Drat's the cursed formatting of other peoples computers.
In an effort to remove the billion >>> marks and pointless spaces in my e-friends letters I changed my settings to plain text. It did help a lot.
Then when I came to write this blog entry I got three paragraphs into it, decided to try and add some italics, thus had to change back to rich text mid writing, and ZOWIE SHAZZAM ... managed to wipe it all out with no auto-save to restore from.
Don't you just HATE it when that happens !!!
What's worse is that I don't want to waste any time retyping it all out { especially as I have still got so much to add }, but if I don't then it just wont be starting off on the right foot, which I can't have either.
I mean, imagine where this blog might lead if I didn't stick to the path and just let my mind wander and type whatever drifts through it. Women, role play, massage, Freddie Mercury, x-rated websites, painting, holidays, sex, my next meal ... total anarchy, see what I mean!
So lets start at the beginning { where both my mother and English tutor both reliably lectured me time and again is always THE very sensiblest place to do it from } and let the rest just follow its lead.
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For anyone who knows me, and / or regular readers of my blog, if I were to suggest that my life does not always seem to go according to plan, such a statement would not seem out of place.
Similarly, if I was to say that often my life seems like just a vortex of random localised events that land upon or around me one after the other, this too would not seem like a complete untruth.
Thus when I here put down that, even for my unusual standards, the last few weeks have been both filled to the brim and with plenty of things coming from far enough left field that I would normally consider them to be from a different ball park completely, you might begin to get a glimmer of what's in store for those who feel courageous enough to read on.
{ As always I won't say that I never lie, or that I never stretch the truth just a little to make a better story, but let's not forget the two age old sayings "there's nought as strange as folk" and that "you wouldn't believe me anyway even if I told you" which together fairly well sum up the last few weeks. }
In no particular order, as I can't really remember how any of this started, I'll just run through the things as they reappear in my mind and, if I get time at the end, I might try and cut-paste things into more a semblance of chronological order.
My good friend Susan moved into her house with her fiance David this week, and although they have been together for less than a year, knowing her and seeing them together, I do not doubt that they have the courage, the love and the devotion to grow their relationship from strength to strength, a love that I hope with all my heart will endure through all their years.
For the past ten months I have been writing blog entries and hoping that I could write interesting enough to have attracted and entertained a small but ever growing selection of readers, perhaps even to the point where they look forward to each new entry. However, after seeing my viewing figures almost double overnight following my Darwin Awards entry, I have to accept that there is an element of truth in the old saying of "no such thing as bad publicity".
Despite making a fool of myself and leaving myself open to ridicule to the entire cyberworld, it did seem that enough people though it worthy of reading that they stopped to have a look, and a few even chose to leave feedback. I don't think that I really want to try and repeat the experience, and I expect that anyone caught trying to get an award is banned from getting one for much the same reason as why anyone wanting to become a politician should be banned from becoming one, but at least it got a few more people reading my blog.
A track-side fire happened the other week, which meant that I could not take my normal route home, and so through a bit of luck and friendship, I was able to attend my friend Paola's Brazilian party that night and travel home after instead. This in itself is a bit bizarre as Paola and her cousin are both Colombian, yet I guess the party organisers couldn't find any suitable Brazilian dancers who were available, or perhaps they figures most of the clients would be too drunk to even notice the difference { and as it was at one of the BBC's club lounges, that's probably more the case }.
I was a little bit miffed that despite being promised free drinks at the bar as soon as I ordered the barman changes his mind, saying that his boss was watching and that he had to charge us for the drinks. Luckily I had my card on me, and have done a sterling job of not using my overdraft since getting my remortgage a few weeks ago. Unlucky for him, such blatant lying meant that he could kiss goodbye any notion of a tip or gratuity then and there.
But was really got my goat was that not only was Paola doing it for a favour for a friend, but that her friend cancelled as he said he was sick without letting anyone know AND as he was the DJ with all the music this meant that my friend and the rest of the dancers had no music to shake it on down to. After a long trip on a Friday night, they managed to track down a shop with some Brazilian music, and after a few photo opportunities I had to make my semi-drunken way home.
Following up a lead from my Colombian friend at work I have started using
www.Gumtree.com/ as a search engine for all sorts of stuff and have got a pretty high batting returns from it. So ok, I haven't found the dream writers job that she first suggested it to me for, but on the plus side its had other more successful results.
Firstly I met online a girl from Lancashire, who after a dozen or so emails has agreed to go on a fortnight cruise holiday around the Caribbean. She is a true kindred spirit, nutty, travel addict and totally bonkers ... we get along great already and we never even met yet.
Secondly I have met online a woman who has agreed to share a few memories with me over the coming Easter holidays. Furthermore as she is living in London we agreed to meet up for a couple of drinks to see if we had anything in common and things have gone from strength to strength. Without any description or photo, I could not have hoped to have chosen a better companion for my holiday.
Han is Chinese, slim, pretty, funny, cute, likes travelling, loves the cinema and movies, is single and suggested that we met up again over the weekend to carry on where we left off. Because we wanted to see the new movie '300' {9 out of 10} I chose to book into a hotel near her rather than struggle to get home on the last train and that only added to the time we spend together, meaning that I didn't return home until the following night.
{ With my typical stupidity, at the end of the film and after a hectic scramble to get there by midnight - the check in deadline - I tried in vein to convince the concierge at the Hilton Hotel that I REALLY DID have a reservation there that night, only to be extremely embarrassed by finally realising that I had actually pre-booked a room in the Britannia International Hotel, which was the building a few doors down on the same road !!! }
The following day I bought a new memory card for my new phone { 3G, 3.2 mega pixel camera, etc, blah, blah } and then went shopping with her before a trip to Greenwich museum, watching the new cartoon movie of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles { 7 out of 10 } sharing a couple of non-alcoholic cocktails, and finally headed back to Gillingham on a unheated train carriage where the lights also didn't work and the half dozen drunken chavs sitting directly behind me seemed to be playing tag-team-vomiting all the way from London Bridge to Lewisham.
The cold, the smell, the dark and the noise didn't bother me, I'd experienced a great deal of fun all weekend long and it was only fair to suffer a small amount of inconvenience for the privilege of doing so.
My new friend Han and I shared many interests, plenty of personal stories and if it wasn't the fact that she could very well be heading back to China for at least 6 months I would be now writing to say that I had found a new girlfriend. She could even top my story of dating a genuine Taikwando world champion ( best in her own height/weight category ), as her last boyfriend recently married Miss Vietnam 2004!
I have had a really nasty cold/cough/flu for the last few weeks and all it has done is yet again give me plenty of chance to paint my Orc & Goblin Army as I have been bedridden and unable to breath properly or suffer the outside cold without more layers of clothing than an Eskimo.
My former friend Cheryl completely blew my mind, by actually repaying the last £800 of the money that she borrowed over a year ago. Admitted I did have to inform her that I was about to dragging her cheating / lying ass through the small claims court with enough facts and figures to show that I was serious and not spouting hot air AND then refuse to answer her phone calls after that, but I still never believed that she would pay up until the last second before the subpoena was actually being personally handed to her in broad daylight.
The downside was that it was not her that delivered this unexpected boon, but her brother - a self confessed nutter who had done time inside for A.B.H. / G.B.H. and thought nothing of some serious rough-housing on anyone who dared "make my little sis cry". Being that I was still suffering from my flu, having to deal with such a potentially explosive situation was only made easier by the fact that my lodger and another friend were in at the time, and would fully back me up as eye witnesses had anything kicked off.
But even with the 3-1 number and home turf advantage, I still did everything I could in power to convince him that now I was being handed back the last of the money I was owed this was the matter done and sorted, with no further comeback or any need for me to try and make contact with his sister for any reason ever again. Admitted, it was not not every last penny back and it was without any interest either, but that was not the point at this late stage, anything was a relief.
The most amusing part of it all was that Cheryl had gone to all the trouble to type up a letter that required my signature to discharge the debt, but had called me David Dickinson. As tempting as it was to sign as such and know that by doing so the debt was still valid and the cash could not be traced back to me, my sense of fair play won out quickly and I signed correctly and had done with it.
I received a text message earlier today, from my Caribbean cruise co-holidayer, who was having a real nightmare of a European vacation and desperately needed my help in getting her, and her friend, back from Rome in one piece and as soon as was possibly under their newly truncated itinerary.
For some people, this might seem odd or even slightly stressful, but for me it was almost a formality. I called her up, clicked onto the Ryanair website and after a short chat led her verbally through their online booking form, before confirming and purchasing it using her own card. Easy, done and sorted without me even needing to leave my comfortable sofa - as as I had only just previously moved my PC downstairs to prevent me staying up past 11pm surfing the net or chatting to friends abroad and thus making myself late for work the following morning.
On matters of employment, although I have not found myself a new job yet, my sister Tamzin has and despite her having taken a few years out while her two grow up, she managed to grab a permanent job that pays a few hundred more than I take home after barely a month tempting for a city agency. Thus suitably landing on her feet, I am now even more encouraged to push myself for a better job, although for me it is a case of changing careers and not just recovering from a few years out through raising my children.
When I mentioned this to my boss, all her bluffs and trickery about how incredibly hard it is to get a job in London these days, or how I should be forever grateful for the salary that I do have, came crashing down around her ears and seeing as I am one of the lowest paid in the company and that I, along with many others in SMPA, am overdue for a pay review I am fully expecting not to have a repeat of another pay freeze like the last pay review I had.
My role-play character died, the first of my characters ever to do so outside of a Cthulhu based system. It wasn't all my own fault, mainly I was just a lightly armed ranger that gave him last breath to save a fellow dwarf in over his head against four opponents. Although I barely survived the encounter I was comatosed by the damage inflicted upon me during the fight and then through an outrageously comical farce a wizard tried to physically carry me up a side of a cave mouth and managed only to fumble and drop me at the very cave mouth, sending my prone body falling back down and splattering my remains on the rocks below.
To add insult to injury there was a much stronger elf standing idly by just outside the cave entrance who thought it more urgent to guard a dead body that to assist in rescuing me from the cave below. The final salt in the wound was that my fellow Dwarf, who I laid down my life to try and save, caught an infection from his wounds and died from untreated fever barely a few hours after my own tragic demise.
My ex-housemate and one time gym partner has again befriended her ex-boyfriend and has now arranged to visit Kenya with him this coming week. I don't think it appropriate to attempt to wash anyone's dirty linen, save mine, on my own blog, but I will mention it in reference as it has meant that our twice weekly trips to the gym have come to a unexpected halt and also with her now holidaying with him it will leaves her precious few days holiday left this year to also plan an excursion with me later this year.
I sort of saw this coming, as she has drastically cut down the amount of text messages we are exchanging per week as of late, and also cancelled at the last minute from the group of friends we had gathered to go to the casino nightclub with last Friday. This was no small thing, as it was her idea to go in the first place and she even asked me to invite some other friends along, so for her to call off the do with no real explanation, notice or apology is a little bit rich to my way of thinking.
Furthermore seeing as I was first invited, and then sadly uninvited, to vacation with her to Rome at the start of this month, it seems as if the chances of us travelling together are once again being pushed back into the realms of barely remote possibilities. This more than anything else frustrates me, as I would rather not have had my hopes raised and then dashed so, and this is also one of the main reasons why we had our own falling out last year.
So with all this, along with the more mundane and everyday events that have been going on you can imagine that I have not had too much of a quiet life as of late, not that on the whole I am complaining, but it hasn't left much time for updating my blog or writing emails to those who I would normally like to have kept more in touch with.
Well I've gabbled enough for one day, so I will leave this humongous entry here and say that life is for living and so if ever my blog or emails are think on he ground, you can be sure its because I'm making the most of the here and now and that when things settle down again, as they always do, the following correspondence will be all the more interesting because of it.
t.t.f.n.
Oh, and as my bro-in-law has had more views in a couple of months than I have had in ten I might follow his lead a little more in future.
So here goes ... 'name dropping bombshell'... star wars, chewbacca, st elmos fire, harrison ford, drew barrimore, jodi foster, pirate of the caribbean, snakes on a plane, 300, miss world, mr bean, michael j fox, ER, emerdale farm, bill hicks, darth vader, david southwell, george clooney, brad pitt, jedi, dirk pitt, harry harrison, isaac asimov, jar jar binks... etc, etc ... blah, blah ... waffle waffle
...
Has it worked ? Has my readership trebled overnight again ?? Only time will tell.
