuff that’s too self-referential and/or indulgent, and a lot of it is “of it’s time”, shall we say – nor are they bad, either.
Anyway, along the way, D4D™ has become a bit of an entity of its own. I’ve written (at the time of doing this piece) some 4,500 posts over five years, amounting to just under 630,000 words- not including the rants and thoughts. A fair amount of it is crap, obviously – but with a fair amount of OK and good stuff thrown into the mix too. (He said, modestly) But at the same time, D4D™ is a greedy beast, and I spend more time writing odds and sods for here , which means that rather than fuelling the drive, impetus and maybe even need to write, instead it’s become the outlet, and that requirement to write is the fuel for D4D™ instead.
And where does Studio 60 come into it? Simple, really. Aaron Sorkin is one of my writing gods – I absolutely adore West Wing, and I think Studio 60 is another part of that pantheon, although I can also understand why it got canned after one season.
Over the weekend, Gordon pondered what would we do if we won the lottery. The thing I would do in that circumstance would be to take a year completely out of work (well, out of paid work, anyway) and instead use that time to put fingers to keyboard, and work to bring about some of the writing ideas that’ve taken up residence in my head over the years.
And that’s the dream, really. A life/job where the creative side takes precedence, so that I can both write and take photos for a living. The odds are fairly long that I’ll ever get there, although I still want to try.
But if I’m going to do that, perhaps D4D™ needs to go on pause, so that I have to find another outlet for the writing. It’s not going to happen just yet, but it’s something to think about. And it’s something I am thinking about. I don’t know whether it would work, but it’s something that I might just have to try…
Seasonal?
Posted: Sat 14 July, 2007 Filed under: Depression, Introspective Leave a comment »From the perspective of seasonal depression, this year has been decidedly odd. I know I’m badly affected in winter, when I don’t get enough sunlight, and I work fairly hard to make sure that I get out as much as possible during the (very few) daylight hours in order to alleviate the depression symptoms as much as possible.
However, I’ve also noticed this year that I’ve been affected quite a lot by the constant grey overcast skies. It’s not rocket science – hell, in hindsight it’s pretty fucking obvious why I was affected this way – but all the same I hadn’t figured it out ’til recently. Sure, I’ve known I’ve been fairly depressed, that my motivation and inspiration levels were well down on usual, but I couldn’t figure out why.
Of course, now that we’re back into some weather that actually bears a resemblance to summer (in that at least it’s not grey and overcast all day) I’m beginning to feel better again. So I’ve definitely been affected by the last six weeks or so of consistent grey skies and rainfall.
Hardly a surprise, I suppose. Well, with hindsight, anyway. At the time it was strange, and I just couldn’t figure it out. Still, I’ll know for the future…
Taking Photography Forward
Posted: Thu 12 July, 2007 Filed under: Introspective, Photography, Thoughts Leave a comment »Yesterday I was writing a bit about the portfolio site, and what to do with it. At the same time, I’ve also been looking at what I need to do as the next ‘phase’ of the photography that I do. And when all’s said and done, the simple answer to that one is ‘take more photos’. It’s when you get to the question of ‘What of?’ that my brain currently stumbles a bit.
As it is, I’ve got several projects in mind, and once I’ve started them off, I’ll be fine – it’s just those initial stages where getting started requires some energy, inspiration, and motivation. Not necessarily in that order. But they’re the bits in which I’m currently lacking quite significantly.
In the mean time, I’ve also gone back to some earlier ideas, and been thinking about the best ways to get certain photos I want to try. Currently my big weakness is that I’m really bad at just asking people if I can take photos of them, even when they’re in a public place, and in theory I don’t even need to ask permission at that point. As it is though, well, I feel uncomfortable doing that – although I feel even more uncomfortable asking people. I’ve ordered some business cards, though, which will hopefully come in handy. To my mind, it’s all too easy to just say “I’d like to take your photo – I’m legit, honest!” without any corroboration, and I figure that the cards might help a bit on that score, and at least lend the semblance of being somewhat competent. We’ll see.
At the same time, I’m considering getting some decent(ish) notepaper done up – it won’t be too expensive, and again it’s probably going to come in useful. I know I need (or, more accurately, feel the need) to gain permission from certain places before going off to photograph them, so again it strikes me that having a request come through on ‘proper’ paper, rather than just any old printer paper might be a bit of a bonus.
As with many things this year, I suspect that a lot of this is all about initally “laying out the groundwork”, getting everything in place so that when I do have the inclination/motivation/energy, I don’t have to hang around doing the organisational scutwork – by that time, everything will be as in place as I can make it.