A strange bike advertising the Mountain Biking World in Fort William. The whole town was covered in them when we got there to pick up supplies.

*Disclaimer - This is written for my memory in the years to come and for the nosey folk. I don’t blame you if you get bored after the first paragraph *

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In in Sweden on my ‘honeymoon’ and its damn cold at night but very nice during the day. Seems like a cross between Amsterdam, London and Moscow from what I’ve seen so far.

And another thing. I thought there was an international standard for keyboards. Well I know there wasn’t but apart from cyrilac Iäve never had to try and use another one. Alt GR + 2 for an @ symbol?

Overall the year’s been good but I don’t think I’ve ever had such a rollercoaster of a ride in my life.

February seen the mother of my children & I say ‘I do’ in front of our family and friends in a church. The Old Parish Church in East Kilbride was the only church I would agree to be married in and we managed to have a fun day. Many folk didn’t know quite what to think when the pink hummer turned up with the bridal party in it, but it fitted the day perfectly. And beside we couldn’t fit the bridal party into anything else without breaking the bank for 3-4 cars for them. The night ended with our babysitters backing out at the last minute and my parents taking #2 son for the night leaving us with #1 daughter sharing the bridal suite with us as well as the 8-9 folk that came back for more drinks after the bar shut and everyone else went home. It was a good day.

In April I started my new job at work. With the civil service headcount cuts hitting the service sectors pretty hard we were hit bad. It was something like a 33% job cut across departments from the service staff. So effectively we ended up with something like a 40% cut from our division. After reapplying for my own job as well as several other posts I ended up with nothing. Not even a temporary post to see me through until I could find something else with DFID. Eventually after my line manager pushed for me to be reconsidered I ended up with a 12 month temp post which is almost up and yet again I have nowhere to go.

At the end of May I struggled through a chest infection which wasn’t killed off by the antibiotics I was put on. It eventually spread to the lining of my heart and on the evening of the 3rd June I spent the night in pain. It felt as though someone was sitting on my chest and I struggled to breath. After painkillers I eventually got some sleep but it came back during the bus trip to work. Thankfully/unfortunately the hospital is directly across the road from my workplace so a quick call to my office saying I may be late as i was getting it checked out in A&E was the order of the day. Two hours later I was still in the hospital high on morphine with my ECG results showing a possible minor heart attack. Turns out I had a dose of pericarditis and spent the night in the hospital. It was another 4 months before I was back at work and I’m still feeling the pain at times even now. In fact my echocardiograms and ECG’s have still been coming back with abnormalities.

Apart from a few days last December to London we have never been on holiday as a family. In July we finally managed it when we went to France on a camping trip. Health problems seen us return home a few days early but it was well needed and very much enjoyed by everyone.

In October I got a dose of the flu. you might not think that as being notable but as I had never had my bloods checked after all my problems they ran a full panel of blood tests on me. The results came back with elevated bilirubin levels which couldn’t be explained and so I was off painkillers and alcohol until very recently. Three blood tests later and the results are still elevated but dropping, and all the specific tests and ultrasound haven’t found out what’s wrong. I’m a medical conundrum.

It sounds like I’ve had a bad year but I’d disagree. I’ve enjoyed my year. 

I’ve finally got a computer I can turn off and not have to worry about it maybe not turning back on again!

Thanks to my lovely wife I bought one of these a couple of weeks ago.

And it was finally delivered yesterday. No longer do I need to use an old 14″ CRT after my flatscreen blewup. No longer do I need to fight with the on switch to get it to boot up. No longer do I have to fit all my computer time into the space of breakfast and dinner.

The thing is a beast though. Its a mid range version of a mid range model so whilst its got a few bells and whistles they are very basic. Nothing as fancy as Vonnies XPS laptop at any rate despite it having similar specs. What makes it a beast however is that I’ve went from being used to a 13″ laptop to a 17″ widescreen laptop. The keyboards got a bloody number pad its that wide! I don’t actually think it will fit in any of my laptop bags.

Anyway it runs games at higher resolutions and at higher frame rates than my desktop which I’m surprised by but its certainly not something I’m going to complain about. It won’t be running the latest games but anything I have to throw at it just now it will handle with ease.

Now to get a decent mouse for it.

So we’ve finally managed to track down my echo results. Apparently they were returned on the 9th September and they’ve been kicking about the system since then. My doc asked for the cardiologist to see me and finish things off which was nice. What wasn’t so nice was that whilst my echo came back as clear for the symptoms of pericardiatis it also showed abnormal septal movement which my doc wasn’t sure he should tell me.

So now I’ve got to wait until the hospital get back with an appointment. This wouldn’t be so bad but the doctor also said that I shouldn’t go anywhere near a gym or do anything more that a brisk walk or swim for exercise. All those nights dancing or playing with the kids in the street apparently weren’t good for me. Who’d have thunk it?

We all went down to see Stephanie and Gary’s new baby today. We handed in a few presents and went for lunch in a nearby pub. I don’t know if its my health problems or what but these last few nights I’ve not really been sleeping well until last night when I slept like a log. I’m still shattered though and my chest is really tight which it hasn’t been for the last week or so. I had an enormous appetite though which I think has worked against me today.

So yeah the chicken… I got the kingsize chicken combo for lunch which consisted of 2 bits of corn, 2 chicken breast piripiri style, 2 chicken kebabs, 4 southern fried style strips and a big plate of chips. I think it worked out at about one and a half full chickens or there abouts. So not only was I tired but I was stuffed as well. If it wasn’t quite sunny today I’ve have thought it was christmas day and I was feeling the effects of having stuffed my face all lunchtime.

The whole house has been zombified because of that food this evening

The blog over at Entrecard is running an experiment to see just how big a site can get with just using Entrecard as a means to promote it. I’m very tempted to to try and run my own experiment alongside it.

My own problem is that entrecard doesn’t really have many blogs in my particular niche so it may not quite work as well as some of the more well used niches.

Time will tell I suppose.

I’ve got a couple of new blogs/websites starting up soon but I’ve been thinking about them over the last few days. I currently struggle with my portfolio thanks to limited time when I’m at work and whilst I’m not actually working just now I’m finding myself with even less online time. Where am I going to get the time to update them all?

It’s going to come down to a posting schedule massacre I think. I used to try and post once a day from my other blogs if I could help it but I would always make sure I had a new post ready to go at least every second day. I think they only way I’m going to be able to keep this up is if I change that to at least a post a week and if I get more written up then great. I’ve just never been one for following blogs that update that infrequentely though.

Thankfully though the existing blogs can all survive on a post a week as they aren’t news related. They’ve actually went the last month or so with only a handful of posts but they are still getting hits and people are still commenting on them even though I’m not posting anything new.