I’ve struggled to write these past few weeks. I never have the time and when I do have the time I don’t have the energy or brain capacity to string a sentence together never mind a full post.

My foot is getting better. I managed to walk for 90 minutes around Calderglen Country Park yesterday without the support on it. My foot was strapped up as best as my hiking boots could manage though and I’m paying for it today. I managed it though without any real discomfort. I’m looking good for my date with a mountain at the end of March.

Calderglen Country Park

Vonnie had it confirmed last night that her contract will not be getting extended so come the end of March we will both be ‘out of work’. By out of work I obviously mean working for ourselves as we should hopefully take over the shop we’re leasing a few weeks beforehand.

Talking of the shop things are progressing. It’s going slowly as every time we think we’ve managed to get over the last hurdle another three or four appear. The latest one involves bank accounts and proof of ID. Basically a lot of the things we need to get sorted NOW require proof of the business address which we can’t do until the lease is signed and in some cases until we get our first utility bill in. I think we’re going to have to get inventive to get past this one.

I breathed new life into my photoblog a few weeks ago but I’m not entirely sure folk know it exists. Trying to work out some way to display the updates on here to catch a few more readers. And yes I did actually take that photo up there!

This is the moment of embarking.
All auspicious signs are in place.

Desirée Delgado @ Flickr

I’ve been looking for writing inspiration for a while now. It’s a habit that has fallen by the way side. In fact if you go back through the years on this blog I’d hazard a guess that the most written about topic is actually about me writing more. If it’s isn’t number one then it’s definately in the top three. So I went about looking for something to give me a nudge for something to write about every day and to be perfectly honest I found absolutely nothing online. By nothing I mean I didn’t find anything that wasn’t related to religion but in saying that all I’m looking for is a one word topic. I could have used the daily prayer book thingie that Vonnie was given last year if I could find it as all I want is a nudge. I don’t want to be sitting discussing the ins and outs of whatever passage from the bible was mentioned that day.

With that in mind what I did find was 365 Tao: Daily Meditations. I’m going to take a leaf out of Unclebear’s book and use this as a starting point. Hopefully I’ll get a post written every day but I say things like that a lot and I’m going to be very busy over the next few months so I’m making no promises!

So aside from the thoughts on starting my daily writing exercise I guess the big change is that today is the first day that I have been without work since I started my first job over 15 years ago. It’s terrifying. Let me get that out the way right from the beginning. Who would want to employ a mid-30’s guy with no degree level qualifications and no real transferable skills outwith knowledge of working for the civil service who is also dyslexic? Most folk in their right mind will run away screaming if I were to give them my CV but I have found a couple of folk that will employ me. Those two people would be my wife and I. That’s right we’re setting up our own business and hopefully very soon things will start to speed up and we’ll be well on the way to success.

I sometimes feel like I’m playing that round in Takeshi’s Castle where you have the choice of three doors and you have to run and jump through one of them. One is fake and you bounce off it ending your game, the second you can get through easily enough but someone is waiting on the other side to try and catch you and the last door has no obstacles and so is the easy route. You’ve no idea which one is which though when you try to go through it and it’s all against the clock. I have those three doors in front of me but someone has thrown away the timer. We’ve hummed and hawed over the last 15 months about this business and after a false start at the beginning of last year we’re at the stage of having chosen our door. My job now is to get up enough momentum that even if we hit the locked door we make it through to the other side.

Today has been spent recovering from last year and preparing for this year. If any of you had seen me today you would have said that I was lying and that I spend today doing dishes, cooking dinner and washing nappies. This would all have been true but it’s what was going on in my head that is important today.

Today is the first day of the rest of my life. I’ve talked about it and, surprisingly, I’ve joked about it but above all I’ve stressed about it. Today I handed in my confirmation letter for voluntary redundancy.

This isn’t me. Well it is obviously but I don’t do things like this. I’m completely out of my comfort zone on this one.

Grant MacDonald @ Flickr

Ten years ago I couldn’t have lived without a wage coming in but it wouldn’t have been the end of the world. I was still living at home with my parents and even bringing home £40 a week would have been enough to survive on. Five years ago I had a mortgage and wasn’t particularly happy at work but I stuck with it. It was an easy job for the money and in all honesty once your in the civil service unless you quit yourself it’s really hard to find a way to end up without a job. It’s safe. This was all compounded when I met my wife and I took on some of the financial responsibility of her son. That job I had was money in the bank. And then not one but three babies came along. That need to provide for them come rain or shine kicked in hard. After a lot of disappointing times at work I finally found a post that I enjoyed but it was a lot of work and between it and my home life my health started to suffer. I was stressed beyond belief and really not enjoying life. A lot of opportunities were passing me by that I wouldn’t, no make that couldn’t take because I refused to leave the safe money.

Fast forward to earlier this year and suddenly after months of denying the restructuring at work would come to this they offered up a voluntary redundancy package to us. Those that know me better than most will know that since gaining that job I enjoyed I have been diagnosed as being dyslexic and almost in the same breath lost out on making that job permanent. I’ve since been sitting in limbo helping out our Accounts teams doing the most brain numbing of tasks. Despite the best intentions my work have been mostly unsuccessful in helping me deal with my dyslexia and our redeployment team just don’t seem to care.* Needless to say I’ve lost all hope/want/desire to carry on working here. Don’t get me wrong. I am completely behind the work we do overseas and I will really miss that feeling of no matter how shit a day I’ve had at work doing the most menial task imaginable I will have still done my part to make the work we do possible. There comes a point however where it just doesn’t balance.

I could write for days on where I go from here. I’ve got university prospectuses to read through, a house to redecorate, a garden to fix, business plans for a new business, funnily enough, to help my wife draft up and even with all of this new things are showing up almost daily. Last night we went out for a family dinner to celebrate my brother in laws 18th birthday to a very popular Indian restaurant in Glasgow. As is our custom we baked a cake to take along although this time it was myself that did the work rather than the joint efforts we usually put together. The owner, at least I think he’s the owner due to the newspaper interviews with him at the front door talking about his friendship with Micheal Jackson, took my wife aside and asked if we had bought the cake or made it ourselves. In the 30 odd years in the catering trade he said it was the best cake he’d ever eaten and gave my wife his business card in case we were interested in in going in that direction.

I am completely terrified that this isn’t going to work out. The UK’s unemployment numbers are starting to bottom out and house prices are starting to rise again but what if I can’t make any of this work? I’ll have gave up a safe job with an OK salary for nothing. I do have to say though that the fear is no where near as debilitating as the stresses from the work itself.

I’m actually looking forward to the change. All my life I’ve needed to have my life planned out. When I was off sick not knowing what I was going to do the next day drove me up the wall. When we go anywhere new I need to know exactly where we’re going and sit with the map on my knee as my wife drives us there. There is no road map from here on in only the hope that just around the corner and with a little bit of work there is a destination that is going to make us all happy. Sure we might take a wrong turn here or there but even if you hit a dead end you just turn around and retrace your steps until you get back on road you were on before.

I can’t wait to get that journey started.

* By this I mean they are in no rush to help us out with anything and so far I’ve asked two out of a huge list of questions I had for them. One question I finally received an answer on two weeks after first asking and the second question I’m still waiting on an answer. They seem to be telling other folk in our office one thing and then not telling us anything. As for helping me with my dyslexia I waited six months for them trying to get me a secondhand PDA only to be told they they’d finally binned the last of them a month ago and forgot about me and anyway as my psych report doesn’t mention a PDA specifically, instead it says ‘all possible use should be made of electronic aids appropriate to Robert’s work’ and so they were going to give me a laptop to do the same thing. Where is the point in that? A PDA costs far less then the laptops we use in the office.

-+ For the record this started out as an email to Wil Wheaton…Don’t ask me why…but it got a little to flowery and I lost track of the point I was trying to make somewhere along the way and instead ended up with this. It is far better as a blog post than as an email to some celebrity that will likely never read it and in all honesty it’s much more cathartic this way.+-

Not been on here in a while. I just haven’t had the time to be honest.

Lets see. Works been crap what with me no longer working in HR and being moved to Accounts to help out. I started off really positive and looking at it as a new start and a new challenge. As the days go on though I’m beginning to feel as though I’m purely there to help out and not as an actual team member. I guess that comes down to noone actually knowing for definate who’s responsible for me while I’m in Accounts. They can’t make any plans for my future because my reporting line seems to change daily and without all the training I need to work in Accounts there is avery little I can actually do. Hell I’m currently helping out another section my clearing payments which is something I learned to do 8 years ago and have’t actually ever done until now.

Friday night was Stoo’s Stag Night Mk2 after their trip Berlin. I gather it started well with a trip to Jongleurs and I joined them after the show for a few drinks. I ended up doing a small pubcrawl by myself as I arrived to early and had about 90 minutes to kill so I went around Ohenry’s, The Solid and Rufus for a drink to see if anyone else was out. Aside from the folk in Ohenry’s I met up with Shawsy in Rufus where I experienced the Nightmare on Hope Street cocktail for the first time. So anyway I met up with the guys and had a few drinks and it was time to leave. A bit of banter was had at the exit at the bottom of stairs with a few of the other groups. Scott walked through the double doors to be greeted with a fist the size of Norway followed by the body the size of Russia. The guy was big. Anyway to cut a long story short Scott ended up in A&E to get a couple of stiches in his head and the guy spent the night in jail.

Saturday we went to Wickes to pick up some fencing for the garden and muggins forgot to buy fenceposts and hinges for the gate. That went down well with my heavily pregnant wife who had herded the kids around the place for an hour. Anyway we went to B&Q today and picked up the bits that were missing and a few extras. I also managed to finish of the ‘pallets’ I was building at the bottom of the garden and move the shed and coop down onto them. Not bad considering I did it all myself and that included getting them down the hill!

It’s all boring stuff I know but as I keep saying my brain is turning to cream cheese so I need the written reminders

I don’t have any today. My mind keeps flitting between things and bright lights are distracting me all to easily. I could be sitting in the middle of something important and I’ll get up to get a drink of water and an hour later I’ll remember what it was I was doing and have to go back and try and find where I left off.

Not so good when you’ve got wet paint around the house :S

The date for my echo came through as a month earlier than expected and I’ve got a meeting at work tomorrow to dicuss my phased return which will probably start on Monday. This is going to be weird.