Hey guess what

  No surprises today in that we went shopping. We only went to get some cinnamon buns to use for my birthday but ended up going to half a dozen shops and getting some other things. One of the best things about this shopping trip? Knowing that there is a Lego shop going to open in the mall we went to. Exciting news, well at least for me.

  This morning also involved cleaning up the path around the pool. It has been a while (in the four years or so kind of while) that it has been completely cleaned of leaves and debris. I used our big blower/sucker thing and ended up with something like 7 bags full of stuff. At the end of though I had a nice dust tan all over. Incredibly messy work to say the least with that much stuff being sucked up and blown around. At least you can easily walk all the way around the pool again now with not too much crap in the way.

  One other important thing to note. For lunch both my wife and I had a cookie. Yes one cookie (each). We didn't want much and saw a nice cookie shop in the mall. The one I had was a chocolate fudge dipped one. The icing it was dipped in ended up being thicker than the actual cookie, it was hard work towards the end biting through that much basically pure sugar.

  Less than 2 weeks until I become an official old man and must declare myself middle aged for sure. Still feels so weird knowing I'm going to be that old, you never feel like your age in the end. All it is is you as you always were (near enough) but with more experience and a little less physical ability.

  Oh, one final piece of important and good news. My old school friend who is undergoing chemo had some news this week. He had a PET scan to look at how things are going. They basically could not find the tumours anymore on the scan. The difference in the scans is quite striking. They are going to have to do a biopsy to try and find anything cancerous. Brilliant news really. He only needs to finish his 4th through 6th chemos and if it is still clear then they are going to declare complete remission and treatment success. I'm very happy for him.

15 things

I'm just going to write a list here and present it without further comment.

1. Galaxy chocolate
2. Confidence to talk to people
3. Pushed my career forward
4. An amazing body to admire
5. 20 happy years
6. Someone to look forward to coming home to every day
7. Amazing sex
8. Pursue my hobby as much as I want
9. Introduced me to our lovely wonderful cats
10. Opened my eyes to more of the world
11. CFD Pepsi
12. Untold delicious meals
13. A person to feel safe with
14. The joy of shopping
15. My first kiss

Missing and remembering

  My wife is very sad at the moment. She is missing something that was in her life and is now seemingly not. It is hard to console her since there is very little I can do about it, I just need to comfort her and be there for her. I want to give her what she wants, I always want to do that but not everything is in my control so it is hard. I've tried my best to protect and look after her, make sure she knows she is loved by me but I can't make other people do things.

  It feels like those situations when you can see what is happening but are helpless to do anything about it. Either you are half a world away from where the thing is happening, are frozen with fear or are simply physically unable to do anything about what is happening. It is one of the more frustrating things in life, the inability to fix what you know is broken and wrong.

  I just want my wife to know she is loved and wanted. I feel that is all I can do right now.

This made me laugh

  Saw this earlier, serves them right for setting off fireworks with pets just hanging around.

Old man club

  I can feel things starting to slow down a bit physically every now and then. It is the aging process finally catching up with me, I can't do some things I used to do in my teens and twenties. I can still do a lot physically but I notice now and then that I get sore more easily from doing things. The reality of growing older and having things actually get worse and not better is now upon me and it is slightly scary to be honest. I think I need to take up what our cat Fudge has done and just enjoy lazing around in various comfy positions.

Playing stuff

  Not much to say right now, work is busy, life is carrying on, getting older by the day. I've been replaying some old games and just finished Red Dead Redemption last night. I then decided to throw in Uncharted 2 and was immediately reminded just how fun that game is, from a playing standpoint but also from the interaction between the characters in it. It is making me look forward to Uncharted 3 even more to see where they can go next with this.

  As for the movie adaptation of these games, if they get it right it could be a lot of fun to watch. Nothing too cerebral but very enjoyable.

  With those profound thoughts to start the day off (well, carry on starting the day since it is almost 4 hours in to it for me now) I'm off to work out why someone yet again broke some code.

Global stuff

  Peoples tastes are very particular but some things end up being more region based. Others are quite often country wide and some others still seem to tickle the fancy the world over. Given where the hits come from for one particular picture post I did it seems that Nigella Lawson is someone who is popular all over the world. There are very few countries in the world where I have not got hits on that picture post. Also it is interesting to note that this woman is now 51, beyond what some people seem to consider the cutoff age for someone being attractive (I've seen people talk that once someone is in their late 20s they are past it...)

Lay in

  Some days I wish I could just lay in bed until I'm ready to get up. I don't think it is the fact that I get up so early, since the days when I do lay in I generally do get up any later than 7 or 8 in the morning. I think it is the fact that I must go to sleep and get up at exact times that bothers me. I wish I could live a more free form life if that makes any sense? So much of what I do is being at certain places at certain times to do certain things. I would much rather just do things as they take my fancy when they take my fancy.

  I think this includes the whole I must be in the office and do 8 hours of work during the day every day from Monday to Friday. I would find it easier if I could just get some work done, having worked the equivalent of my required hours and do it when I want to. So much of what I do has no fixed time to get it done other than as soon as possible and virtually all of my interactions with my work colleagues is via IM and online that I don't see why this should be a problem. Work however still thinks that being physically in the same place is required even though us engineers are spread out over 4 different places in 4 different times zones in 2 different countries.

Choosing

  I've been trying to chose something recently. Basically thinking of a name that I would give a daughter if I had one. It is not an easy thing to do since a lot of names I think of immediately remind me of someone I've known over the years. Then I realise I don't want to use a name just because it reminds me of someone.

  I want a name that would give this theoretical daughter confidence in herself (a strange thing to be honest but it is important to me) and not some kind of name that she would be annoyed by in the long term. It is such a simple thing potentially but fraught with ideas and thoughts since it ends up defining someone in the end even if this someone is never going to exist.

  Anyway, that is the main thing on my mind right now. There are names I like but they are also used by other people that I don't want my "daughter" to be associated with. Frustrating.

RDR

  I've been replaying Red Dead Redemption a bit over the last few days. I just got to the bit where you cross over a big river from the USA to Mexico while chasing the man you are hunting down.

  I should mention the sound design and music in this game. It really helps create the atmosphere the game has from the almost silent prairies with only the odd animal sound to the really booming thunder when there is a storm.

  Anyway, the point in me bringing this up is that there are a few points in the game where you get a song played. The most unexpected is when you first arrive in Mexico. You get on a horse and start riding up a hill then over the top and see the huge canyons before you. The song that plays is this one. It is surprisingly effective. I've tried to find a good video that also demonstrates what you see when it happens but nobody seems to have recorded a decent version of it.

Tired

 So so tired right now, another non stop day of work with the odd bit of trying to get personal business done in between. Nearly home time but stretches of work like this while productive really drain me in the end. Thank god for some time off for my birthday in a couple of weeks.

Wednesday's Woman

  It has been quite a while since the last of these (which incidentally gets so many random hits from around the world it is now my top blog post) but this one is woman is very important to me. Only my wife and I know who she is and she doesn't have a name (yet). And yes, she is a she.

Gestures

  My wife gave me something on Monday. It was a very symbolic gesture that means the world to me. It is one of the most important things she has done for me, other than agreeing to marry me that is :) . It is hard to put in to words to describe how it makes me feel but suffice to say she is my one and she always will be.

11 hours later

Just got home after waking up at my usual time this morning and finally have a moment to slow down and rest. Not sure how today became do non stop but the list of things to do just didn't seem to shrink. From an initial triage of bugs when I got to work to three different design discussions later everyone wanted to pick my brain today.

Despite all that though I actually feel like I accomplished my own work today which in itself is rare. The best part of today however is right now. Well right after I finish typing up this on my phone. The part where I get to sit down with my wife and wind down at the end of the day.

On a side note, wished my friend going through chemotherapy a happy 40th birthday today. Hope he sees many more.

Strange dreams

  I don't remember my dreams much, it is rare I wake up realising I have even dreamed about something. The last week though I've actually remembered some of them. Lets recant some of them shall we?

1. In one dream I was building a Lego set only to notice that you had to buy two separate sets to complete the model. As in the instructions in the second set picked up where the first set finished. To top it off I somehow had only the second set so was missing lots of Lego. My completionist OCD side kicking in there I think.
2. In another I was in a forest for some reason doing god knows what. As part of that though I was avoiding spiders (big jumping tarantula sized ones) and climbing around in the tress. No idea what that dream was about.
3. Last night was stranger still. I was on a cruise liner which started having problems and sinking. Then it got stranger where another liner came to help but just started bashing in to the sinking one sideways. Then they both tipped over and I was stuck between the two liners. Then we reached some form of small rock island with a lighthouse on it. The lighthouse keeper hit the alarm (why he had an alarm I don't know) and the lighthouse then started shooting lasers from its light at all the passengers in the water so I had to hide to escape around the back of a rock. I'm not sure how I escaped in the end but I did.

  So there we go, just an assortment of what is going on in my head recently while I sleep. Looking forward to whatever weirdness comes in the next few days.

Day go zoom

  Feeling very brain dead at the moment. I've been at work almost 6 hours and it has been non stop since I started. Really need to get some food soon or my brain will shut down. Luckily though a few more hours and I can get out of here and I'm done for another week.

  It is so annoying that so much time can pass while doing work and you don't realise it, so much time I could be doing better things than sitting here earning money like sitting with my wife relaxing. Can anyone spare a few million dollars so I don't have to go through the tedium of earning them? Thanks muchly.

Strange cat

  Here is a picture of Daisy. She has taken to laying around like this a lot recently. She will crawl under something, the sofa, the media cabinet, this piece of furniture in the picture and just lay there with her back half sticking out. Sometimes it is just a bit of her tail but she seems to get some comfort from lazing around underneath something or in some form of confined area to crawl in to.

  She is a fairly small skinny cat so she can get in to some very tight spots around the house. I found her in the back of one of our kitchen cupboards the other day, the one with a big pullout drawer with all out pots and pans on it. The drawer was pulled out so she had climbed in and sat down behind the drawer at the back of the cupboard. She was quite happy there and did not want to come out.

  We shall see how many more places she decides to make her own little private hiding space. We never had this happen with the older boy cats since they are so large. The girls though are much more normal sized, Daisy especially since she is so skinny.

Project planning

  Some strangeness with project planning going on here at work. I've got a task I need to do. It was originally planned to start in October. It got moved in though so we could finish the project sooner. I started work on it this month and it is due to be finished later this week. However the planned date of finishing it is now some time in September. Confused yet? Yeah me too. When you look at the overall plan it shows up as late, negative 66 days late. WTF? So I am so early with this that I am late?

  We employ a guy full time to deal with this stuff (since our project altogether involve about 500 to a 1000 different tasks) so that all of the various people and their progress can be tracked so we get a rough idea when we will be done. If this is how we plan though god help us.

Waiting around

  Did a fair bit of waiting around today. Mostly in the doctor's office where my wife spent 4 minutes seeing him almost 2 hours after her actual appointment time that we were there in time for. Then we went to the DMV and is was actually quite pleasant. We had booked an appointment before and we got everything done (my license renewal and an ID card for my wife) in less than 30 minutes. Kind of funny though all the poor saps sitting around waiting to be seen since they hadn't booked an appointment.

  Seems strange that I've not been to the DMV for a decade, basically two license renewals done without actually going anywhere near an office. The downside is that my nice full head of hair picture on my license will be replaced with my more receding and slightly gray hair I have now. It also says I'm a little bit lighter than I actually am although I'm proud to be within 10 pounds of my weight from 13.5 years ago when I first filled in my US drivers license application.

  As usual you get all sorts of strange people in the DMV. From the guy who had just taken the written test and complained about having to know what to do when he had kids in the car when he didn't have any kids to the other guy that had to come in a retake his test since he got a DUI (idiot). I can see how DMV workers get annoyed with the amount of idiocy they must deal with every day although 2 of the 3 people we talked to were actually nice and chatty.

  Yet again people had a hard time believing the picture on my wife's green card is actually her. It is from 11 years ago and she is so different now than then. No to mention her passport which she also had with her as an alternate form of ID which still looks a bit different as well. In the end though they accepted it and took a copy. Luckily we won't have to use those for too long, we are going to do the US citizenship application thing after the trip for my birthday next month.

  Been a busy day all around, fair bit for work going on along with the doctor and DMV. Just need to wrap up one thing for work and I should be done for the day after being up early as usual (well 6am, not as early normal but still early) and getting most of my work done before people turn up in the office.

  One final note, only 30 days left of my thirties. From then on I'll be in my forties, gulp.

Random musings again

  Some random stuff to start the week off:

• After doing a fair bit of towing with the caravan I really appreciate people who know how to merge. Pulling on to the motorway at 40mph when most of the traffic is doing 60 to 70 is doing it wrong people. If you do that in front of me I need to slow down a lot and it takes a lot for me to speed up again.
• After not playing a game on my phone for the weekend much I've dropped from number 2 in the worldwide leaderboard to number 9. Time to get playing and get back up there.
• While shopping with my wife this weekend she got excited a couple of times in that "ooh ooh" kind of way. When she does this she squeezes my hand subconsciously. It is kind of cute :) .
• I can't believe we know have a 12 year old cat. It was Boots' birthday yesterday. Only seems like a little while ago we got him and he was this bundle of energy that would attack and moving thing (including his brother) all day.
• Still playing with Lego, a kit I got for free (well effectively, ebay money from spending money on ebay :| ) turned up over the weekend and I quickly put it together. Still lots of fun to do those.
• Starting to plan my wife's birthday for next year. Given how much planning she is doing for my 40th next month I need to do quite a bit to match it I think. She deserves it though.
• Looking for a new game to sink my teeth in to. Finished everything I have pretty thoroughly although I did start replaying Lego Pirates yesterday in order to try and get 100% on it after it glitched out the first time I played it. We'll see though, not much new coming out in the summer as usual.
• Going to wish a friend here at work happy birthday today, he is the ripe old age of 33 although he looks way older (major hair loss). He is one of those weird types who actually go to work on their birthday. Is it that hard to take a day off?
• Getting annoyed trying to actually finish this post since work keeps interrupting, yes even at 7am in the morning (when I started this post) until 8am now I get asked questions. Gah, I need to be dumber and not know so much :| .

  That's all for now, going to go tell my wife I love her and then try to get some of my own work done.

Shopping

  Away in the caravan this weekend and we've done a lot of shopping. Something like 15 different purchases in the end from all over the place. We visited a lot more places than that as well since we didn't always find what we were looking for.

  The air conditioning in the caravan works really well as well since it is hot out here. Inside though it is quite lovely and liveable if a little noisy from the air blowing in. We have taken a couple of dips in the pool here as well to keep cool, not too many other people being in it at the same time meant we had a huge pool pretty much to ourselves.

  In a bit of stunning planning the Chinese take away place we had planned to get food from last night wasn't actually open on Fridays... Go us. So instead we drove around a bit and found a different one. We ordered a few things and this huge box of food was presented to us. I keep forgetting portions in this country are ridiculous. We have enough food for last night, tonight and another night with maybe a snack left over. Mostly good all round though although our local Chinese place does do one of the dishes better.

  Better post this now, using the free one hour of wifi at the RV place which is a bit slow (1Meg down, barely 200k up, ugh) and I'm not too sure when I'll get kicked off since it seems a bit temperamental.

First and last

  Just watched the last space shuttle launch sitting at my desk at work. Quite different from watching the first on a little black and white TV at school during lessons all those years ago. Also I suspect we saw a hell of a lot more detail in this one than the first one live as it happened. Watching the tank separation in real time is an amazing thing when you think about it, especially when it is from the point of view of the tank itself.

 Anyway, back to work so I can get out of here early to go away in the caravan for the weekend.

Remembering where you were

  Saw this trailer about Margaret Thatcher this morning. The actress gets fairly close to how she was although the accent is off slightly. The main thing I remember about Margaret Thatcher though is that when she left office I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news. There are a few things in your life that impact you in that way, events that when they happen you can still clearly remember your exact place in the world. As PM she had such an impact on my life, being in power basically throughout all my teenage years from being in school to at university, that when she finally left it was a relief. Not that the people that came after her were much better, she just stood out so much compared to most other people around her.

  I can think of only a few other things that have happened in my life that I know exactly where I was so it seems strange that this was one of them. The most important ones of these are to do with my wife however, I can remember those very clearly.

My wife rules

  Just wanted to say my wife rules. She is finding me pictures of other women. Yeah :-) .

Gaming pet peeve

  Just wanted to get something off of my chest about games. I was playing one of my free games from PSN last night after having finished Infamous 2 again the other day. The game is basically a zombie survival shooter game where you kill literally thousands of zombies trying to get through the level. However one thing it relied on was the concept of monster closets. Every time you got to a new area and engaged a group of zombies a whole bunch of zombies would suddenly appear behind you from an area where you had slaughtered everything in sight. You could tell exactly when they were going to trigger and it made the game just a bit of a chore to go through the levels. The game is fun enough in its own right but it became predictable what was going to happen. Game designers need to get beyond this one trick which this game along with a few others in the past use too much in order to create difficulty in a game.

  Anyway, just something that annoys me about games that I wanted to get out there.

Sign you are old

  Just took a look through the coin change in my pocket. Out of all the coins in there only 2 are older than me and one of those by just a year. That is a sign you are getting on in years when even long lasting coins are no longer older than you.

  Don't get me started on how much I have to scroll to select my birth year when getting past an age gate on a video.....

Posting

  When I'm at home like today I don't feel the need to post so much. When I'm with my wife I would rather just be with her, being doing something with her around or just whatever. I don't feel the need to interact with anybody else as strange as that seems. She becomes everything to me and hence I don't see the need to talk to whoever ends up reading this.

  Why am I posting this now though? Well my wife is taking a nap and so I can't talk to her or do something with her. We were up early to go see the hot air balloons take off from a local park which happens every independence day.

  And to my wife who will read this when she gets up. I love you and hope to spend all my time I have with you.

Beach day

  Not much to say today, went to the beach, photographic evidence being lower down in this post. Picked some strawberries and olallieberries which my spell checker thinks isn't a word but it is damn it even if I only heard about it today. Then some more beaches (at least two more I think), including one where the wind was strong enough that it felt like the hairs on my legs were being sand blasted off. That beach did supply the funniest moment of the day though with a little boy losing his beach ball to the wind as it got blown across the entire beach, across the creek by the beach, across the beach on the other side of the creek, almost up the sand dune on the road before finally coming to a rest in some driftwood. It provided a mighty chuckle to me and my wife as this poor kid looked so forlorn, he tried to chase the ball for a bit. In the end the mother had to go fetch it and bring it back.

  Anyway, despite a fair bit of driving (the route we took is a single lane road through the hills) in traffic we got there and actually saw the sun as well which is rare for the coast there. It can be cloudy and foggy quite a bit. Just got in from a splash in the pool to cool off and now I'm going to collapse in a heap and think about something to scoff for dinner.

Accomplished day

  Managed to get quite a bit done today and it is not even 4pm. Got up and attacked the big purple bush out in front of the house I've shown a picture of before on this blog. We managed to rip it down very quickly (like in 30 seconds). However stuffing it in to the garden waste bin (which we filled), the normal rubbish bin (which we didn't quite fill) and the back of the car with the seats down (which we did fill) we got it cleared away in the end. One quick trip to the rubbish tip and you wouldn't even know the bush was there (other than the little bits of debris left and the slightly mucky pillar we couldn't quite scrub clean).

  What was all that in aid of you ask? Why to put a different plant there of course. Trying to grow a plant my wife really likes instead, a wisteria. Hopefully it comes out the right colour since it isn't budding in the right colour at the moment.

  Then to the important and longest part of my achievements today. I managed to build a complete 1204 piece Lego set of the space shuttle. It took a little bit of organising at first which my wife helped with since when the set arrived the other day I simply opened up all 17 bags of pieces and emptied them in to the same box :-) . It took all afternoon but I got it completed and luckily the one piece I was missing (well they put the wrong colour of that piece in the box) was on the outside so I can fix it later. Here are a few pictures of the end result.

  My wife was very patient with me as I did all this. She sorted out blocks, found ones I couldn't find and hoarded other blocks to play with herself as I built it :-) . I'm pleased with the end result although I did it faster than I thought I would. The end result is damn good and quite large to say the least.

  Now I just need to do the other small set my wife got me that turned up today. Yes more Lego is in my future.