Unintended Consequences

While I was successful this morning with my main goal (to to the gym) and miserably unsuccessful with the others (go to the bank, get haircut), the fact that I was up early enough to go to the gym and still have time to do the rest of my tasks should I have the motivation to do so.

Being the thoughtful husband I am, I got up and dressed very quietly so as not to disturb Chrissi, who was still asleep. An hour or so later I learned that, thanks primarily to my consideration, Chrissi had nearly wet herself by not knowing where I was and thinking I was in the toilet rather than at the gym. The crossing of the legs apparantly continued for half an hour until the sound of the door went as I came home - which was a hint that I hadn't been in the bathroom all along.

No harm done, though. Chalk up another victory for bladder control.

But You're Treating Me Like An Adult!

There are some conversations during which you can't help having this little internal monologue, baffled that you're being treated like an adult. You know full well you shouldn't have this sort of responsibility or decision-making power, you're surely not old enough or serious enough to be talking properly about this sort of thing like - well, like a normal person.

Chrissi and I had one of these earlier in the year when we were handling the housebuying paperwork with the solicitors, and another previously with the bank when discussing mortgages. Throughout each of those conversations there was this incredulous disbelief that they're taking us seriously, which is clearly madness - it's us, how can we be talking about buying a house? In what sort of crazy world would they let us buy a house as if we knew what we were doing?!

Today there was another one of these conversations, as we were at the doctors discussing what we'd need to think about and what our options were if we were to consider trying for a baby at some point. I hasten to add that at the moment we have no idea if this is something we want or not, and it was with this intent that we wanted to understand all the considerations - but they took us seriously. As if we were the sort of people who might seriously talk about starting a family, which is clearly madness. Yet at no point during the appointment did the doctor turn to us, point and laugh and accuse us of taking the piss.
The whole experience was very surreal. Do you ever get to a point in your life where you actually feel that you are at the appropriate age to be doing something? Does the terrified bemusement that you're actually being taken seriously when you're trying to act like an adult ever recede?

Template Adjustments

One thing I've been doing with my free time at work recently has been learning a little more coding - there are several courses on CodeAcademy and while I've dabbled a little with Ruby and SQL, last week I was doing a combined course on HTML and CSS, the first of which I mostly understood but was useful to really get clear, and the latter of the two has always proved a mystery to me.

The result was that yesterday, when I looked at my blog and knew that there were a couple of features I'd never really liked but never quite worked out how to change, I realised I now probably was able to adjust it. This was somewhat true - I knew roughly what I was doing, but the difficulty of navigating a very concise template which wasn't filled with handy comments or pointers as to exactly what did what was slightly trickier to handle.

The eventual solution was a combination of handling the template code in one window while using firebug as my investigative aide to help pin down exactly which classes were causing the problems. The actual solution involved commenting out a couple of lines and changing some of the padding - but the net result should be a marginally cleaner layout, which has been long overdue.

How Does This Work Again?

While I'm on a blogging surge*, I still can't quite remember how this blogging thing actually works. I was in a productive mood last weekend and so wrote a couple of posts, which as with the tried and trusted approach I set to appear throughout the week to create the illusion of activity.

Apart from one slight flaw in my plan - I forgot to actually publish them as scheduled posts. I simply prepared them, saved them as drafts and then abandoned them. It was only when logging in to write something today that I realised they had been entirely abandoned. So I published them, and we return to activity.

* Yes, the now four posts within a little over a week does count as a surge.

Pleasing Symmetry, or, Coincidence

A couple of weeks back I got a new CD from Chrissi, Teenage Dirtbags 2 (which I feel is the sort of title which should have a tagline, perhaps along the lines of More Teenage, More Dirt, More Bags) - the imaginatively titled successor to the Teenage Dirtbags compilation from last year. This made it into my car this week and eventually the CD actually made it into the CD player. The result of which is that I've been humming several songs that have gotten slightly into my head throughout the day.

This evening at work we were watching a couple of films - apparantly my cinematic knowledge is fairly sparse and there are many films I have simply not seen. This week it was the turn of Back to the Future, followed by Back to the Future II (but not III as it was getting late). Having watched these, I got back to my car and was amused that on starting the car the aforementioned CD picked up where I had left it on track 4, which is Bowling For Soup's 1985. There's a pleasing symmetry about this.

Musical Interlude

As this weekend was the August bank holiday - marking the Reading and Leeds festivals - I've been enjoying the various sets available on the BBC iPlayer as a magnificently lazy way of sampling live music without needing to actually summon the motivation to leave your house.

There were lots of great sets - Blink 182 were typically energetic, although it's worrying to think that some of their songs featured (a couple from Cheshire Cat, for example) were released nearly 20 years ago - meaning that probably many of those watching weren't even alive at the time. A worrying thought for a band you've grown up with! The 1975 looked particularly energetic, although didn't seem to play as long as some others, while another favourite of mine was the excellent set from Imagine Dragons. For both of these I'm looking forward to see what their second album is going to turn out like, having enjoyed their first offerings and heard some teasers in this.

Six Months of Slacking

It may have escaped people's notice, but I've not been around here much recently. Clearly three posts this year has been a lethargic effort even by my own highly lackadaisical standards.

So what's happened this year? Well, I can cover it off quite quickly. We bought a house, we moved into the house, we've done the standard 'new house' stuff such as organising furniture, constructing IKEA puzzles, putting off decorating and taking advantage of the eternal DFS sale. On a work note I've been made redundant twice - admittedly the first time I was sent a lifeboat from a neighbouring sinking ship, but it's still twice - and have since found another job with longer term prospects of staying above the waterline.

There's been time for some travel and social activities too - we've spent a weekend in Frankfurt, an enjoyable week in Sweden split between Stockholm and our friends in northern Sweden, and to round things off we have a trip planned to Athens in September. Closer to home, we did the annual visit to Wimbledon (sunburn report: not excessive), hosted a July 4th barbeque (albeit not on July 4th), and watched the Farnborough Air Show from the comfort of our own garden.

So all these goings-on, and not a thing written about them. Clearly I have some catching up to do!

Relative Timing

As you know I like to ponder on some of the messages and what they actually mean - particularly in mediums such as advertising and how facts can be twisted and presented with such stark differences. A conversation on the radio prompted me to think of this again. For example, which of these sounds more likely to happen: (1) something happens to an American on average once every ten years, or (2) every second the same thing happens to an American.

The answer is - perhaps surprisingly - exactly the same. With a current USA population of 313.9 million, and a total of 31.5 million seconds in a year something that (cue Daily Mail style capital letter alarmist headlines) AFFECTS ONE AMERICAN EVERY SECOND ... is the exact same as something that only happens to an American on average once every ten years. Something that happens (cue headlines again) AFFECTS ONE AMERICAN EVERY TEN SECONDS? Happens once in one hundred years.

Basically, we're not very good at handling large numbers. And we can't compare between big and small numbers - so tend to think something happening over a small period MUST be big over a large period.