Friday, 16th December, 2005

Up, Down, Turn Around

Permit me to be a little self-critical for a minute. Please. I've noticed a rather alarming habit that I seem to be developing One more than one occasion recently, I've gotten shit-faced sitting in front of my Mac, headphones blaring away to whatever happens to be in my iTunes Party Shuffle at the time.

Obviously, this is not new in itself — I've been getting drunk at my Mac on a regular basis since, well, I started this weblog I guess.

(Quick mental calculation: that's about 1,000 bottles of wine. Yikes )

But recently, I've been combining this sozzledness with a far-too-trigger-happy finger over the "blog this" button in my Flickr photostream. And the result is that I've posted meaningless pictures with obscure titles, which only vaguely reflect what I was listening to at the time, and serve to worry everyone who sees them and knows my past history of mental stability.

Hopefully, having spotted this little trend, I can nip it in the bud. And get back to talking about serious, important things, like (for example) the mediocre mood-fluctuations that characterised this week...

My head, if you hadn't already guessed from the techie-biased ramblings over the last few days, has been rather stuck in CodeWorld™ this week. I'm not going to start again on the ins and outs of this thing I'm working on, but it's kinda been accupying every single second of my time.

I get rather entrenched in CodeWorld™ whenever I visit it. Time goes by without me really noticing it, I become a one-track-conversationalist, and generally bore the pants off everyone I talk to.

But it does have its rewards That site I've been working on? It's rather bloody good Nowhere near finished, but it should be pretty effective when it's done, and it should be (most importantly) really easy to use.

But I'll come back to that.

Tuesday morning was glorious. I dunno if you noticed the picture I posted of my drive in, but the day seemed brimming with exciting possibilities.

For a start, it was sunny (always a good thing), but most of all, I was going to put my little plan into action — and impress the socks off everyone.

Turns out, things (as always) were a ot more complicated than that. I struggled for hourstrying to come up with a way past the University's firewall so I could update the database, but even tunnelling didn't work.

Whatever, that evening, me and M (who I work with and who puts me up when I'm over there) spent the whole evening getting drunk and shifting the furniture around in her flat...

Here, for example, is the sofa acting as a temporary bookcase while we lugged things around:

It all turned out lovely.

And. Um.

...

Sorry.

God, I dunno what's wrong with me at the moment. I keep thinking "Aha! I'll write about that!", and then losing track half-way through. I have a complete air of despondency that's somehow creeping into everything I'm doing at the moment.

Perhaps it's because it's coming up to Christmas Perhaps the generall weathering effect of thousands of cretinous fools bumbling around supermarkets buying shit and getting in my way is becoming too much. Perhaps the National Dumbing Down™ which begins in September these days is just grating my soul too much to the point where the will to be positive about anything is far too much effort.

I seem, for whatever reason — maybe that one above, maybe something else, who knows — to be a right grumpy sod at the moment. I just can't be arsed to do anything.

Earlier on, for example, I was walking home when a van phuttered its way past me. It was an F-reg van — but not an F-somethingsomethingsomething somethingsomethingsomething reg, the F was at the end. That made it really really old.

And as I walk back to my house across the playing field, a little BlogVoice™ started to talk about it, going into great depth about how British number-plates worked for the benefit of non-British readers, and how I used to know an incredibly anally-retentive transvestite who could tell you where a car was registered just by looking at the plate.

This little voice told the whole story, wrapped it up in its usual quirky-yet-witty way, and then chuckled smugly to itself all the way home.

But by the time I got home, the Grumpy Fucker living in the other side of my head decided that it would be a crap thing to write about, plus it would take too long, and besides, no-one wants to hear an indepth discussion about number-plates cunningly hidden behind a story about How I Saw An Old Van Today™.

Except, perhaps, anally-retentive transvestites from Peterborough.

...

So yeah. Sorry again. My Writing Sucks. Official.

Distractions

In an attempt to cure myself of this morbidness that seems to have overtaken me, I came to the conclusion that I could make myself exceptionally happy and bouncy by spending the entire day dressed as a schoolgirl.

I don't know exactly where these notions come from, but they happen on a regular basis: "I will spend the whole day wearing X,Y and Z, and it will be fun", is what I sometimes think to myself.

Needless to say, initially it was very fun indeed Full-on school uniform, complete with pigtails (I am so loving my hair at the moment) — not one of them crappy ones that you see either cobbled together from disparate ends of the wardrobe, nor one of those disappointing "sexy" things you see under the "uniform" category of online adult stores, but something I bought ages ago from a proper 'specialist' adult uniform site.

I say "initially" there, because after the initial "Ooooh!" factor, actually trying to do some work in a gymslip is not the easiest thing in the world.¹

Why am I telling you all this? Yous already know this is the case

And no, I didn't take pictures

did you go out a-la-maiden

Let's see Did I go out of my house, at peak Chav-Season, in the middle of Lancaster, wearing a schoolgirls' uniform?

I think that would come under the legal term of "suicide"

¹ There is more to this story that I'm deliberately not mentioning. Because I'm a bit drunk, and if I wrote anything now, I'd probably regret it in the morning. Someone, at some point, remind me to elaborate on this.

Hols

I forgot to mention, I'm on holiday now.

Ha! In. Your. Face you people who have full-time jobs (and salaries to match)