Don't Annoy Mrs. F.

She really laid into the Credit Card Company who have now, after 20 years with them, been given their marching orders despite them trying to calm her down and crediting her back extra interest they'd claimed after a f*** up with the bank and their internal systems last month that meant we had to do some emergency payments and then they baulked the electronic transfer and charged us again - bunch of shisters. 

So Mrs. F. blew her top at them and when they kept lumping out the same old drivel she told them where they can stick it - good for her.  I've got to run around changing a number of things tomorrow but that's no hardship.  I think we will have a bit of fun with the letter to them telling them how not to keep a customer but then again they have thousands of other customers and losing a long term customer probably isn't too much of a worry to them.  But they are a bunch of tossers and hopefully the new cards and arrangements we have arrived at will see us OK in the future.

Nice one - I'd hate to be on the end of a Mrs. F. Rant :-)  Mind you - you haven't seen me go for someone either - that's exciting too :-)  I remember withdrawing all my funds from a bank as one of the Tellers gave us a funny look as if we couldn't afford a mortgage and said something similar so I withdrew all my savings - that shocked the little pratt when he realised I had enough to buy half the house - so he called the manager and I had much pleasure explaining in a slightly too loud voice about how badly I'd been treated and that the Teller didn't think we would have enough to raise a Mortgage.  He looked stupid, the manager looked furious and I took my money out anyway as a point of order.  Then went around the corner to another bank showed them the cheque and asked if I were to deposit this amount would they consider a chat about a mortgage - you'd be surprised how quickly they responded.

Anyhow - glad she's in bed and not ranting - it was quite frightening :-)

Digitise My Life

Now I have the Server setup for the house and all the back up and stuff working nicely I've decided to take the plunge and put all my music online too.  I've invested in a WiFi bridge and a Speaker system from Sonos which I can operate by PC, Smartphone or one of the girl's tablets.  As it is WiFi I can take it into different rooms and play music anywhere in the house.  It also connects to Internet Radio.  I've missed my HiFi system and I just don't play enough of my stuff on the Surround Sound system which is stuck connected to the TV.

So I'm looking forward to being able to stream my music to any room in the house and to control it by genre, artist etc.  Cool.

Beginning to notice the weight coming off this week - same as last time with the good old love handles going first and the stomach becoming less intrusive.  Still a long way to go but hopefully if I can continue this I can bring my weight down to more acceptable levels.

Feeling OK at the moment which is good.  Haven't been down for a week or so which pleases me.

All Work and No Play

Mrs. F. is once again working on her day off that's twice now and with hardly seeing her at the weekend and (let's not forget) I'm a feature in the house, we still hardly ever see each other.

It's a bit annoying - not that I'm possessive or particularly demanding  in anyway, I certainly don't need attention but it would be nice to spend more than 5 or 10 minutes a week together!  

Somehow I'm feeling that this particular job I'm after isn't the right thing to do for me but it will at least get me out of the house 12 or more hours a day and just leave weekends to sort out.  Perhaps that's not the right way to look at it but it may settle things or start to.

Interview - Maybe

An interesting telephone interview this morning to check that I aligned with some core competencies and now I have to wait possibly a couple of week to see if they will proceed further. Interesting.

The snow is still hanging around and we expect more - it of disrupts loads of stuff and travel is a nightmare.  I will see if we are going to meet tonight - I'd call it off as there will hardly be enough of us to make a quorum I would guess.

Yes indeed we got snow

Nowhere near as bad as we have had before but as usual the railways managed to screw up meaning A had a long journey home and spent over 3 hours by various means to get home and looking at their performance I doubt things will be a lot better when everyone gets back to work tomorrow.  I know I've had some journeys from hell but surely in these days of technology and surely having learnt from the past they are able to actually do something about it.  Obviously not!  In some ways though I shouldn't be surprised.

I have my Interview in about 9 hours time.  The upside is it is by phone so no worries about the weather there.  I have an invite to go for a lunchtime drink too so I may take that up if I feel I have been successful in the interview.  Can you believe it that I re-checked the email they sent me out and the link still doesn't work.  How shoddy is that?  So that's why things don't surprise me any more even top world class businesses have staff that aren't above average I'd say.

I need to get an appointment with my Doctor and with my Dentist and so I'll plan to nail that this week and I've a few other things that need sorting too.  Hopefully I will get around to them soon. 

I worked out that I spent 5 minutes with Mrs. F this weekend and perhaps 15 minutes in total if you include sitting down to lunch as time spent.  She did sit in the living room at one time but read her book and didn't utter a word.  Was she out all weekend?  No of course not for once I was home all weekend so it is a pretty remarkable feat given we were locked in the house that we hardly saw or spoke to each other in all that time!  

Oh well better get to bed so as to be a bit bright and breezy for my interview later.

Snow - Well I guess so

We have some snow but it looks more like Ice will be the issue.  It's been fine snow blown around in very strong winds.  Mind you is has disrupted a lot of the transport system yet again....

I got the next step of my interview process coming up on Monday which is good - a telephone interview this time - again that's good and we will just have to see how it goes from there.  I suppose the results weren't too bad after all?  

The nice thing is that it is conducted on the phone and that means that I don't have to have the stress of trying to get to an appointment when the weather is bad.

Interesting Day Coming Up

It will be interesting to see what they make of my varied test results but today is going to be interesting as I'm catching up with an old work colleague. He has moved down to Rye which is a lovely village in East Sussex - I'd like to live there myself.  I have early memories of family holidays and outings - to nearby Camber Sands where we really did have SANDwiches for lunch :-)

We are expecting some sort of snow event tomorrow and we are getting warned that it will be like 2012 or some other disaster movie but - it's just snow!  A few flakes and the country comes to a standstill!

I am gradually getting my record, cassette and CD collection sorted out and catalogued - I was surprised at how much I actually have.  So far I have over 25,000 tracks on the server!  That was a surprise but, then again, being a DJ many years ago, I suppose I shouldn't be.

The sun is out today but it mush be -4 or -5 out there :-)  So a crisp walk off to lunch...

My general outlook is quite good at the moment and the diet appears to have taken a good inch of perhaps more off of my stomach already so encouraging signs there.

Test Results

Well it's official - I'm a bit on the thick side on one of the tests and a little better than thick on the other one.  Fair enough, let's see if it daunts them to speak to me.

Had a crazy day all around today - I am trying to get my music off of Vinyl, Tape and CD and onto my Server.  This is OK but it is taking a lot of time to do.  I've also now realised that I should be indexing the tracks a bit better and have a piece of software to do that - great - however when you consider that I have close to 26,000 tracks already electronically recorded it is taking me some time to index, re index, merge duplicates etc.

Diet is taking hole nicely now and I'm beginning to get myself into the flow of drinking plenty of water and of eating the same things over and over again - until Saturday that is when I can take a bit of a rest.  I'm out tomorrow to the local pub and so I need to make sure that I'll be on my Red Wine regime and also just have to be careful what I eat.

Feeling quite well and that may be because I've got some things sorted, the diet has started working and other factors.

Not too bad

I only managed about 2 thirds of the numeracy test before it timed out - shame really but the language these people use makes comprehension difficult.  I hate some of the old tosh they come out with but there you go.  It was interesting that I finished the verbal reasoning test in short order - 3 and a half minutes early - I could have gone back and flaffed around I suppose but was happy with most of my answers  - or as happy as I can be.  Mind you like all these things they'll get enough data from the bits I've done to take it to the next stage.

So let's now see if takes 3 months to get an interview....

Finally

We get around to doing these tests - what has it been?  It feels like three months to me - certainly since October I've been waiting on them - unbelievable really.  Anyway - I will make time this afternoon and go through the tests and see how I get on.

It's one of those things that I find surprisingly stressful as I don't tend to work like most people on these sorts of things - I can work quite fast and accurate but these tests, from what I see, aren't really aimed at Program Managers and Directors - they look more like Accountant style questions but hey ho, let's see what they actually appear like on the day.

Just need to get in the zone for them and get no interruptions and noise and as both girls are around and one of their boyfriends I need to make sure they keep out of sight.

Strange Behaviour

I guess I've grown up as an early adopter of technology and so email and spreadsheets and word-processing are familiar every day things I do so it always amuses me when I get emailed something (invoices in this case) and then get them posted to me as well.  I mean why would you do that?  They are so funny and so very quaint.

One of my old bosses printed out every email (or rather his Secretary did) and then he scrawled the responses and let his Secretary answer his emails.  Different - we weren't allowed to do that  but he was - used to make me laugh anyway.

So - what has today been like?  I still feel a little bit hungry which means I just need to adjust my diet to take on board some more food (yes some more).  You shouldn't get hungry at all but you shouldn't over eat either.  It was quite an interesting day today and I managed to do pretty well with the food I had available - tomorrow will be interesting and I'm looking forward to being creative with the same old ingredients.

Monday Diet Progresses

Still a slight headache which I think is normal for changing your diet and shifting the emphasis towards a slow carb regime.  So breakfast this morning was 3 boiled eggs, mushrooms  spinach and Adzuki beans.  Very nice apart from busting an egg over my hands... 

Funnily enough I'm feeling good and got on with a load of treasurer's work this morning counting the money and sorting out cheque in, payments out etc.  We have a dusting of snow this morning and are expecting a lot more later in the day and the week if the Met Office are to be believed - how these people can predict anything with any degree of accuracy amazes me - we were going to have a drought this time last year and it was almost the wettest year on record.  Let's hope our feeble transport system can also cope with the 3 or 4mm of Snow we have at the moment!

Finally got the link through to do my tests - will have a go at those tomorrow I think and see where we go from there.

Also - drinking loads of ice cold water - by product is many trips to the toilet but keeping the bladder irrigated is a good thing of course.

Not So Bad

I cracked on with the diet this morning and so far so good.  I feel a little hungry but then realised that the family meal had no carbs at all so probably where that was missing.

I just need to keep my discipline now and get this weight loss started - I did really well last time and I just need to continue without distraction and follow my plan.

Interestingly enough I've had a bit of a headache today - I don't normally get them - it can be part of the change in diet which is quite sudden.  

Oh well, let's see how we do.

Diet Starts in 5 minutes

Yes indeed I've been out all day on Saturday to two meetings and had two enormous meals and plenty to drink.  I'm definitely ready to start a weight loss programme now and get back to where I was around about April last year.  

Of course it is a matter of just setting out a new way of living and I need to get straight onto the diet in the morning and to make sure that I follow it strictly.  I suppose if it hadn't of been for breaking the habit in April. May and June/July of last year with Dad being ill and all I'd be at least 3 or 4 stone lighter than I am now.  I have a goal to be lighter but I haven't set an ideal weight - I think perhaps I need to think about that in the next week or two.

AT LAST I have the opportunity to complete the tests for the potential job interview.  Diplomatically I could call it a series of unfortunate incidents but really it is incompetence at its worst level.

It was nice to get a lift home in my friends Bentley Continental though :- )  What a lovely car!

Burn's Supper

Well it was very nice indeed and a nice price too considering we had plenty of whisky (malt whisky) to go with the meal of Cock-A-Leekie Soup, Haggis Neaps and Tatties and Plum Duff followed by Chesses and Biscuits.  They even included wine too.

Well - it was just one of those really enjoyable nights and the Lodge members went way knowing that they had put on a great show for us and we had all enjoyed ourselves.

Was nice that Flocky gave me a lift home too as we managed to have a bit of a chat.

Off to bed now and hope to get a good night's sleep - heard bad news today about Wilko Johnson diagnosed with Terminal Pancreatic Cancer.  He is an amazing guitarist and one of the first bands we followed when we were 15 or 16 years old at the local school.  The trouble with Pancreatic Cancer is that it really does have a very poor rate.

It was nice to see some very old friends tonight and we had some chats about "the old times".  It is such a shame that these guys don't get out and about anymore - I enjoyed their company and so it was a pleasure to meet them again tonight.  I suppose I ought to go to them if they can't come to me?

A Lot Better Today

How could it possibly be any worse?  I at least had something constructive to do and went to see a car for my cousin who lives some 200 miles away.  It was a nice trip out and an easily found place and nice little car too.

Back home and going to get ready to go out shortly.  I will probably take a relaxing walk down to the hall and there is a meeting and Burns Supper to be had which I will hopefully enjoy with some of my mates.

I need to motivate myself to get doing things and in some way next week will be good as I will be able to concentrate on getting back on my diet, getting fit and that should also improve my general well being - carrying all this excess weight isn't good for me either.  I'm going to go back to the Tim Ferriss 4 hour body diet which is a modified type of Atkins diet and I hope that it will be equally as good as last year when I did it up until the time of running up and down and seeing my dad.  I just fell out of the habit but this time I think I should be able to stick to it and I also have a strategy to stick to the diet whilst out and about.  It's all about sticking to the plan and last time I did it the pounds just dropped away like magic.  I suppose the only concern has to be if I do end up working in an office environment again quite how I'll work it but I'm sure there are ways around it.

The key thing is to make sure that I have goals to achieve and that I keep myself focussed on them.  

An All around Horrible Day

I have been in a horrible place all day - not I hasten to say the despair and Black Dog of previous years.  No, this is more concerning really it is something to do with what lies ahead and I was in mini panic attack mode on a couple of occasions over things that hadn't happened (and aren't likely to either).  I was able to work my way through things today and that got me through but did warn Mrs. F. of the terrible place I had been and the shortness of breath and suffocating feelings really weren't needed.

It's probably a good thing as a reminder why I'm going on a diet, beginning to sort out getting a job (or not) and all those good things.  I'm surprised that since I got cancer that I'm like this as I didn't expect to be having depression and similar episodes but in my own way I think this is all telling me that I need to stop the procrastination and sort things out one way or the other.  I need to have some uncomfortable conversations.  I've been trying like crazy to make changes but it hasn't really made much difference to me or those around me.  Perhaps it's best just to tackle the problems head on.  Much as I prefer this, most people don't and I realise that I'm clinical, direct and non emotional about things that probably need tact, diplomacy and and a certain amount of political dancing.  Trouble is, the message can be lost that way.  

Tomorrow I'm off on an errand which will be a good distraction to check out a car for my cousin and later in the day I am off to a Burns Supper which will also be nice.  Hopefully I'll be in a better frame of mind at the end of it.

Nasty Start

I feel absolutely horrible this morning.  Just dreadful, I've gone from being really positive this week to suddenly having a mini panic attack in the bedroom and needing to get up and moving.  I had sudden forward flashes of not wanting to attend a couple of meetings due this Saturday to just wanting to be out of the house and breathing properly.

I'm calmed down now - it didn't take long to reason with myself but I'm really emotional and upset now although I feel in control.  I'm guessing I've kicked out an adrenalin surge in a fight or flight sort of way and that's coursing around my body with no where to go.

In many ways the diet can't start soon enough for me - I'm starting this Sunday and neither can the benefits that will bring with a healthier lifestyle, less weight, some exercise and I hope some sort of distancing myself away from these claustrophobia attacks.  These little panic attacks are quite disturbing even though I know them to be based on nothing and have no grounding in fact, they are just something my sub concious is torturing me with.

The Thick Plottens

For such is the strange world that is employment.  Someone wants me to work for them, their HR department are spending an age getting me sorted out for a basic test that is a bit of a laugh as if I didn't have these basic skills (this is normally for graduates) I'd never have the CV and experience I do. I've left them to go internal warfare whilst they sort this out amongst themselves.

I find it amusing that even some of the best names in the industry are as bad as each other.  Corporates are just awful sometimes internally.  I've hated this sort of stuff all my life but hey, they might just give me a job and I might just enjoy it and who knows, it might sort my sorry arse out and stop me floundering around.

I' just wish they'd hurry up and sort themselves out so I can take the damn exams and then get on with the interviews.  

Facing Your Demons

I still think about my cancer every day and it's not what you might think - it's not a self pity thing or anything like that.  It's more how lucky I am and also most of the time it is something reminding me about it but I don't look back to the really bad times or at least not a lot.  Occasionally I get a reminder of those times and whilst I've considered how other people reacted I've never really explored it.

If I can make an observation about people in general (so it is a generalisation).  I find that they tend to assume a lot and don't understand why you aren't grieving (in the case of my dad), in some sort of ecstasy for beating my cancer nor can they understand why my hair didn't drop out with the treatment - so many things are stereotyped and expected and if you "act" outside of the norm they don't get it.  I'm sure that some want you to perhaps deliver some sort of uplifting message for the assembled to take away about how you beat the Big C.  

Today I read a blog from someone who is coming to terms with their imminent demise and how they are combating the pain and how the family members are now beginning to come apart at the seams.  You can't be a hard bastard all the time and despite what you may think, many people have a stake in you, your health and well-being.  I can see his problem and he's talking about funeral details, number of cars, music and all that.  In a way I'd have liked my dad to have left a few notes for guidance but there you go.  I've written some notes myself which are sufficiently woolly so as to allow those left behind to do what they'd like - it's not as if I'm going to be bothered.

I've blanked a lot of the nasty stuff away and hidden it somewhere stored away and try not to remember the operations nor the BCG treatments.  They are the things that saved my life of course and so you can't dismiss them as such but the truth is that they weren't pleasant and added to the stress of the diagnosis they are some of the low points.  I can't say that I was in much pain - some but not a huge amount although the treatments, as I've often said, aren't for sissies.   It also depended on how your body reacted on a particular day as to how you'd feel.  

When I get these flashbacks (for that is how they appear) they are very disturbing indeed.  I don't know if they are exaggerated or whether they are realistic?  I don't recollect if I was just manning up for the treatments and operations or whether they were that nasty and I blocked it out.   What I do know is that they often catch me unaware as did that blog this morning.  Just reading the issue he was having to deal with and suddenly it all came back to me like a wave.  It was quite upsetting and made me feel really sad and a little ill at the same time.