I'd originally intended to follow up my 'Birthday' post with something a little more substantial rather sooner than this but life has a habit of getting in the way. I never seem to get much of anything done in the evenings, and have to go to bed comparatively early (for me) on weekdays to ensure I'm not comatose the following day at work. That's one fairly significant downside to having an hour's travel each way... though I know some folks travel even longer, so I guess I'm not that badly off in the grand scheme of things.
One thing that occurred to me recently was that I had neglected to cobble together a '40 before 40' list, in much the same way as I'd failed to come up with a '30 before 30', a '25 before 25', a '21 before 21' or an '18 before 18', largely because I just don't tend to think along those lines... Which is a bit of a shame, in retrospect.
On the one hand, there are plenty of things I'm glad I haven't done (or haven't had done) in my 40 years so far. I've never broken a limb (though I'm occasionally suspicious that I may have fractured a toe). I've never had an operation or been required to stay in hospital overnight, let alone longer. I've never been seriously ill unless you count maybe three instances of 'flu, the last of which occurred while I was living alone. I've never been involved a proper physical fight with anyone.
Equally, there are plenty of things I've done without really planning. I've been to the States several times, taking in a different area each time, and including a visit to the Kennedy Space Centre, where I observed work on a module for the International Space Centre. I've been to Paris. I've been to Auckland, New Zealand (though never again, for several reasons!). I've bought a home of my own. I've started writing several reasonably popular blogs (though carrying them on has proven tricky). I've written a walkthrough for a videogame (one of the few I've ever completed!). I've worked for three years as a freelancer and sorted out my own taxes (well, not this year's... yet...).
Overall, I guess you could say that I have been pretty fortunate in life. Now, I'm back in full-time employment, in a relationship and, as of last weekend, my girlfriend is living with me. I don't often speak or write in terms of 'the chapters of my life' but, if I did, this would almost certainly be one.
My birthday this year didn't quite go as planned, not least because the local restaurant we'd planned on heading to in the evening doesn't actually open on a Monday. Still, I had a stack of presents to get through, and ended up with what was quite possibly the best Birthday haul in quite some time. Lots of it was DVDs - my best friend got me Arrow season 1 and M. Night Shyamalan's Lady in the Water - a much maligned film which I nevertheless enjoy immensely for its juxtaposition of the utterly fantastical with the utterly mundane, and which has some very funny moments of everyday life. My sister got me Sam & Max Season 2: "Beyond Time and Space" for the Wii, My folks got me the complete series of ReBoot (the perfect complement to Beast Wars, which I got for Christmas). My awesome girlfriend got me a whole box of stuff which included a few things 'for us' (so to speak) and another couple of DVDs - both parts of the animated version of Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.
I would normally try to be out of the office on my birthday, but that wasn't really an option this year as I was still within my three month trial period. And it was a very busy week. One of those weeks where all the deadlines fall one day after the next. Still, that didn't stop them organising cake and presents, at least in part because I share my birthday with one of the Designers. I was actually pretty stunned by the presents I got at work (and this is coming from someone who got a large bottle of tequila (or was it rum?) on his birthday way back when he was working in the hellish office environment he escaped about three and a half years ago!). One was a large mug and coaster set bearing the legend "40 - Aged to Perfection", the other was a pair of rather posh ball-point pens. Then there was the cake... a foot-long leviathan of sugar, sponge and more sugar.
Life since then, naturally, has returned to normal...
I'm sure there was more I wanted to write about before the end of the month, but I haven't had the time or inclination to get to it, and have consequently forgotten most of it... I'm certainly not managing the 'one blog post a week' target I'd tentatively set myself whenever that was...
I should have more stuff to write about this week, however, and more time in which to do so. I'm off work, and my girlfriend and I have planned a couple of days out - first a return trip to the National Space Centre at Leicester tomorrow, then a trip to Bletchley on Thursday to visit the famous site of wartime codebreaking and the National Museum of computing.
I've also seen my GP today (coincidentally getting my first prostate exam because, y'know, 40) about a new weird digestive complaint, and popped into my solicitors' office with some photos of the state of my ceilings and the roof over my flat (he only asked for them at the beginning of the month!). This required a very quick visit to the shops to buy a new colour ink cartridge because, naturally, I run out just as I need to start printing evidence. I had a very interesting conversation with a proprietor who also has landlord complaints for much the same reason as I, and consequently is not renewing/continuing her lease, preferring to centralise in her other business premises a couple of miles away.
I'm hoping that, now the solicitor has photographic evidence of the extent of the leak into my property, he'll get to work on forcing the landlord to get the roof works underway (he mentioned something about a 7-day notice when I last conferred with him, though didn't go on to explain precisely what that was). It would be ridiculous to allow this to go on for another year...
On the downside, I have yet to complete my tax return for 2013-2014... and reached yet another sticking point with the online forms, so I'll have to phone them on Wednesday to sort it out.
More stuff - probably in new posts - as and when I remember it...
Monday 30 June 2014
Monday 16 June 2014
Well, Hello 40
I can hardly claim this day has crept up on me but, for various reasons, I'm not going to do a massively long post to commemorate this auspicious occasion. Not tonight, anyway.
Needless to say, I'm 40 today... and still don't feel a day over 17.
And people tell me I look far younger than my age... Which is surely a good thing.
Needless to say, I'm 40 today... and still don't feel a day over 17.
And people tell me I look far younger than my age... Which is surely a good thing.
Sunday 1 June 2014
Well, Hello June
This month has certainly crept up on me... Not quite sure why, as it was only just over a week ago that my best friend celebrated his 40th birthday by having a weekend away. So now it's just over two weeks till I turn 40, and I've let most of a month go by without any blogging.
For the most part, I haven't had a great deal to say, or have had more pressing or interesting things to do than blogging. Last weekend, for example, I popped over to the MCM London Comic Con at ExCeL. It was a fairly disappointing day (well, more like a couple of hours), though that was perhaps skewed by the fact that I was on my own, and I'd normally be with a friend. That said, there were no real 'stars' to speak of, there wasn't a great deal of interest on the retail side, and some of what I bought ended up being 'wrong' for one reason or another.
I picked up birthday presents for a couple of friends but, after getting them home, developed the strange feeling they both already had what I'd bought them. This has turned out to be true for one of them so far, so I'm even less confident about the other. For myself, I picked up a couple of Wii games, and it later transpired that my girlfriend had bought one of the for my birthday (it was, after all, on my Amazon Wish List). I also snagged the second half of Cowboy Bebop... only to find I'd picked up the Blu-Ray version, not the DVD.
On the upside, I bought a new Darkstalkers artbook, which is fantastic (and not the one I already had on my shelves) and a couple of TransFormers which look as though they won't be making it to the UK anytime soon, since Hasbro UK's 'Thrilling 30th Anniversary' has been effectively cancelled in favour of promoting the new movie toys... even though they're only being released as part of the new blandly-packaged generic toyline, with most of the good ones being Toys'R'Us exclusives. Hasbro's marketing folks really need their heads examined...
The last week at work was weird. There were Marketing jobs that were on some nebulous schedule which our head of department knew about but had neglected to mention to the rest of us... all of which needed to be completed and delivered by the Friday. We also had a whole slew of Marketing materials for the magazines to put together from botched templates created by that same head of department. We also had our regular work on the magazines and directories, plus the work not done by the head of department on her magazines. In that latter case, at least one of the Editors is fuming because the head of department insisted they stick to a schedule for supplying work to be set... only to neglect the stuff that was put through for her over the last four weeks. Apparently she claimed to have been working on "an important Marketing job" but none of us can figure out what she was talking about unless it was a reference to the botched templates we had to finish off... Personally, I suspect she was working on a freelance project on company time.
Yesterday, I popped out to see X-Men: Days of Future Past, and was thoroughly impressed... Not least because the movie effectively erases the events of X-Men: The Last Stand, a movie which basically did everything wrong in the name of grand (visual) spectacle. This kind of semi-reboot trick is nothing new to Marvel, of course... their myriad continuities mean they can resurrect a character, change their identity, or just about anything in order to fulfill the needs of a new story.
In other news, I have a new bank account and will be closing my Barclays account at some point soon. I've banked with Barclays for about 30 years, since I first opened a Supersavers account. They've never been especially brilliant but, over the last five years or so, they've really annoyed me. First, when I was just getting started on the property ladder, they couldn't be bothered to get back to me about a mortgage (possibly because my boss at the time rather overstated the amount of money I'd want to borrow). Then, several years later, they failed to take on my existing mortgage, supposedly because I couldn't adequately prove my identity or income (having banked with them for over 25 years at that point). Most recently, while I have internet banking and receive all kinds of ridiculous emails and postal advertising from them, they didn't let me know my funds were depleted until I incurred a charge due to being overdrawn. In this day and age, I don't believe that is a service one should have to ask for, let alone pay for... particularly when I had two accounts with them, and only one was depleted - the other could have covered the overdraft easily.
Clearly I expect too much from a bank.
So, the sooner I can switch all my money away from them - particularly my savings - the better... Though I still need to figure out what I want to do with my savings account...
For the most part, I haven't had a great deal to say, or have had more pressing or interesting things to do than blogging. Last weekend, for example, I popped over to the MCM London Comic Con at ExCeL. It was a fairly disappointing day (well, more like a couple of hours), though that was perhaps skewed by the fact that I was on my own, and I'd normally be with a friend. That said, there were no real 'stars' to speak of, there wasn't a great deal of interest on the retail side, and some of what I bought ended up being 'wrong' for one reason or another.
I picked up birthday presents for a couple of friends but, after getting them home, developed the strange feeling they both already had what I'd bought them. This has turned out to be true for one of them so far, so I'm even less confident about the other. For myself, I picked up a couple of Wii games, and it later transpired that my girlfriend had bought one of the for my birthday (it was, after all, on my Amazon Wish List). I also snagged the second half of Cowboy Bebop... only to find I'd picked up the Blu-Ray version, not the DVD.
On the upside, I bought a new Darkstalkers artbook, which is fantastic (and not the one I already had on my shelves) and a couple of TransFormers which look as though they won't be making it to the UK anytime soon, since Hasbro UK's 'Thrilling 30th Anniversary' has been effectively cancelled in favour of promoting the new movie toys... even though they're only being released as part of the new blandly-packaged generic toyline, with most of the good ones being Toys'R'Us exclusives. Hasbro's marketing folks really need their heads examined...
The last week at work was weird. There were Marketing jobs that were on some nebulous schedule which our head of department knew about but had neglected to mention to the rest of us... all of which needed to be completed and delivered by the Friday. We also had a whole slew of Marketing materials for the magazines to put together from botched templates created by that same head of department. We also had our regular work on the magazines and directories, plus the work not done by the head of department on her magazines. In that latter case, at least one of the Editors is fuming because the head of department insisted they stick to a schedule for supplying work to be set... only to neglect the stuff that was put through for her over the last four weeks. Apparently she claimed to have been working on "an important Marketing job" but none of us can figure out what she was talking about unless it was a reference to the botched templates we had to finish off... Personally, I suspect she was working on a freelance project on company time.
Yesterday, I popped out to see X-Men: Days of Future Past, and was thoroughly impressed... Not least because the movie effectively erases the events of X-Men: The Last Stand, a movie which basically did everything wrong in the name of grand (visual) spectacle. This kind of semi-reboot trick is nothing new to Marvel, of course... their myriad continuities mean they can resurrect a character, change their identity, or just about anything in order to fulfill the needs of a new story.
In other news, I have a new bank account and will be closing my Barclays account at some point soon. I've banked with Barclays for about 30 years, since I first opened a Supersavers account. They've never been especially brilliant but, over the last five years or so, they've really annoyed me. First, when I was just getting started on the property ladder, they couldn't be bothered to get back to me about a mortgage (possibly because my boss at the time rather overstated the amount of money I'd want to borrow). Then, several years later, they failed to take on my existing mortgage, supposedly because I couldn't adequately prove my identity or income (having banked with them for over 25 years at that point). Most recently, while I have internet banking and receive all kinds of ridiculous emails and postal advertising from them, they didn't let me know my funds were depleted until I incurred a charge due to being overdrawn. In this day and age, I don't believe that is a service one should have to ask for, let alone pay for... particularly when I had two accounts with them, and only one was depleted - the other could have covered the overdraft easily.
Clearly I expect too much from a bank.
So, the sooner I can switch all my money away from them - particularly my savings - the better... Though I still need to figure out what I want to do with my savings account...
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