Enlarged Family

Tomorrow is potentially exciting as not only is it poker night - always a cause for excitement, as you can imagine - but also Rachel returns home. It's been a couple of weeks shy of two years that she has been away and by this point it'll be a shock for her to return, I'm sure!

While she is playing up how hard it will be and how little she wants to return, she's not really coming back for long. After a couple of weeks, she's going out to Turkey for her best friend's wedding - and then she arrives back from that the day before she flies out to the US for mine! It won't be until mid-October when she gets back properly, so there's at least another month of her travelling lark to come.

To bring this blog back to me, where it belongs, today was another rather long and somewhat boring day. I went for a run in the evening when I came home, which was a sign of success. I also received confirmation my computer is ready for dispatch, so that should be winging its way to me this weekend. All going according to plan, then!

Spurred On

Today at work was dominated by a very health-themed agenda, and I am not sure precisely why. Three of my colleagues at lunch encouraged each other into going to the local-ish gym and signing up for three months. A steep membership cost (£95 per month!?) but allegedly worth it, with nice facilities and so on.

I myself was not part of this dedicated gym fad. I know myself too well that it would be an utter waste of money, as I simply wouldn't get the gain out of it I should.

However, I do think it pushed me back into my own fitness regime as I went for a run again this evening. Successfully too, no aching knees to report, although I'm sure there's time for that before tomorrow's entry. The goal is to make it two days in a row, but we'll see how that goes as usual.

Blow By Blow Updates

So while I commented last week - although perhaps not here - about the somewhat amusing nature of receiving an automated status update at 3am about how my new computer was progressing, I am now going to switch to a more favourable viewpoint.

Both today and yesterday I have received updates as to the progress. First I got an update that it was being built. Today I got an update that it had finished being built and was now undergoing testing. On the order tracking on the site, not only can you see how it is progressing, but who is actually undertaking the various tasks. This is a nice touch.

At the current rate, it's likely that I'll have my computer for the coming weekend. This pretty much books out the weekend in getting it up and running, installing software, setting things up and basically then having done that, going back to full-time online procrastination.

Should be fun!

Wedding Jukebox Selection

So a rather arbitrary blog today, based on the discussion Chrissi and I are having about music and songs to pick for our wedding. We have about a week to make our minds up, having procrastinated on this for a little while. This gives me the fun of picking songs I like!

I already went through this concept once, when picking fantastic songs with deliberately silly names for the theme - for example, The Who's Won't Get Fooled Again, AC/DC's Highway to Hell and Meatloaf's I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That).

However, now I have to put on my more serious hat and pick a combination of songs that I like and are fantastic, because after all this is all about me - but also songs that are generally liked too and that other people will enjoy. Gives me something to think about and list this week! Although theoretically I've been doing that the last couple of weeks anyway ...

Improving Mundane Tasks

I admittedly spend most of the time trying to avoid mundane tasks and procrastinate around them instead. However, sometimes I need to actually make the effort - and try my best at the same time to make them fun where I can.

How do I do this, you may ask? Well, let us take cooking as an example. When cooking, I will typically have music on. Because I am a strange person I will therefore spend most of my cooking time actually dancing around the kitchen as well as cooking - before you know it, the meal is ready.

Tonight I took this to an altogether new level of awesomeness. Instead of having your typical music playing, I was instead cooking to the action theme from the latest series of Doctor Who. This gave it a worrying level of fun and comedy. I seriously suggest you try it.

That Friday Feeling

Today was once more a successfully completed Friday, which in turns marks another successfully completed week. Today, in fact, also marks exactly three years since I began my working life. Strange, doesn't feel anywhere near that long! Yet at the same time, it also feels like I've been working forever!

In another bizarre demonstration of how time flies, this weekend is also the last weekend before Rachel arrives back in the UK, having been on her travels for nearly a year! That'll be both really weird and really fantastic. In other weekend news, this weekend will not be when I get my new computer, as it's not been built yet. I anticipate next weekend now, and will be very disappointed it if it isn't considering the estimated 8-10 days and this coming weekend allowing for a total of 14 working days.

As I'm sure you were all concerned, my knee feels a lot better today but still mollycoddling it - so we'll see how it does tomorrow and may give it a bit of a run out then.

Pitiful Run

This post title is both accurate and a terrible pun. I started my plan yesterday with high hopes; however, I have done something quite painful to my knee to the extent that walking with any speed was quite inconvenient. With this in mind, I decided that a run today only to try and prove a point would be a needless exacerbation of whatever is troubling my knee and cause more issues in the long run.

So after a grand total of ONE DAY, my September Challenge fails - not due to my own motivation, surprisingly, but instead due to my knee. I wouldn't have actually bet on either of those endings!

To return to an frustratingly frequent yet irritating theme, I have to have a bit of a rant at the expense of the Evening Standard. This morning, there was an impressive serialisation of Steven Hawkings' newest book on the front of the Times. I read a snippet while waiting for my train - it seemed impressive. An outline of how laws such as gravity would on their own be sufficient for matter to coalesce, for spacial, solar and planetary bodies to be formed.

If this is the case - and being the world-leading expert on this, I suspect Hawkings would be the best placed to say so - it's a pretty momentous thing, laying down the foundations of the universe. Sadly, the only mention of this in the aforesaid paper this evening was the headline 'Vicar rejects Hawking's God theory'. Not only is this a truly bizarre way of reporting this story, but you do wonder on the credentials of said vicar to have such a knowledge of theoretical physics to be able to discredit the theory. Especially only based on a section of the book!

I suspect this one will be cropping up a lot more in the near future. For myself, I may get a copy of the book and try and understand the theories and think on it a bit before forming an opinion.

Not that I really need another book to read when I already have a queue, mind you, but I'm always interested in something new!

September Challenge

This is a random decision to make, however, I have decided that I will issue myself a September challenge. Mainly because today is the first of the month, and I need some motivation to push myself on things.

This challenge is twofold as follows:

1. I will, without fail and without excuses, go for a run every day. A proper run around my official 2-and-a-half-mile circuit. Stopping to wheeze is permitted.
2. I will, without fail and with excuses making up the bulk of the topics, post a blog post every day. This is nowhere near as challenging as the first, but at least some of them have to be interesting.

Besides that, there's nothing more to it. I will try my usual things of being social and/or being better with eating, but these are two definitive and measurable goals that I can - hopefully - achieve.

This post marks the first day successfully completed. On to the second!