Month: May 2004

We did some climbing in the Peak District at a place called Birchen’s Edge. The weather for once was our friend. I’ve been living in England for 4 plus years now, and I must say that the weather is the only thing I really don’t like about the place. Anyway, I hadn’t been climbing for a while, so I was glad when Paul called and asked if I’d be up for getting out into the hills. We climbed Trifalgar Wall, Trifalgar Crack, and Nelson’s Nemesis before the rain came in and ruined the party. I picked up a few bruises, but otherwise had a great day on the crags.

Trumpet sounds
Sounds of fury
Men they march
Judge and Jury

Hard things are put in our way, not to stop us, but to call out our courage and strength.

You are water. You’re not really organic; you’re
neither acidic nor basic, yet you’re an acid
and a base at the same time. You’re strong
willed and opinionated, but relaxed and ready
to flow. So while you often seem worthless,
without you, everything would just not work.
People should definitely drink more of you
every day.

Which Biological Molecule Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Watch me unravel, I’ll soon be naked….what a great line.

I’ve been buzzing most of the day despite my project being pulled at the last minute. I was due to finish it tomorrow and was about three quarters of the way with the final edits. But it looks like the module won’t run, at least not for the near future. No worries. I’m now free to move on to the next project which looks like it will center around a topic I find very enjoyable and stimulating and that’s leadership and motivation.

I’ve had several short burst of distractions in the form of potential business ventures, but I solidly stuck to pursuing my dream. I even went so far as to write the first draft of a story this week, although admittedly I have been struggling to get back to it and rewrite the second draft. I want to assume the title of prolific writer, but as I struggle to even write the few words I rattle out in this diary and on my weblog, I’m not sure that such a sobriquet will ever be my namesake. Though I wonder, what would make me such? Is it, as Seneca once said, that writing is easy if you have something to say. Perhaps that’s it; I don’t have much to say at the moment. Perhaps it’s because I’ve spent so much of my past time not using my mind for anything beyond the trivial pursuit of ordinary functional day to day living.

There are men of words and there are men of action so says the poet. I would say I am a man of action who wants to be a man of words who wants to be a man of action.

After all my travelling about last week, it was only fitting that i had a lazy weekend. I laid about like a lazy lion soaking up the Savannah sun on a soup warm summer day. I feel guilty when I’m lazy, but sometimes the occassion calls for doing nothing except recharging the old batteries, regaining a sense of freshness about the world or least my place in the world.

I thought the term MILF was reserved for the vocabulary of the Beavis and Butthead monkey spanking porn addict. But alas, I heard MILF floated amongst the crowd on the High Street and out of the mouths of babes (well babes of the grown up full bossomed variety). I was walking behind a couple of girls, one of whom was pushing a pram with a toddler in it. The usual exchange of chitter chatter volley’d between them. And then I hear….

“Hello MILF.” By way of greeting as a new girl joined the pair.

“Hi MILF.”

chuckle, chuckle.

I had passed them by then, but I had to turn around to see if indeed they were worthy of the sobriquet MILF. I tipped my hat and smiled, for indeed they were….

i’m going to shed my skin…

I went a little out of focus over the last few days. I tend to do that when I’m on the road a lot. I lose my routine, which I suppose is not a bad thing. It’s so easy to become as stale as a 10 day old chicken in a meat grinder. The only routine I hate interrupting is my physical fitness routine. I usually take my workout gear with me when I’m traveling, but the grind of the road takes the umph out of me. I did manage to go for a run once while I was in Edinburgh last week, and boy am I paying for not running the other four days. I ran 2.5 miles today and it hurt. Usually I can run 2.5 miles in my sleep, but today I felt every jarring slap of my feet hiting the pavement. And don’t even get me started on the stitch i got during the run, or the cramps I got while doing situps. You would think, I was a rank amateur.

I’ve restarted my 0430 morning meditation sessions again. My mood for the day seems to be more stable when I spend time meditating in the morning.

I spent most of today buried deep within the bowels of my laptop. I’m under a pretty tight deadline for this elearning module. The projects not going quite the way I’d hoped, but then they never do, do they? I reckon I have another 2 days designing before moving into the test phase.

It’s good to be home again. I thought I would get a chance to write from the road, but the opportunity didn’t arise and I didn’t make an effort to force myself to find an Internet connection. I did keep notes in my paper diary. The three days in Scotland were kind of touch and go. Here is a summary of the last three days:

Wednesday

• Flew BA instead of Flybe.
• Didn’t like BA’s blatant display of class discrimination.
• Had a rare moment of social conciousness – vowed not to fly BA again to protest their blatant class discrimination.
• BA served food on the flight (Flybe doesn’t) – changed my mind about flying BA (they say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach)
• Lost my faith in man.
• No suits, no ties; fuck shareholder value.
• Desperately needed a coffee.
• Maybe it’s not so bad being Joe Average.
• Spent the day planted in front of a computer that belongs in a museum.
• Trying to designa 21st century product with 1980’s technology.

Thursday

• Lovely Scottish hills – would love to live close enough to mountains to see them from my bedroom window.
• Searching for a story to plot and write.
• Hotel restaraunts are peculiar; lot’s of loney diners – they should force us to sit together get…what would be the harm in getting to know another fellow human being
• One to one with my boss
• More time stuck in front of dinosaur PC
• Thought about sticking a fork in my eye
• I had dinner with an old friend at my favorite restaraunt in Scotland – Jimmy Chungs
• Worked into the night on new elearning module
• Didn’t pack and should have

Friday

• Packed in a hurry
• Worked for a 4 hours in the office; left to catch flight home
• Saw a big Hill-Billy Bob looking man in a sky blue tie-dyed short sitting crossed-legged with no shoes on a chair to small for his big body
• Pissed off at the media showing the same pictures of abuse over and over again
• Pissed off at the US Soldiers who have disgraced and tarnished the reputation of the service I once proudly served in and still cherish
• Home Sweet Home

Time to ready myself for another week in the corporate salt mines, at least the week is only 4 days; today was the May Day bank holiday in England. I will be on the road this week, which is a good change of pace. Tomorrow I am in Sheffield for the day designing content for an elearning module. Wednesday I fly up to Scotland to work with my boss for a few days. I hope I get the room facing the monkey cage again. Or myabe not…they make an awful racket early in the morning.

I spent the whole of the day reading The Heart of the Matter, by Graham Greene.
“The Heart of the Matter” is the sad story of a man tormented by an inability to live up to the dictates of his religion. Deputy Police Commissioner Scobie begins the book as a rare subject, an English colonial policeman in Africa not on the take. He is cursed, however, with a wife who constantly, if not always overtly, reminds him that the life he has provided for them is beneath her. Louise Scobie is one of those Catholics of the mid-twentieth century that believes things like missing mass on Sunday is a mortal sin, but unfortunately can’t bring herself to “avoid superbia” as the nuns used to admonish schoolchildren in the fifties and sixties. In other words, Louise is a snob. When it’s announced that her husband won’t be promoted when the commissioner retires she simply can’t deal with the shame of it.
Most of Scobie’s capacity for love died several years earlier at a boarding school in England when their nine-year-old daughter was taken by a sudden illness–the difficulty of communication and the fact of World War II prevented him from even attending the funeral–and the third person narrator notes how he retreated into his job, but “[t]he less he needed Louise the more he felt responsible for her happiness.” Louise does see Scobie’s struggles, even gently accusing him of wishing she were dead. He responds, as he always does, that her happiness is his priority, and promises to find a way to pay for her passage to South Africa, where she’ll be able to be with friends and without the ignominy of not being the new commissioner’s wife. The only way to find the money is to borrow it from a well known but smooth Syrian crime boss who likes Scobie because he can trust him to be incorruptible.
Crossing the proprietary line of borrowing the money flows into crossing the mortal sin line as Scobie takes up with a much younger woman. While he grows to love Helen, whom he meets in a hospital while she recovers from nearly dying in a shipwreck, he cannot love what he sees himself becoming. Scobie’s struggles with despair are moving and genuine, even as the reader perhaps wishes Scobie were just a little bit smarter than he is. If he were of course, he wouldn’t be Scobie, never able to attain his desired simple life where he can do his job and feel loved and loving, redeemed and free.

A Few of my good friends are moving on from the office and on to new adventures. Darren is moving on to work in the big city of London. Phil is setting sail for Japan to teach English as a foreign language, and Tom is going to travel around the world for 5 months.

In true British style, we had a leaving-do (any excuse will do to drink beer, wine, and spirits). We rented out the party room of the Jug and Jester complete with full bar.

The Jug and the Jester carries a lot of history fo us; When we first started putting together the joint-venture 4 years ago, the Jug was the place we’d all meet to release tension built up over the long hard days of getting the joint-venture ready for launch day. We would absolutely go hog wild (think National Lampoon’s Animal House). It was good hard clean (well maybe not so clean) fun.

So much has changed over the last 4 years when the project first started. The sun is setting on the end of an era. Many of the original members of the joint-venture have moved on and the last of us are starting to trickle out. The place is barely recognizable now. So many new faces populate the place.

Anyway, we had an awesome turn out last night; even people who’d long since left the venture returned to see Darren and crew off. It was good to see some of the old familiar faces. I suspect I will not be long in joining them….

New adventures await….

Couldn’t resist seeing my limited vocab.