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http://www.wordspy.com/

I particularly like the idea of VB6 (vegan before 6pm) - I may just try it.

Crane lady rant...

500-ish words, to go towards this week's 1000-word total.


We lost the gender war. Not you younger women who can now do any trade, any job (even the dirty ones), even if it still isn't for as much money as the blokes sitting beside them. We took the jibes, we marched in, heads high, pride swallowed as men called us slags, traitors, home-wreckers and insults too old-fashioned for you to even understand, like "unladylike". But we, the women who fought the war, we’ve lost. We took it all - the jokes, the side comments, the demands for coffee, the pats on the bum, worse, and we took it to give the next generation of women and the generation after that the chance to be who they wanted to be. Hell, we even campaigned for women to be seen as more than tarts, mothers or pin-ups. And what did you do with it? You learnt to compete, learnt to use everything as a weapon in your fight for the top. Including sex. You decided the playboy symbol was a neat logo for your pajamas. And we learnt that you don't have to pay £200 a night to be screwed by the next generation. It's not that we were expecting a thank-you. Why would you even think about it? The doors that we had to beat on to be let in were wide open by the time you got to them. But somehow in all this you've ended up acting like a bunch of ungracious teenagers. There, I can already hear you starting to grumble about it; "it's not our fault", "why do you expect us to be grateful". But look at it from our point of view for a minute.

There's sex everywhere. I went to the opticians today (we all get old, unfortunately), and there it was. Lady optician, nice lass, but an enormous uncovered bosom, floating just under the finger she was asking me to follow. I mean, I'm amazed I wasn't listed as the largest eyeballs on the planet. Just. Where. Are. You. Supposed. To. Look? And don't tell me it's your right - we campaigned for equality, for dignity, for equal treatment. Not the right to embarrass the hell out of men all the time. Or worse, to remind them about sex, the great discriminator. And then we’re screwed. Or rather, we’re not. Because faced with all that sex, all those visible nubile bodies, is it any surprise that men our age don’t find us attractive any more? So enjoy it while you can girls, because you’re pissing it all away. The pay gap is widening again, the doors are starting to close, and if that doesn’t get you, then get as much sex as you can before 40, because the next generation is waiting to take you on too.

1000 words about cranes

I don't write enough. And I'm spending the weekend trying not to do any work (more difficult than it sounds). So I've challenged myself to write 1000 words (just long enough to be called a short story). Here they are. Raw, but 1000 of them (yep, I've counted).

It’s not that old people aren’t sexual. It’s not that we don’t think about it, wouldn’t do it if we got the chance. It’s just that the chance doesn’t happen very often these days. I watch, envious, as two girls stride out, all black leggings and perfume and barely-contained want, giggling excitedly towards an evening with a hint of a promise of a romp. The romp passes me, grinning, glancing quickly at their bodies, certain in the knowledge that they’re not the first two blondes he could have if he wanted tonight. Pan. The original boy who never grew old, still lust and intoxicating fumes wrapped in tight leather trousers. Tonight he’s wearing a devil costume topped with silk-smooth skin and tight black curls (the horns, incidentally, aren’t fake). "Wotcha, Nerys", he grins impishly, "how’s tricks?" Bastard. He knows I’m off to work now, and whilst he’s shagging the nights away I’ll be working my threadbare arse off to make Sunday morning just right for his coffee and fucktoy before the next week begins. What? Didn’t you know that old people swear too? You have so much to learn young whippersnapper. Starting with…
Okay, so I’ve just let it out of the bag about the Arcadian gods. You might have guessed that they were still around (clue: convenient hurricanes, volcanoes and other "acts of nature" every time the humans start getting bored). But I bet you’ve never thought about the others. The wood-nymphs, the satyrs (not to be confused with satire. Not ever), the mythical bores. I’ll spare you the history lesson, the human geography, the demographics. Just answer me this: where do most people live, and what are the principal structures in those places?

The answer is cities. We’re still here, we still hang around making things work for the humans, but they’ve modernised. And so have we. Forget the wood and water nymphs flitting around the countryside waiting for unwary travellers to spot them frolicking in the nude. We’re older now. More crabby. Clothes-wearing. And invisible. Not invisible in the I can’t see you in mirrors, look there’s a person-shaped space on the dancefloor kind of way. Just invisible like older women, invisible because nobody notices us. But if you look, you can see us, you can see who we are. Example? crane nymphs like me. There aren’t many of us around, but we’re easy to spot: those old ladies whose souls haven’t left their bodies yet, the ones with bright blue eyes that pierce through yours to see you exactly as you are, with no cover, no artifice left within those withered old bones. Then there are towerblock nymphs – the original oak nymphs, still hanging on to the largest structures around. Tall, elegant, perfect grey hair, usually on the arm of some captain of industry who mysteriously hasn’t swapped them for a string of younger spouses. The road nymphs (ex rivers and streams), now responsible for trafficcones, gyratory systems and one-way streets. And so on. And we’ve all left Greece for the new empires, new temples, new capitals. The satyrs still drink lots and dance a bit, but they’re all disguised as city middle management now, and the nymph-chasing is a little more viagra-enhanced these days.

Ah yes, even amongst the gods there is sexism afoot. Although perhaps not sex. But back to myself. Have you ever wondered why there are always cranes above a city, even when they don’t seem to have a purpose in life. Well they do. Sure, they lift things and move stuff and make nice with the building trade, but that’s not why they’re really there. I have another question for you: have you noticed how time speeds up in cities? That 5 minutes waiting for an underground train can be forever, but 5 minutes waiting for a country bus is nothing? Or that weekends are somehow slower there. That the effect isn’t geographically uniform?

I cover Shoreditch West. I’m nearly there now. Shuffle awkwardly past the overflowing pubs – head up, chest up, look straight ahead. Sex. It was once all about sex. Breeding the elite - heroes and beauties - with gods, or sending mortals mad with our whims, our desires. But not now. We could, yes. Seduce, entice, make one of those pub-hounds believe we are beautiful, young, special enough to twist their minds with lust. But only for a short while. Unless. Off skywards to the office I go. To spend my once-lustful Saturday nights carefully adjusting and readjusting the tips of the cranes, to forge my last link between the old gods and men, to move time itself for the new god to flourish. Because there are new gods now. Money, influence, youth: all have their pulls and their terrors, just as Jove and Artemis once. And the cranes are the key, slowing and speeding time, matching its flux to the places it most pleases these gods. Stretching it weekdays in the city to let more money flood in by the hour; compressing it at weekends when there’s no-one around. Of course there are leakages – even the gods can’t be perfect now – but we cover those too, balancing the rapid ageing of bankers against extreme youth in the boroughs nearby. Like Shoreditch – the place where Pan will probably wake up; full of beautiful young things in fashionably-old clothes, partying all night and waking at noon. But he’s working too, keeping the artifice, hiding the line between fast and slow. Why else would the pubs be full and the cocaine lines flowing, but to keep everyone from noticing the change as the cranes stretch out time? I stop, partway up my skyward-pointing crane, and realise that at last I am bored. Tonight the time in Shoreditch will stretch out. The drunken lads will become bored too. And I will wake with one bedazzled, for one glorious Sunday morning nymph-struck and mine, just as we once were in the groves before the new gods came and changed out our ways.

Depth

I feel... fake. A pale facsimile of someone I once was, or worse, someone I had once hoped to be. Empty: a confusion of needs lost and places unfound. It will pass. It always does. But depths have interest too.

Pain Relief

The pain. Came up and out and through. And as I looked in the mirror, I saw myself and you - the real, whole, raw you - reflected. And I remembered why I love you.

Planning

I used to think sitting still was a waste of time... but yesterday I got in, sat down, and realised that if I spend the 5-10 minutes after I get through the door thinking about what I want to do that evening, I'll have a much more effective evening. Sitting still being useful - who'd have thought?

a little inclination

The table on my patio is on a sloping patio, so it slopes itself, and anything I put onto it seems to be about to slide all the time. It's enough to be noticable, and enough to be annoying. Dad and I have been laying a new patio (building some walls, turfing a new lawn - normal lightweight garden maintenance for someone in my family...), so today we were playing with a digital inclinometer. A patio should slope at roughly 3 degrees, and the table seemed so slanted that I estimated 15 degrees. The reading? 1.5 degrees; 2 degrees at the worst.

Now when you look at it on the scale of, say, 0 to 90 degrees, 1.5 degrees seems to be tiny. Piffling. Not even noticable. Lost in the noise. But in reality it's both very noticable and appears to make a difference (I can point to exactly the direction that each patio slab slopes in, and none of them are over 2 degrees sloped). So I had a look at my spirit level - something I'd never really thought to do before. It's marked at 0.5 degree per mm and there is 1mm from the bubble (if it's completely straight and still) to the marker lines on either side of it. Now I think I'm getting sloppy if the bubble is half that distance away from the line, i.e. if it's 0.5mm off true. Which means that theoretically (although not, on a too-hot day, in practice) my wall should be within 0.25 degrees off true in all directions. Now I personally think this is really quite an achievement - and not something that we ever really think about beyond "is the bubble inbetween the lines". We DIY types and shelf-putter-uppers really should congratulate ourselves for that...

...but there's an experiment here to be done. If I can spot a 2 degree slope on my table, I'm wondering just how small that slope has to be before we humans really can't tell which direction it's going in. I'm guessing somewhere around half a degree, but I think some more time with the patio and inclinometer (and possibly some friends and some beer to do some more advanced "what is the effect of alcohol on..." perception tests) is called for here.

Why don't I write?

I haven't written for a while. In truth, I've been running near empty for a while, but that hasn't meant I've been out of words. Far from it. But I haven't written because I fear - I fear hurting the people closest to me, the people who know me and have found this, my release valve.

I've been ill for a while. Depressed. It doesn't show, and it does. Mostly I look normal - I doubt most people would see anything. But since depression includes withdrawl, I haven't really given anyone a chance at a good enough look. But that loss of worth, that sense of disociation, that encompassing sense of loss, they've all been creeping up, to reach the point where nothing in the world makes sense anymore, including and especially my own place within it.

I should have fixed this a while ago. My health insurance covered treatment, and I started this, started to get some of myself back with careful counselling (I may have covered some of the horrors that happened at work last year, or I may not - suffice to say that 3 otherwise strong people have all come close to the edge from these and come back both weaker and stronger from it), but then it reached the point where the insurance stopped and the NHS began. Now I've had and seen some excellent NHS treatment in the past, but this is at least worrying and shading into deeply troubling... I was referred and then forgotten about. I called - they'd lost my records; I got an appointment but went into the wrong building (the signage wasn't clear) and was rather ungently told to go away (not the NHS's fault, but not something you'd want to do with a less pacific referral case); I got to the right place at the right time, made sure they had the right contact details, and was assured that it was an admin glitch and I'd have a decision within a week - on whether I'd be allowed into a group session rather than receive individual help. And then nothing. They forgot me again. I got on with my life. And all the earlier treatment slowly faded away.

I can think of several reasons for what happened. Maybe the unit was deeply disorganised - somewhat troubling in a measure-everything culture. Maybe it was overloaded - worrying, but not necessarily unsurprising. Or maybe, myself only being a danger to myself, I just wasn't an important enough case to be treated. And that just makes me plain angry. If I had a physical life-threatening condition (and I use the word 'physical' loosely because depression is also a physical response), I'd be seen. Maybe not immediately, but there would be outcry if the NHS chose to completely ignore a relatively cheap method of keeping someone alive longer. But because it's a mental condition, perhaps even because the link between life and death includes my own will rather than a god-like decision by a doctor, the treatment isn't there. And my company insurance is prepared to pay more money to an osteopath to fix my back when its muscles go out of line than it is prepared to pay to help give me the tools to handle a potentially fatal condition (my depression) forever. I am tired of this thing nearly killing me. And I am pissed off for all the other people who are in the same place, for all those people who do not have the voice to rage at this institutional insanity, who do not have the energy to keep on asking for help, or for whom any help would now be too late.

I feel a bit better for a small rant. Tomorrow I may try again to get treatment. But it really shouldn't have to be this difficult to obtain.

Writing, and a new Horatio

I'm in a writing mood. There's a science fiction short in the pipeline (more, er, shortly), and I'm long overdue for a new Horatio. So here's a new Horatio. Unfinished. I'll be finishing and sending it sometime in the next few weeks.

Horatio goes on Holiday

Horatio knew about London: he'd read all about it in books, and loved to hear his Mum and Dad's stories about them living in London when they were younger (although as far as Horatio knew, they had always been old, and had always been just his Mum and Dad). And Horatio really really wanted to go to London, to see all the places that his Mum and Dad talked about, to listen to Big Ben strike twelve o'clock and to see Nelson and all his pigeons (which Mum told him were very much like seagulls really) in Trafalgar Square.
Horatio's family had been on holiday before: lots of holidays. They'd camped in Kingslime one Easter - it was very crowded and they were stuck in the harbour for quite a long time while they waited for the tide to come it. They'd stayed on a holiday berth in Starboard Harbour and marvelled at the huge crumbly cliffs then eaten ice-creams by the beach in Curdsmouth. And he'd even been on a school trip to Goodwater Bay. And all these holidays were really really nice. But Horatio wanted to go to London. He wasn't sure why, but it just sounded exciting. And he asked. And he asked. And he stopped asking. And then asked again. Until one sunny speckly day when the birds were singing happily, the waves had little bright diamonds in them and the breeze was just warm enough to be summer, his Dad grinned and said "pack your things Horatio, we're going to London".
Well the journey to London is another story in itself: sailing around the White Island, wriggling into the mud in Chichemeddle, playing with the pier at Sunnytown and steering around the big big ferries coming out of Guller. But that's a story for another day, so we'll start with the part where Horatio and his Mum and Dad, his little brother Hardy and Parsley the tender passed the grey navy pontoons (which hooted a low-voiced 'hello there' as they passed) in the middle of London and sailed into Katherine's Docks.
[Horatio is on an exchange visit with one of the tuktuks. He goes on trips up the river with his parents, sees Big Ben and Parliament and the naval colleges, goes to look up at the buildings in Canary Wharf and chats to the tin-voiced Navigator, but what's really really exciting is when he's loaded onto a trailer and goes slowly round London with his new friend Tuk and Tuk's parents the taxis (he goes really quite slowly because he gets a little queasy when he can't move naturally). He sails in the water in Trafalgar Square, upsetting the pigeons til they calm down and settle back on the top of Nelson's head. He goes to the park and plays with the pedaloes on the Serpentine, but is a bit sad that Tuk can't join him, then has an idea and races Tuk up and down the length of the lake until they're quite tired and the park-keeper chases them away. Then he has tea with Tuk's parents, and Tuk's grandfather the red bus, before going back to the docks tired but happy. The next day, he has an adventure on the part of the canal that Tuk's allowed along and sees the strange red and yellow boats with lots and lots of roofs. And he holidays a bit more with his family before finally going home. Which isn't really the end, because a month or two later, Tuk's family come to the White Island for a holiday too, and all go on a sightseeing tour with Bryan the Ferry before Tuk is loaded onto Horatio's Dad's shoulders and gets to go on the water himself.]

Elephants in the room

Nobody mention the pachyderm. It's there, it's eyeballing you and thinking about standing on your foot, but if nobody mentions it, it doesn't exist. Even when it does. Right?

Electric (un)necessities

I saw the Tescos recycling centre again today. And started on my usual rant about it. Which is really quite unproductive. So instead of ranting to Hwsgo, I'm going to start a list of things that are so mindlessly wasteful that they can't possibly justify their place in a civilised green economy.

1. Automatic recycling machines. What? The? F? Which genius thought: "I'd like to encourage people to recycle things so they can make the planet last a bit longer. I know: we'll replace all those boring (and over-used) metal recycling containers with something that takes ages to load, uses lots of electricity, and has a huge ground footprint". This. Is. Not. Green. At best, it's pseudo-green to encourage people to recycle things because it gives them points, and to put a bloody great big electric into the carpark presumably because it looks nattier than the original set of mismatched metal containers. So consider. The big box takes lots of types of recycled materials (bottles, cans... erm... anything else?) but only has two slots in it, into which you can post just one thing at a time. The original bins had 6 holes each, through which you could post bottles, cans etc as quickly as your heart desired (and your hands could manage). Clustered with this were boxes for foil, shoes, books, clothes, and all the other things that most people don't know that they can recycle unless they're looking at them. This system has been working in carparks all over the country for an awfully long time now. So why mess with it? Why replace it with something that actively consumes time, patience and electricity? Why? And before anyone says things about wind turbines and solar panels: I've looked. These don't appear to be fitted to the machine at my local supermarket. And if they were, I'd much rather they were powering something a little more useful and a little less hypocritical.
2. Automatic towel dispensers. A serious pet hate. When we don't even notice that we're using electricity to do what we used to do with one tug on a (manual) paper towel dispenser, then we've seriously lost our way about energy use. And then there's the automatic tap. What in Gods' name (deliberate apostrophe: choose your own deity, including none) is wrong with turning a tap on for yourself? Okay, so it probably means less maintenance on the washer front, but at what cost to the environment? And then there's this, the electric kitchen towel dispenser (and its friend, the electric-powered bin lid). Which is wrong in so many ways that I don't even know where to start.
3. Electric toilet seat covers. Actually, I've noticed that the favourite places for this sort of electro-madness are airports and service stations. Maybe it's just a subtle form of acknowledgement: y'know, we exist because you're using up too much energy, so we say sod it to political correctness and thinking green, we're just going to party like we're on biofuels. Man.
4. I can now make an exception for electric carving knives however. When my dominant hand stopped working for a while recently, I discovered just how difficult it is to carve bread with just one hand. In fact, it's impossible: I was reduced to making marmite sandwiches by putting the bread under one arm and tearing lumps off it with the other hand, then pasting marmite onto the results. It's not pretty, and said electric carving knife would have made all the difference. And probably led to another dodgy accident, but lets not go there.

Okay, QVC generation: it's over to you now. Prove to me that I'm wrong about this...

Death and self

I think I watch too many brutal detective series. Mostly to play with the puzzle, to see if I can work it out before the protagonists do (which is of course always easier when all you see are the necessary clues with a little light obfuscation). And it doesn't usually go much deeper than that (except of course watching mortuary scenes during dinner, which can always be a little offputting). But tonight I was watching Cold Case whilst doing something else, and looked up to see that moment between life and death, that change from a moving sentient thing into a body. And thought again about how contradictory my beliefs on life and death seem to be, even to myself.

The other thing I thought about was something I saw on holiday recently. I'd taken a boat to the top of the Bosphorus, to look out over the Black Sea; a futile effort in itself since the day was so misty that I could see a few large boats and just enough water to sense that the Sea was indeed very very big. And as I walked up the hill to the local castle for a second time in the hope that the mist had cleared a little, someone ran over a cat with their car. I didn't see them run over the cat, but it was a single road with no sidestreets, and the car had been going fast and just narrowly missed me on the lane less than a minute earlier. And I rounded the corner to see the cat in the road, smashed but fighting, with the car gone and people walking past it, seeing but not pausing. It was probably only 100 yards, but it seemed to take an age to walk, to stand by the cat to see if there was anything I could do, and all the time the cat fought, struggled to get its paws on the ground, fought to get itself up, presumably up and out away from the danger. And then it was still. Stiff then relaxed, tenaciously alive to body, bleeding out to blood flowing down the hill. I've seen that moment before, watched my father break the neck of a wild creature that was too injured to survive. But this time I felt helpless. Angry at the driver, at the people who didn't stop, but aware too of the culture difference between us that made them accept death and ignore just a cat.

On my things to do pile is a letter from the woman who cradled my husband by the road as he died. It's been there a while (there have been other things going on, mainly at work, but they did take over precedence late last year). She's a friend of a friend, and he only connected the two people by accident. I believed in the continuation of spirit when it happened; that part of a person continues for a while after their death. But the cat was such a live-to-dead thing, a there then gone moment. And if I can be shocked by a cat. If.

Therapy

Memories stir. Lithographs of a time ago; thoughts, images, feelings brought back to life by a practiced hand. And with them comes self. Me. Was, is, can be. Pain floods, but the tears are good. I curl near him, careful not to disturb, grateful for each listened breath, for each sense of nearby warmth. And am comforted, return to sleep.

New Year's Resolutions: Life

And so another year starts. I can understand the need to party, the pagan urge (I'll hold on my usual comments about England really being a pagan country, with pagan festivals, tastes and traditions - it's a whole post by itself) to light up the darkness and race headlong into the gathering light, but some part of me wants the switch from year to year to be more considered, more thoughtful, more like Yom Kippur. For 15 years now, I have spent one significant day in early December thinking about what I've done in the year past and what I want from the year to come. But this year it seemed less possible (all hell breaking loose at work) and somehow less appropriate (the time for mourning is perhaps now past).

So to thinking. The year past. It's been quite an explosive one, on almost every front. Which for my own memory, I'm going to lay out in gloriously monocolour bulletpoint...

• I became poorer. My boss stopped my payrise, which meant that I was not just below the cost of living but positively going backwards from it. I stopped my lodger so I could move out and move on, but events have left me in an expensive house, not wanting to move yet because I'm waiting for the next (job) things to happen.
• I got away from said boss, but not without collatoral damage. I now have a great (if demanding) boss and an amazing job, but I'm still within the sphere of influence of the person who made my life and others' so difficult over the last two years, and after a couple of wonderful months working out of his way, he's back and has done all the damage that he can.
• I learnt the hard way about HR procedures. It's been a rough few months, but the beauty of always telling the truth is that there is only one truth (granted, there may be many perceptions of truth, but there is, generally, only one underlying truth), and it's very difficult for lies to be consistent. The beauty of bullies is that they rarely attack just one person; once one victim is dispatched, they quite often seek another then another. And the beauty of supposition is that people rarely have the gift of full empathy: often what a person says about you tells you much more about them than about yourself. That said, seeing how other people see you can be an enlightening and sometimes liberating experience too.
• I got way way too stressed about all the above, and let the rest of my life slide away a little too much. I've hardly spoken to many of my friends all year, haven't spent much time with my family (granted some of it is sailing round the world, but that's not the best of excuses now: there's still email). What is most difficult perhaps is that I became too stunned by my own troubles to be there for anyone else. Like my grandparents. My grandmother has Alzheimers, which has got worse this year. Apparently (and I say apparently because I haven't even stopped to visit them this year), she wakes up every morning as smart as she always was, but by the afternoon she's alone, afraid and in some dark place that even my grandfather, who's loved her for almost all their long life, can't bring her out of. He needs comforting, reassuring that life continues, but apart from the above couple of peaceful months, I haven't been able to do this.
• I tried to get another job. To be fair, I was very fussy about what I wanted; to be close enough to Hwsgo to become a short-distance couple at last but still do something useful and interesting; but I failed quite spectacularly to get a whole set of wonderful jobs. All of which had a common theme: I failed mainly because I'm not programming enough any more. I have the CV (she says modestly) of a tech god, but without regular practice, I can't easily back that up in an interview. I might once have written Trojan horses (only small funny local ones!) and obfuscated Perl in my sleep, but if I can't instantly explain SQL tree traversal, I'm not going to get the job that I want.
• I went to the gym again. Mainly because S got us a personal trainer so she could pass her fitness tests. I did go to the gym, but I didn’t take it as seriously as I should have done; I went for the training sessions, but gradually tailed off on the rest of my training. Stress again, despair, and interruptions from work, illness etc. And I hurt my back and shoulder; I’ve spent 6 months doing press-ups with an inflamed rotator cuff. Which is probably not good. I didn’t do much running – I always meant to, but somehow it was never quite the right time. I did a 5k race with Dad a couple of days ago, which proved that I can do it, so it’s much less of a worry now.
• I started to tidy up my life. I had no-buy months, and I have removed stackloads of stuff that I no longer need or - yes, and this is hard for a girl to admit - bought in error. I removed my ex's stuff from my garage after repeated attempts to get him to take it away followed by finding a mouse invasion that had headquartered within it. I wouldn't have believed that a mouse could eat a washer-dryer and a lawnmower, but I'm definitely convinced now. Anything rubber, anything soft plastic, anything ridiculously difficult to reach without disassembling a complex and heavy piece of machinery. This year, I gained a new-found hatred of small furry uncontained invaders, to go with my only other great loathe in life, namely container-based slugs.
• I had cold after cold, my back packed up, my mind started to go pzzt. All stress symptoms. I’m tired. I know I’m tired, and I know I need to fix that, but it’s difficult when you’re tired.
• I finally found a good place with Hwsgo. We are neither of us simple creatures, and even Shakespeare would have had a hard time following all the complications that we managed to knot ourselves in this year.

Things to do this year:

• More programming. If I want a tech job, I have to have tech credentials. It’s not enough (as it is unfortunately in the defence industry now) to be able to talk about how to build systems, and to outline their designs; I need to get myself back at the coalface of reality, making those difficult compromises between ought and can, even if it slows down my apparent output.
• More running. Starting with mapping out some genuine 5k runs from my house and from work. Then taking a set of kit to work, so I have no excuse not to run at lunchtime (it’s too cold… the car’s too far away). And putting myself in for some local 5k and 10ks, to find myself a local club that I actually want to go to (the town one here is mainly track and field, with no plodding road runners at all).
• More gym. Which is a difficult one: get a cheap subscription to the company onsite gym, or continue very occasionally attending an expensive one. Okay, that’s no contest. Company gym it is. Gyms are strange places. You can dress them up, dress them down, put in pretty machines and nice staff, but in the end it’s all about you and your willingness to keep repeatedly pulling down a difficult weight. Kinda like life really: you can dress it up all you like, but in the end it’s all about heart.
• Do a job I love for people I can trust. Or at least people I can trust to not cause as much damage as I’ve seen in the last couple of years.
• Move house to somewhere smaller and less dark. This has been waiting on my job for the past few months (waiting for a new one to move to, and waiting out what's happened at work), but I need to set a deadline now. I want to move out of this house by April 2009. Even if I don't get another job by then, or am still stuck in limbo here, I'm going to move anyway. Even if that means being somewhere temporary for a while.
• More tidying. Shrink down the number of my possessions. Hwsgo pointed out this morning that although I appear to have lots of shoes, I don't have many good ones (the Russian hooker comment about the J-Los was erm - possibly appropriate). I would, optimally, like to be able to fit all my basic possessions into one room of my house. Books, cd, clothes, detritus: I have too much of each and I need to deal with that.

Happy New Year

So I just lost a job opportunity that I really really wanted; panicked and fluffed the second interview. It's rough, but that's life. But you know what? I am tired of checking what I say and think and do all the time, tired of working in places that beat down their staff but expect miracles from them anyway. So I say stuff the world, I'm off. It may be the most stupid thing I've ever done, but I'm going to follow my heart and do what I love instead of what pays the bills. And what I really love is building systems. Top down designs to nuts and bolts twiddly bits, and out to the interface and user needs too. It really shouldn't be much to ask, that I can build stuff that's useful, but it seems to be. And when it's got to the stage where I'm fighting personal politics by day then trying to find time to go home and relax by building stuff at night, then something is deeply terribly wrong. So I have a plan. It's not going to make me popular, but it suits me better than becoming a lesbian lumberjack in Peru. Onwards... oh, and Happy New Year - may all your choices be both courageous and right for you this year.