overlap

In the early hours of this morning I got back from the Big City, having seen the triumphant return of My Life Story to the stage, and enjoyed the experience of cycling and drving in the capital's traffic; it has been a very long time since I drove inside the North Circular, and I won't be upset if the next time is as long away again. I'm no stranger to riding in traffic, and it doesn't hugely bother me, but driver behaviour where the average motor speed is 6mph is unsurprisingly desperate - the chances taken, the driving through red lights at will, the forcing oneself out into static traffic with no regard to impeding all other traffic and bringing everything to a halt is staggeringly widespread. That gridlock is not a daily occurrence can only be down to the patient few. As a one-off it was an amusing and educational diversion, but I'm at a loss to understand how anyone can live with that on a daily basis. Especially when alternative options exist that make this sort of sight a regular alternative to the back end of the non-moving car in front.

Labels: gigs, music, My Life Story, pop

Just a bit tidier and neater. Seven months after my previous haircut, it's rare enough to be worth documenting, especially when someone working on it remarks on how good its condition is. If you've got a spare hour or two, trying to take a picture of the back of your own hair is a challenge I can commend to everyone.

One of the positive things about the couple of weeks where I wasn't at work was getting in the habit of having something to eat every morning. Now that I'm edging back into sleep deficit again, today is the first day where I didn't eat anything before getting on my bike. It's only twenty-odd minutes of riding, but I'm noticing it makes a bigger difference than I thought. Lesson learned!

The ongoing theme of the moment appears to be technological difficulties; from apparently becoming unable to operate a video recorder to leaving my mobile phone at home and feeling mildly disorientated without it even though I don't actually use it from one day to the next, to a succession of error messages as various parts of my home computer go into failure mode. At times like this I'm glad I don't work in air traffic control or anything else responsible.

I can't say just how great a joy it was to wake up to the window view above rather than one like this below, just for a change. Of course I knew it wasn't going to last!

Slipping back into the working routine was easily enough, but having got used to having that little bit more time in the morning I'm hoping to stick with having breakfast more often than I don't, instead of the other way around. We'll see. Meanwhile I know I'm back to normal living, having seen a great gig; Justin Sullivan has all the wild-eyed charisma required of some sort of cult leader, and the New Model Army catalogue is a mixture of defiance against authority wielded harshly, and individual and personal responsibility - for me that's nothing but the cult of humanity. And they did Stupid Questions, which is definitely my favourite NMA song, and one I don't believe I've seen done live before so it was with a very broad smile I was running in the rain back to my car.

Labels: gigs, New Model Army, rock

A leisurely hour long trip home half wheeling the bike and half riding on a flat tyre as the rain continued to lash down was a genuine joy. Tomorrow it's back to the grindstone, but for now there is still wine in the fridge. This post comes with a certain vineyard-sponsored delay!

Changes in routine seem to be beneficial - certainly having that little bit more time in the mornings has seen an improvement, and not ending up buying yet more cakes at lunchtimes due to not being quite so close to the temptations of the baker's is working for me. Today I even made my own sandwiches! This new routine is not going to be possible for much longer, so the question will be whether I can get up earlier and live a little wiser. The lack of late night driving exploits for a few weeks makes a difference as I'm not feeding off the passenger seat, and having this little bit more time to myself means I can try and concentrate on those positive changes. Sometimes it's hard to see things because other things get in the way, and the signal is lost in the background noise - that's my thought for today. And for tomorrow too.

I have had a very slow paced, idle, hanging about sort of weekend, that nevertheless leaves another obligation dealt with, and which won't need repeating for another year or three. It's funny how tiring sitting around in the fresh air, drinking tea and eating biscuits can be! The other benefit is that my idle hands are that little bit steadier, even if the close up photography doesn't quite show the slightly more even finish at its best. So at least until they get chipped, I'll be starting the week with pale pink shiny fingers.

My garden is now significantly less overgrown, or at least less dandelion, nettle and bramble-ridden than it was, though there's always plenty more to do. Whether I'll get round to doing anything constructive or decorative to it remains to be seen, but it was good to get back out in the fresh air for a bit, and to feel like I've done something productive with my time.

This evening I have for the first time scanned my own shopping in the supermarket - welcome to the technological age me! And while I've got the Pointer Sisters' Automatic in mind, I should also note the passing of June Pointer a few weeks back. Seems a fairly predictable sad story, but all the same the sisters' hit singles, and I'm So Excited in particular, resonate strongly for me of a certain place in time. I also wanted to comment on the specific vagueness of my last couple of posts - there is a very good reason why I can't go into detail here at the moment, even if I wanted to, but it's safe to say I'm doing something new to me and it's taken over a large amount of my life, as it rightly should. Frustrating as I find it that I can't really work things through except internally, it won't be forever and normal service will be resumed soon enough.

All this hanging about not doing very much obviously has its good points in terms of being able to concentrate for those times when there is stuff to do. So I'm stuck somewhere halfway between a physical holiday and a head workout. Based on what I know, that's not about to change just yet.

That was a fun day. No web access of course, and very little to do until the late point at which there finally was something to do. Observing new groups of people is always interesting, as is learning something else about how something new to me works. And it occurred to me just how much good the idling, braindump time of watching rubbish daytime telly and not drinking anything caffeinated was doing me. Maybe there's a lesson there for other times too.

In the space of a week I've gone from being able to see a good mile beyond the end of my garden to looking at a screen of greenery within yards of my windows, I've started wearing shorts again and my team's football season has drawn to a satisfactory and exciting close. This ought to be the start of an easy couple of months, once the next week or two are out of the way. That said, I've a bike to rebuild, a house to clear out and a fridge to defrost just as soon as I've emptied it. In the spirit of the season theme, I've gone for what I hope is a slightly less cluttered revamp here. But there's really no rush to get everything done, so in the meantime here's a couple of colourful seasonal scenes from my recent travels.

This post comes from the twilight zone somewhere between not enough sleep and the post-dentistry period where anaesthetic is wearing off and the facial nerves don't quite know where they are.

It's funny how very little things can have disproportional effects - on the back of one of my top front teeth there's a little spur of tooth that was used as the point of contact on my brace when I was thirteen, and of course nobody knows it's there but I've become very used to it.

And it's not just the sleep deficit and the anaesthetic injection that's making me feel a bit iffy about the fact that there's now filling material piled over it. Suddenly I'm realising how much I'm used to resting the tip of my tongue on it when I'm thinking, among other things.

It's hardly a problem, it's just change and the nature of life is change so there's really nothing too exciting about it. It's just that some changes come out of nowhere and momentarily loom into close focus.

At this time tomorrow I shall be getting into my car for the long drive home, with one more gig under my belt and I'll deal with that then and not before. But with the help of round numbers I've realised just how quickly things can move; I've just added my 150th picture to flickr, and now I'm just short of 1,500 pictures taken in the first month with my new digital camera. I'm finding there's a whole different way of taking pictures going on - where before I'd be looking for the picture and only using the film when I really thought I might have something, now it's more a question of looking for the potential picture and taking a dozen shots regardless. The results are more instant than waiting several days for a film to come back from the lab, and if it's not quite right it is easy to re-shoot from a different angle, and there's a lot to be said for that. And of course it comes with its own set of storage, cataloguing and organisation problems, and you can guess how readily my organisational side has taken to that!