Monday, January 26, 2009

Thing a week 12 - All in an inch

Just a short one this time. In fact probably not even an inch (or about 2.56 cm). Basically I’m rushed off my feet and don’t have time to write blogs at the moment. However that’s no excuse to shirk bloggy responsibilities, or to miss an opportunity to pat myself on the back.

Everyone remember how I took December off exercising to get fat while I had a couple of little injuries Well at christmas I got an absolutely adorable belt. The best thing being that I could adjust it myself so it actually fitted. I cut it deliberately as short as i could get away with. It was straining on the last hole. As of this weekend I could move it up not one but two notches. That’s right, I’m getting skinnier. Hell yeah.

Whoda thunk it. Healthy eating and regular exercise actually works.

Sunday, January 18, 2009

Thing a week 11 - I’ve been ill and I don’t like it.

On Wednesday I woke up and couldn’t hear properly with my right ear. This was an irritation at worst, inconvenient at best, but I thought nothing of it. I’d probably been sleeping funny, and since I’ve been sleeping unusually well lately I decided to take the rough with the smooth and got on with my day. I figured at some point I would get that strange pop sensation as in a plane or when climbing a mountain and my hearing of the right hand side of the universe would be returned to me.

By lunch time I had a dull pain spreading through the right side of my head and it felt like that side of my head was swelled up and I had a constant dull thud, thud, thud pulsating through my senses. It went beyond my hearing. Thud, I could feel the pulse in the back of my jaw, almost taste it. Thud, I could see see the pulse as a flash behind my eye, of the kind that used to come just before an insomnia nightmare migraine. Thud, vertigo, a strange sensation that I don’t think I’ve ever felt before, I certainly don’t remember it. My balance left me and I stumbled. I had to catch my self, support myself arm outstretched to the wall and stand still, eyes closed, until it passed. Thud. Thud. Thud. I took some paracetamol and the sensation passed and I was left with only the dulling of all noise to the right, a slight clumsiness and the self-knowledge that no matter what the mirror was trying to tell me my head had swelled to at least twice its normal size and still undulated to a now lazy but constant thud.

Then night fell and discomfort rose. Sleep, so often for me a distant prospect at best, was not even a blip on the horizon. Constant pain. Constant Thud. Faster Thuds as the pain grows, intensifies and becomes more acute. There have been times in my life when such a constant and immediate reassurance that my heart was still beating loud and strong and constant to the point when I could experience it with all my senses and it was overloading my perceptions to the point of exquisite agony would have been a welcome blessing. But not now. Not here. More pain killers. I plead with my body for some peace, a brief respite for sleep. It hurts to lay down my head and the room spins as my head moves. The pain relief overtakes the thudding and I feel the unpleasantness of being drunk. As I eventually fall asleep I apologise to all the glasses of water that helped me through the day.

Thursday started as Wednesday ended and painkillers became a part of breakfast. They were a regular companion for the next few days to be honest. The whole world became more distant. Dulled and somehow further away. No longer just the right hand side. The painkillers had taken all of me away to a place that was so similar to that wonderful terrible state that an insomniac knows so well. I can’t adequately describe it other than a dullness, a detachment from the world. A second hand experience from your own eyes. It’s a state of mind normally reserved for the insomniac and the new parent. Stay awake for a few days and keep functioning. You’ll find it. I realised this on Saturday. That’s when I decided to put the painkillers to one side and deal with the pain otherwise. I’d allow the pills to help me sleep, if I needed them, but I’d not walk willingly back to that distant world.

Now it’s Sunday evening and the pain has largely gone. I’m left with a slight ache behind my right ear and I still can’t hear properly on that side. I can hear the sea, as if I had water in my ear from a swim and the ocean refuses to leave, but I think my body has the ear infection mostly on the ropes. I feel on the mend.

Now after all that self indulgent whining I'll end this dirge of a blog before I go full emo. We all know you should never go full emo.

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Dull, dull, dull

Hello again, welcome back. Sorry about the delay. I was talking a break from the internet over the holidays. Speaking of which how were yours, good I hope.

Now, however, the holidays are over and it’s back to work. This is the reason for the rather downbeat title of the first blog of the new year I’m afraid. Work. Not my job per se. I want to emphasise that. I actually enjoy my job for the most part. The problem is work, or rather the lack of it.

I work for a consultancy, this means the work generally comes in peaks and troughs. We’re either rushed off our feet or scrabbling round for work, but there’s always something to be getting on with. This first week back though I’ve been experiencing something new. Nothing to do. Not constant, I’ve been able to scrape together the odd hours work here and there, but there have been stretches, such as the whole of yesterday afternoon, where I’ve had literally no work to do. It is dull.

I did all the things I was supposed to do in this unlikely event. When there was no lovely profit making project work to do, I did admin and business management. When this ran out, I asked my bosses for work, I rang round the company, other departments, other offices, asking for work, I rang customers to try and rustle up some work. Nothing.

I then moved on to personal development. I gave my self some training, learned a few new tricks to deal with flood water. I spent some time training some minions (I like to call the juniors that because it gives me a happy face, it’s a good thing really, imagine if I used my powers for evil and got real minions, scary). Then nothing.

Because I look after our teams resource plan now (remember, I told you back in week 3) I know I’m not alone, because I rang round the company and outside, I know it’s a simple case of there’s not much work out there at the moment, but there’s several promises on the horizon.

I read the paper. This is where I start to deviate from the staff handbook approach on how to deal with a lack of work. I played monopoly on excel. It’s a great little spreadsheet I found years ago. If you want it, send me your email address, I’ll forward it to you. It helped pass the time.

In the end though there’s no denying that the new work year has started dull and is putting a severe dint in my shinny new optimistic approach to 2009. Hopefully it will change for the better soon. In the meantime I’ve decided to use any wasted time on other things. Hopefully I’ll put out a couple of extra blogs over the next few days and catch up so that at the end of the year there are 52 things a week. That would be nice.