Today was my second day of holiday this week. By arrangement with the MD, a select few in the department were granted an extra week off work, to be taken by the end of January. The way it worked out, my week off was just before my boss's week off... which seemed a little awkward to me so, being a workaholic - or so it seems - I negotiated my week off down to two days: Monday and today.
As it turned out, my boss was off sick on Monday, which meant next to nothing got done. When I went in on Tuesday, pretty much everything looked disastrous, and Wednesday started off looking no better. Turned out fine, though... my magazine was complete by 5pm (near enough), but then I stayed back to catch up on backups of previous issues.
I do feel as though I've been neglecting this blog lately. The whole point of it was to write about the small and inane things that happen, just to keep me writing. It's not as if nothing has been happening, I just haven't felt inclined to write about it. I only dealt with Christmas in the vaguest of terms, wrote nothing about my visit to my sister's new house (which is pretty fabby... though the area will be a bit dull and soulless until it develops a larger population), and barely commented on New Year. Since then, I've ranted about the morons at work a little (they haven't got any better since - we had a meeting on Tuesday and they're all 'demoralised', as well as being lazy, selfish and stupid... though, actually, that's unfair. Some are working out better than others) but nothing about the other stuff...
So, here goes...
At some point recently I managed to do something nasty to my left hip. Whether it was by sleeping awkwardly (and I can think of one particular incidence of this) or by overexertion (highly unlikely) or even perhaps sitting awkwardly, as I am wont to do at home (particularly while at my computer), something really got damaged. It's something of a recurring problem, but this time was so much worse. For a couple of days I was in such agony that I could barely move without yelping in pain, had great difficulty climbing stairs, and couldn't even sleep well because it hurt to move into any position, and no position stayed comfortable for long. Thankfully, I rediscovered Ibuprofen-based pain-killers, which do an admirable job of controlling, if not fully relieving the pain.
The odd thing about this is that the pain started right on my hip joint, and spread briefly up to my back, with shooting pains down to my left knee. After trying things like microwaved wheat sacks to warm the area, and even wearing a pain relieving heat wrap for a night, the pain moved up, so it's essentially now in the meat of my backside. On the one hand, this seems to be a muscular problem (and I'm so very glad it's not the bone), but on the other had, there is the sense of infection at work... but what kind of infection, and how the merry hell did it get to my hip?
In any event, the pain is relieved, but not yet gone. My two days off this week have allowed it some rest which, in combination with the previously mentioned Ibuprofen-based pain-killers, seems to be doing some good. This is easily the longest I've had hip trouble, though. Normally it'd clear up in a couple of days, as long as I don't do anything daft. Then again, if the worst comes to the worst, as I suggested at work yesterday, I could always become the office equivalent of House - the cantankerous git with a limp. That, or I could see a doctor.
On a more positive note, one of my colleagues has a small exhibition of her artwork running at a vegetarian restaurant near her home. I popped over there this last weekend - despite having a rather agonising night of intense pain the night before - with a friend/colleague, for lunch and to take a gander. It was an interesting mix of styles - some painting, some photographic work - and there were a couple of very striking images... one of which I have since expressed an interest in acquiring. The restaurant probably wasn't the best exhibition space, largely because the lighting - both electrical and ambient natural - was a little excessive for some of the pieces (one or two were essentially 'shades of white'). Also, it felt strange to wander round past tables of people enjoying their food (which was fabulous! I had the vegetarian equivalent of an All Day Breakfast - I don't know what went into the sausages, but they were great), excusing myself by pointing out the paintings I was looking at.
I'd also taken along my camera, to take a picture of the artist with her works (and the large bunch of flowers we'd brought along), for use in the socials pages of one of our magazines. I should have fixed the camera settings more thoroughly, though, as the only photo I took turned out quite grainy. A few more photos might have fixed the problem also, but my friend and I had places to be in the afternoon...
...Specifically, a cinema, to see Night at the Museum, a new comedy film starring Ben Stiller. The main reason for going to see this film was that, in the States, the trailer for the TransFormers movie was playing alongside it. Sadly not the case over here. The most interesting trailer - and I should be clear that this is more 'morbid curiosity' than actual interest - was the new Eddie Murphy vehicle, where he plays almost all the main characters. Again. Don't the Actors' Union have anything to say about this?
Night at the Museum was surprisingly good, though. Some of the less prominent roles were played by decent actors - Owen Wilson as a miniature cowboy with dreams of expanding his railroad into new territory, and his bitter rival, a miniature Roman general with similar goals, was played very well by Steve Coogan. Dick Van Dyke turned out to be a villain (oops, sorry... SPOILER!) for what must be the first time in his career (unless he's been in Columbo), Mickey Rooney still isn't dead, Robin Williams was - at times - quite restrained, and Ricky Gervais did his usual bumbling, unable to finish a sentence, English twit routine. There was absolutely nothing new about the story, but the details and gags they threw in dragged it somewhere above average. My favourite scene - between Wilson and Coogan toward the end - was an affectionate stab at Brokeback Mountain, with the Roman general urging his cowboy pal "Save yourself!", only for the cowboy to shout back "I ain't quittin' you!"
More toys from the upcoming TransFormers movie have been revealed, some of which are looking pretty special. Starscream still looks awkward, but better than the simian/insectoid early prototypes. There are already several versions of Prime around: the miniature one, a Fast Action Battler, a standard-sized one, and a larger, more detailed version. Most are only around as flat grey prototypes at the moment, but the Fast Action Battler has painted prototype images floating around on the interwebs. Fully painted images of Ratchet have been doing the rounds for quite a while now, and FAB Ironhide has turned up now. We've seen pictures of most of the Decepticons in one form or another (though Bonecrusher has been quite evasive so far), so the big question mark is on the movie's interpretation of Jazz... The miniature version has turned up, but nothing else.
Today, I spent quite a while discovering the gems of YouTube... I definitely underestimated it at first glance. Sure, there's a lot of self-absorbed crap, but there's also just about every music video you could ever want to see (and plenty more besides), and oddities like the Nobody's Watching... project. Mythbusters may have shown the world the dangers of adding Mentos to Diet Coke, but the NW crew have scientifically proven that one can create a lightsabre by dropping an M&M into a bottle of Mountain Dew or Diet Mountain Dew. Their investigations of Lost (including an appearance by Maggie Grace) and 24 were also highly entertaining, and their many appearances at an awards ceremony, thanks to borrowed usher's uniforms, were a laugh. The really odd thing is one of them looks like the guy who played the president's aide in the new Battlestar Galactica TV series...
Also, as a somewhat bizarre side note, I spent some time today cleaning my bedroom window. The frame had become somewhat overgrown with mold of a furry grey variety. Great clumps of it, floating in a bleach solution, appeared to have little red bobbles inside them. Ick. It took two scrubbings and some neat bleach to take care of the worst of it. It's not all gone - though some of it seems to have stained the plastic, so it's difficult to tell - but it's certainly cleaner than it has been. The problem with my room is that all the furniture is fixed, and having the desk right in front of the window presents something of a problem when it comes to cleaning it.
I keep meaning to write up a dream I had recently. Quite an odd one, even by the standards of your average dream. It started off jumping into a story where I'd met up with the woman who was the full-time waitress in a bar/restaurant near work, which I used to frequent for a couple of years. She was working elsewhere, in a job which had her wearing a lab coat and, it would seem, carrying around a clipboard much of the time. For reasons not explained by the dream, I was meeting up with her at her job. There was a shopfront, but I ended up being led out to some kind of garden shed to wait for her while she and her clipboard sorted out a few things elsewhere. Before she arrived, however, the dream switched into what seemed to be Aliens vs. Predator vs. TransFormers. Cloaked Predators were sifting through the remains of an utterly destroyed Optimus Prime, and were then set upon by Aliens. At various points in this dream I was seeing it as a movie, or as the Spectrum version of the game of the movie (or whatever). The game was a top-down maze thing, with the sort of simple, monochromatic graphics you'd expect from the Spectrum, but it would then cut back to the 'movie' for some kind of action sequence. Other than the remains at the beginning of this part of the dream, I didn't see a single TransFormer.
Some time ago I had another Aliens-type dream... I wonder if they're replacing Zombies as my subconscious's Bête du Nuit... My Zombie dreams were never really scary - laughable more than anything, as I quickly noticed they'd never come anywhere near me - but they were very frequent for a while.
Better sign off for now... From what I've heard, work tomorrow is going to be harsh.
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