Motor Control II

I don't think I should be allowed near food or drink. I don't seem to be having very much luck with it recently.

This evening I was sampling a delicious Capri-Sun beverage, as pictured here. Bursting with natural oranges, and such, and sporting some kind of funky sports top ideal for the busy olympic athlete such as I.

It was indeed very orangey, and the ideal accompaniment to my evening sandwich. But while engaging in this smörgåsbord of fine dining, I noticed that the packaging seemed to have an interesting effect of crumpling up as I drank. Perhaps the space-age doobry on the end was some kind of one-way valve, allowing easy refreshment to pour out, but no air to return into the package - ideal for the busy spaceman such as I.

I experimented, as any good scientist would do, blowing air into, and sucking air out of, the package. It seemed to retain its shape no matter what I did. Curious. There's obviously some kind of funky action going on here, I thought, and as a result I came to the conclusion that this must be some kind of spill-proof top or something.

Testing the thesis, I cupped my right hand (to catch any small droplets of juice which may leak if the experiment fails) while tipping the alien technology packaging with my left. It's not long before I discover two things. One - there is nothing space-age about this packaging at all and if you tip the juice, it comes out. Two - a cupped hand is no place to store orange juice, even when poured gently, let alone gushing out of its low-tech packaging, as it is currently doing. Where are NASA's rocket scientists now, eh?

Result - orange juice everywhere. T-shirt soaked. Trousers soaked. Underwear soaked. Juice on chair. Juice on floor.

Forget the sharp objects, I clearly shouldn't be allowed near anything. Complicated foods like crackers and cheese are one thing, but if I can't even handle orange juice, I'd better give up any thoughts of being allowed near any kind of food ever again.

Highlights of a Hundred: New Readers Start Here

Note from October 2008: Most of these links don't work because they're pointing at the old AOL Journals pages where this blog used to be. I'll update them to point to their new locations soon. :-)

It's not for me to examine my own navel, but upon discovering that this would be my 100th blog posting, it put me in a mood to somehow celebrate the occasion. And what better way by looking back on my so-far illustrious career in blog-type-entertainment?

It was on September 10th 2006 that things started, with me noticing as I do that my blog had been viewed 8 times before I had even written a single word. Clearly a good sign, and more than a year on, I can report that AOL's blog counter is no more reliable now than it was then. It has reset itself back to '0' at least twice this year already, thus leaving me unable to measure the audience in any meaningful fashion. Ho hum.

It was not long before I was paying attention to how gorgeous I am, albeit strictly in a virtual kind of sense, before moving to the always good-value subject of Lies My Parents Told Me (Volume One), which reminds me that don't think I ever did get around to Volume Two and the delightful story of the tomato. Then again, I might have done so and just forgotten it - I have lots of things to think about after all and sometimes there is not enough room between my ears.

Attempting some 'lifestyle blogging' about infeasible smoothies was very Daily Mail and entirely a disaster that I didn't see fit to repeat. Then the first in a long range of mental musings set more of a pattern for what was to come. All this and I'd only been blogging for a week, too.

That seemed to jinx things and the next week went entirely unblogged apart from the recycling of The Ridiculous Frog Song and, the very same day, my hilarious take on how 3-2-1 worked which I will still admit to being rather pleased with. Trouble was soon to follow as I wondered how to feed myself when Tesco's website was down or how I would ever play the piano again as a unidexter.

Not bad for a first month's work, soon followed by many other entries not entirely worthy of mention, although the hilarious battery story is always a crowd-pleaser, and might explain why I was still single. Luscious Ladies clearly overlooked the fact that I invented blogging but then again back then my bedroom was such a tip that I couldn't have invited them upstairs for coffee even if I'd wanted to. I was lucky to see anyone at all, even a greasy Talk Talk salesman who I really should have gone all John-Smeaton on. But hindsight is always 20/20.

My grand plans to mess with people's clocks came to nought, but at least there were reasons to be cheerful - of course, talking about how delighted I was by my gas boiler was bound to cause me trouble later. But at least I knew how to fix things like a nerd, which is always an attractive quality. Things were no tidier in November, but that would change later too. Next month I got a dirty email from Amazon, which was always going to be prime blogging territory, and wrote the first of two entries about dreaming, and the start of the incredibly long-running and crowd-pleasing King Of Postage series.

By the new year I was feeling literary, in between trying to tidy up and thinking about Speak & Spell and reading more dirty email. Tidying progress was slow, as this horrifying picture shows, which required the launching of The War On Elastic Bands and its sister conflict, The War On Lightbulbs and non-stop boring updates on Project Tidy. Life indoors is still warm but expensive as I settled in to the realisation that I'd probably be tidying up all year before I got anywhere. Not until much later would I have floor space upon which to dance and swing cats. Even then it did not prevent the blizzard of boring articles about cardboard boxes from coming. :-)

In the midst of all the excitement, I never did find out why Yul Brynner was unavaialble.

Dreaming

I notice that I'm still having persistent recurring dreams about being at school.

This is kind of strange - clearly the highly symbolic and Freudian act of shredding my old school books (inexplicably hoarded for 19 years) has had no effect. So why do these dreams recur?

There's usually some variation in the circumstances surrounding it, but the basic dream generally involves me not being at school. Somehow I'm late, or don't want to go, or haven't been for a while. Either way, I'm absent in a way that I probably shouldn't be.

The other night's dream revolved around these usual themes, although I recall that this time I was about a week away from leaving school for good - but nonetheless I didn't really feel like going. Seeking to back up my decision, I thought about which subjects would be on the timetable if I were to attend today - and of course I couldn't remember what lessons were at what times, or even which room they are in. Which is not surprising, because I left school nearly twenty years ago. Even so, the awkward feeling of not remembering the timetable is also a recurring element of the school-based dreams, even in the ones where I'm actually at school and not bunking off.

I wonder why these themes haunt me. I have similar recurring dreams about trains. Now maybe this makes a bit more sense because on the rare occasion that I do happen to leave the house, I usually travel around by train. Of course, in the dreams, I'm usually at Waterloo, waiting for a train which doesn't seem to turn up, or is on a platform I can't find, or which doesn't actually move, or something like that. If I do manage to board a train that starts moving, it's usually going to the wrong place. Or I'm just not quite sure where it is.

Hmm. There's a common theme here... Not being where I should be, either because of circumstances or my own lax attitude to regular attendance.

Wait, there's a third recurring dream - walking around trying to find a toilet. Outdoors, indoors, up and down stairs and through doors.. lots of doors. And lifts too. Plus, irony of ironies, when I find a convenient convenience, there is usually something wrong with it. The door doesn't have a lock on it. There are other people watching. All things which conspire to preventing the happy pee time which I seek. Of course that's probably a good thing, because when I wake up, I really really want to go actually and for real. That must be why I can't actually go in the dream, because if I ever did find that perfect secluded locked toilet, I'd be wetting the bed, which at the age of 35 is generally considered impolite at best.

I bet other people don't write things like this in their blogs. I wonder if I've got any more pictures of kittens anywhere.

Having It Off

There is a time in every real man's life, when that man is called upon to perform essential menly duties. Today was that day. I have returned, fresh from the fight, in a rugged kind of manner, pleased to report that I'm So Vain I Probably Think That Bonnie Tyler Song Is About Me.

This evening the cooking of my macho manly dinner was disrupted by a kitchen failure. Namely, the oven door would not close in the way that is normally required for efficient cooking of a man's meat. For the purpose of illustration, the door is seen here, screen right, in the silver colour which mine is not, accompanied by cheese and vegetables and lovely worktops which my kitchen does not contain.

A troubling situation. Dinner had to be aborted, replaced at the last minute with that which could be cooked on the top of the cooker. However, this did not mean that the fight was over, no sir.

As the evening rolled around, and the cooker had cooled down, it was probably under the impression that it was victorious. No sir, for into the kitchen I burst, armed with an armful of screwdrivers, ready for revenge. Within moments the door is open and I am looking for screws. Two on the top, two underneath. It probably thought that the underneath screws, being difficult to access, would be enough to save it, but no. Seconds later the cooker is down, on the floor, on its side, where I can access all of its parts with ease. It's not a fight, it's an execution. And it is not long before the door is off and I am examining the strange mechanism by which it stays shut and/or open.

It's a strange little dealie with springs and rollers and stuff. There wasn't a whole lot I could do with it, but jabbing it a few times with a screwdriver at least seemed to restore proper operation for the moment. I did consider spraying it liberally with WD40, but paused once I noted the word "FLAMMABLE" on the tin. Coming to the conclusion that flammable solvents are perhaps not a good thing to have hanging around the inside of your oven, I chose not to use the lubricant. Purely for the wellbeing of the city's women and children, of course, and not because I am scared. If my cooker bursts into flames then I'll have that thing down on the ground again in the blink of an eye, just like John Smeaton.

It seems that a little prodding has made it work right again - the best kind of repair - so I put it all back together again. I also took the time to examine whether the earth wire should be hanging off like that, and during my investigation I was forced to unscrew the wall socket to assist with my enquiries. Also fine.

There are ten million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them. Now where's my dinner..

Duet

I seem to be in a bit of a 'Bee Gees' mood today. After all, Everyone Loves The Bee Gees. I think that might have been the title of one of their albums. If it wasn't, it should have been.

Here's another excellent song which has a certain Bee Gees kind of feel to it. Funny how you can miss stuff at the time and only realise how great something is years later...

I Can Has Lasers?

Last week I needed to print something out. But it would not print. Mr Printer decided that it would really rather prefer me to install a new ink cartridge, and would not co-operate with any plans of printing until this was done.

So I installed a new ink cartridge. I always keep some handy. This pleased my printer enough to cause printing to begin, but at first the result was all streaky and missing bits. This isn't too unusual when you put in a new cartridge, so I told it to go clean its nozzles, as printers often need to do.

After a double nozzle cleaning, all was well, and hoping to print my thing at long last, I was therefore delighted to see a new message appear on the screen.

"Your EPSON printer reports that an internal component has reached the end of its life."

Basically, on an inkjet printer that must be about five or six years old (how time flies), and is therefore unrepairable, this error message means "buy a new one".

No amount of coaxing, of button pressing, of turning-it-off-then-on-again, would get it to play ball. Once the printer has decided that its life is at an end, it cannot be persuaded to play.

I find this annoying. I rather like to find out that household appliances are at the end of their life by some kind of verifiable and obvious means. Loud grinding sounds, sparks coming out of the sides, springs and cogs flying in all directions. That, to me, says "end of life - buy a new one." But for a printer that was working quite well enough just seconds before to suddenly turn up its heels and DECIDE that it had had quite a good innings but that was quite enough, is just not quite in line with how I expect things to work.

The printer could also not be persuaded to release the precious ink cartridge which I had freshly installed in it not moments earlier. Of course there wouldn't be much that I could do with it (unless I had another identical printer, which of course I don't because they don't make them any more) but it is still the point of the thing.

So, reluctantly, I chucked out a perfectly good, yet somewhat self-euthanised, printer, and bought a new one. Not a new Epson printer, of course, or in fact even a new inkjet printer. No. I have taken the opportunity to "trade up" to something more whizzy.

I remember when laser printers used to be expensive and large - but now they're not. So this afternoon a nice man knocked on my door and delivered a nice new HP Laserjet 1020. No ink, just lasers. And toner. It is small and quiet and good, and now sitting on top of my VCR where Mr Epson once spent his time. Not bad for £50, including free delivery. Who wouldn't be delighted by such a bargain?

Of course I keep wanting to print things now, so as to properly play with my new toy. I must resist. But at least I finally printed out that thing I needed a week ago...

Spaceman

Dear Diary,

Having a lovely time tidying up. It's like a giant jigsaw, coming together a few pieces at a time.

On Saturday I moved three storage boxes away from behind my chair. With those boxes out of the way, on Sunday I was able to get to a much bigger old box with stuff piled on top. And once I'd piled through that, on Monday I was able to move the big pile of (flat) cardboard boxes that I bought earlier in the year (but which ended up being really just rather too big and not any kind of aid to tidiness at all.)

So now I can walk to my window, and look out of the window. This is nice.

Of course there's still more to to. In exchange for all this space, I do have more or less a complete wall formed of nothing but storage boxes - but that's not so bad, and it's several hundred times tidier than it used to be. Plus, the storage box is a handy unit of work for the second wave of ruthlessness which is sure to follow in the future.

I'd quite like to move the filing cabinet by the window over to the other side of the room. So if I clear four boxes, I'll have the space to do that.

I like this a lot. There's even more of a "point" to tidying when I can say "I need to do THIS so that I can do/have THAT". It's useful to have a reason to do things.

I've said it before, I'm still not entirely sure what I'll do with myself once I'm fully "tidy" - but then again, given that I've been wittering on about this since last December, I'm sure that this blog's millions and millions of readers will be delighted to have me finally stop wittering on about cardboard boxes all the time. :-)

My Excellent Taste In Music

Just to prove that I'm not completely stuck in the 80s (or late 70s, for that matter), here's something relatively modern which is also good:

Records & Tapes

I had no idea that tidying up would end up making me feel so amazingly old. The process of sorting through long-forgotten things seems to be bringing home to me that before you know it, what was only yesterday turns out to have been half a life away.

Perhaps it's the fact that much of the stuff that fills my spaces is that which was once current, and is now forgotten. I find myself in possession of a fair number of cassette tapes. The things that we used to listen to music on - before MP3 players killed off the CDs that killed off the tapes, that is. I haven't been through them too closely yet, but I can make a fair guess that the vast majority of the cassettes I own are filled with nothing more than harsh electronic squeaking noises - no, not the Pet Shop Boys, but data cassettes for the ZX Spectrum which I once spent so much time with.

Even so, part of my grand tidying up is in making old things all modern and digital, so I've been transferring a lot of tapes to my computer. And these last few days, I've been finding more tuneful tapes of music recorded off the radio, as people used to do. Lots of good songs, in fact, including the one above, which came out in 1977, when I was about five, although I discovered it much later on. But then somehow between the music some cheesy radio jingle will break in.. "Your 1989 power station! 103.2 F-M!!"

1989? Was it really that long ago?

And that's when it hit me. I was seventeen years old. That makes these tapes eighteen years old. These tapes, so normal and useful and everyday at the time, are half a life away, and now almost obsolete.

It's not just cassettes. Maybe the most painful part of the tidying is in finally coming to terms with the fact that a whole lot of my "stuff" is also obsolete. Hundreds of VHS tapes. 45rpm singles. 33rpm LPs.. Even floppy discs, once an everyday essential, have now been taken over by time. So I'm also copying all my floppy discs onto something newer. I must have at least 400 of the things. And for those playing along at home, all the files on 400 floppy discs will fit quite comfortable on precisely ONE CD. Or a USB thumb drive that's smaller than my thumbnail.

Progress IS fantastic. CDs are better. Floppy discs take up a ton of space. It's hard to find things on tapes. But the reminder of how the passage of time can so swiftly turn the everyday into the antique, or worse still, the relic, is just scary.

There's no reason why it should be. As I've occasionally said in the past, there's every reason to believe that there is nothing to fear about getting old. Or at least, older. After all, you pick up some nice memories along the way.

Millions

After one false start, news reaches me that word of my blog has spread far and wide, and that there may now be as many as two people reading, on a good day. Needless to say, if I am to continue to build my ratings, tales of cardboard boxes may not be enough to pack in the crowds. So here's another adorable picture of a kitten:

Please Come Back

"I am hoping you get this... please come back, we miss you."

I haven't been on Second Life for a good long while. I guess I've just not had quite as much time or inclination for it recently.

There are people I know on Second Life - I'm not sure I'd really be as presumptuous to call them "friends" because that's really their decision rather than mine - but in any case I wasn't really expecting my absence to be noticed or for anyone to be particuarly bothered that I was just not around any more.

I'm not quite sure how to take it. I guess on one level it should be nice to be missed - heart-warming somehow to be liked enough that someone realises when I'm not there. Or maybe that too is being rather presumptuous and there is another less ego-flattering reason at play. But on another level.. slightly worrying. Suddenly, more of an obligation, a responsibility.. and even without being there, I might already be making people feel bad.

I do worry about stuff like that. One of those things at the back of my mind which worries me so, the idea that I leave people worse off than I found them.. that somehow as much as I might enjoy people's company, as much as I'd hope to be a fun and decent and useful person to have around... what if I was actually bad for people? What if, overall, without even knowing, I was somehow saying or doing things that actually just upset people? Without even knowing. I'm not sure I could stand that.

It seems I can do it without even being around, and on the occasions when that particular thought has currency, it gives me this terrible urge to run away. Just to disappear, to crawl back into my shell and keep myself to myself and not bother other people any more. Because as much as I do like other people's company, I'm fairly sure that I'd miss them a hundred times more than they'd miss me - if they even noticed at all. As much as it would hurt, sometimes it just seems like the right thing to do, because the idea of upsetting people with something that I did or didn't say, without even realising, is just too painful to bear.

The usual problem is that "friendship", at the risk of being presumptuous again, is that it's just too hard to escape. Inevitably I'll end up saying or doing something which gives people other ways to find me or get in touch, which makes it hard to ever truly disappear, no matter how strong the urge sometimes is. There is no escape, short of moving house - but I guess, no-one's really going to come knocking on my door just because I haven't been on Second Life for a few months. Or at least, I certainly hope not. That would just be too embarrassing.

So as far as Second Life goes, I need to decide - return... or run? Oh, how stupid is this? I wish I was better at this kind of thing. Just not being a complete basket-case would certainly be a good place to start, but I doubt if that's going to happen any time soon.