Bad Snow Thing / Good Snow Thing

Bad Snow Things:

• Listening to the Herculean efforts of people fighting the weather to get into work.  People seem to be ‘snowed in’ on one side of the city and yet on my side all I get is that dirty slush.  I’m yet to see any proper stuff.

Good Snow Things:

• I did a brilliant  power slide coming out of my road this morning, doing about 4mph.  I thought I was Colin McCrae.
• Getting sent home early from work today.  *high five* thanks Mr Snow Maker.

Edit Update:  I take back everything I’ve said about snow.  It’s just turned into Armageddon out there  *plans day off tomorrow*

Getting back into the swing of things

After having two weeks off, it’s not very easy sliding back into the old routine is it?  The last 2 two nights I’ve had less than 2 hours sleep.  Whilst my brain tells me to go to bed, my body clock still says “stay up as long as you want, you’ve got sod all to do tomorrow”.   Not great at 5am when you know the alarm will scream at you in 2 hours time.

I’m not the greatest sleeper in the world anyway (I only ever get 4-6 hours sleep on a good day) so it’s not surprising that it takes me a while to adjust back into some kind of normal sleeping pattern.  It’s just frustrating more than anything else.  Even going back to when I was 13/14 I used to always be awake on the Sunday night after school holidays until ungodly hours.  I’m sure my body will start shutting down by Thursday.

Stalker

Facebook stalking, sponsored by Cynical Scribble:

You know I said I didn’t get voodoo girls number from my last post?  Well, Sunday night boredom kicked in last night and curiosity killed the cat.

After working out how to spell her name I found her on Stalkbook (she has a very unusual first name so it wasn’t too difficult to find her).   Unfortunately she has a limited profile on view to prying eyes, but from her picture she does seem to be better looking than I remember from my drunken haze last week – I’ve even just patted myself on the back for that one!

I am now, however, laughing at myself for being so pathetic (whilst simultaneously congratulating my stalking skills).

In today’s glorious technological age, given it’d be obvious I’d probably had to undertake some kind of Facebook stalking to find her, would the alarm bells starting ringing if I sent her a message?  Especially a week later.  After I didn’t initially get her number.  Or make her tea.  Or toast.  And virtually kicked her out in the morning…even I know that it’s bordering on the insane….isn’t it?  But I’m thinking, I’m single, what have I got to lose apart from my whole life’s worth of dignity, haha!

Or should I just leave it well alone?  What d’ya reckon????

The one including a girl and vomiting

When I go out I never actively go out to try and chat up females.  Ever.  I also know this is the main reason for my longstanding singledom status, but for one reason or another I can just never be arsed. 

Rewind to a few nights ago and I didn’t change my tact much either, but somehow I pulled.  Finally, years of perfecting my ‘I can’t be arsed’ look worked.  Even my bad ‘uncle knobhead, with the movement equivalent of a tree’ dancing in the early hours didn’t put her off.  I was, however, initially more concerned with the whereabouts of the free Sambuca which was being given out by the bar staff (my priorities were in still in working order)!

Long story short however, given it had been “a while”, it wasn’t my greatest moment between the sheets.  I therefore have no shame in announcing to the internets, that I was initially more efficient than a P&Q roll-on/roll-off ferry.  Although I did make amends in due course.   I did!

In hindsight though, given she had come back to mine, my morning after etiquette wasn’t up to scratch.  After a couple of refused requests for tea and toast (tea and toast? Is that the norm nowadays?  In the past I’ve tried to make a break for it as quick as possible – apart from that time someone actually went out to the shop to go and buy bacon so she could make me breakfast *aaahh those were the days, they don’t make ‘em like they used to*) I just always want to avoid the awkward morning thing.  It also seemed she wasn’t in any particular rush to move and was digging in for the day, so I finally manned-up with the classic: “I’m not being rude but I need to go out in about an hour” (I did actually need to go out…just not for another 3 hours).  Who said chivalry was dead eh?  I’m an ol’ romantic at heart!

Neither did we swap numbers with each other.  Would she have given me her number?  Was she waiting for me to ask? Again, in hindsight I probably should’ve asked, as she was actually good looking and my type of girl, but something in the back of my head told me not to ask for her number for some reason.

 

Anyway, fast forward 12 hours later and I’m doing the greatest impression ever seen of that girl from The Exorcist, and I’m projectile vomiting all over my bedroom floor. 

I woke up about 2am and the only thing I literally had time to do, was swing my head off the pillow to ensure I didn’t vomit all over my bed.  I couldn’t even lift myself off my bed, nevermind make it to the toilet.  I’ve since spent two days in bed, slept the most I’ve slept in about 6 months, and still feel like shite.

Possible Theories to the sickness:

• Food Poisoning
• Stomach Bug
• Severe (delayed) allergic to reaction to being in close proximity with a living female

Taking into consideration that I hadn’t vomited for years and that it’d been “a while” since I last pulled.  My many years of medical training can only drive me to one conclusion: that the two events are somehow inexplicably related (maybe some kind of post traumatic stress). 

I’m therefore estimating next intimate relations with a female to be in the year 2015.  This way I won’t be disappointed and hopefully the current distinct whiff of vomit will have left my room by then.

 

PS: Happy New Year and all that malarkey *shakes everyone’s hand*

The Weather

I can’t get excited by the weather in any way, shape or form.  I was oblivious to everything yesterday until I fired up Facebook and Twitter to see millions of “IT’S SNOWING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” type messages.

I’m surprised David Attenborough hasn’t yet put one of them sweeping cameras (the ones which are used to record and follow buffalo migration) in our office to capture the moment  something significant happens with the weather (significant can mean anything from it being sunny, drizzle, rain, hail, sleet or snow).  It only takes one person to shout “Look at the weather” and one of the natural wonders of the world will suddenly happen…a stampede to the windows.  Mouths gaping wide and squeals of “Oh my god, have you seen it”?  And that’s just the men.

Me: “Yes, it’s rain. It’s that wet stuff that falls from the sky” / “Yes, it’s that big yellow thing in the sky making it hot” / “Snow?  Yeh, I’ve seen it loads of times”.

Snow gets people excited for some reason; I can’t take to the stuff personally.  Maybe it’s because I once threw a snowball at an ex-girlfriend, but it turned out that she didn’t catch my drift (Wahey…I’m here all week).

Snow just means venturing outdoors becomes a dice with death.  I end up walking to the shop like an old man…taking dead small steps, as if I’m walking across a balancing beam, ensuring I don’t end up arse over tit.

Luckily enough though, for all the “IT’S SNOWING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” messages, even from people who live not far from me and in the same city, I looked out the window this morning and there was feck all snow.  Although, yet again, the news headlines this morning already make one nights snow fall turn into Armageddon like conditions.

It’s December, it gets cold, things will ice up and it’s probably going to snow.  Just get on with it.  If you don’t need to urgently travel anywhere, then don’t.  Why does it become headline news…every year?  I feel sorry for the people caught up behind a jack knifed lorries who were stuck in there cars overnight and things like that, but as a country that is prone to cold weather it’s embarrassing that we can’t cope with snow or ice.  Canadians/Americans who get proper snow drifts must piss themselves laughing that we grind to a halt with a couple of inches of snow.

In other news it’s my last day at work today until 4^th Jan. Whoo Hoo.  Productivity today will be zilch.  Who’s brought the Battleships or Connect 4 in?

Teletext

Before the land of internet, this was information at your fingertips. Hours were spent trawling page after page of Ceefax, Oracle/Teletext. Now it’s all but dead after the Teletext signal was switched off yesterday with Ceefax due to follow suit once the Digital switchover is complete in 2012.

I could read a page of text in about 10-20 seconds, and then you’d have to sit there for another minute waiting for the page to turn.  Hours/days of my life wasted in front of teletext.

Back then it was just as addictive as today’s numerous email checks, especially on a Saturday afternoon: “watching teletext” for the latest football scores.  It seems absurd now that I’d sit there, watching a black screen (for an hour and a half) in the hope that when the page next ‘turned’ your team had scored and I could punch the air in triumph (and then you’d have to wait another 5 minutes for the pages to turn again until you found out who’d scored).

For Teletext you needed patience, lots of it, especially during mid-week football matches.  I’d annoy the family and flash up teletext constantly throughout tv shows.  Making them watch the TV through that text ‘mix’ you could do – making the black background transparent and instead, having the text imposed over Coronation Street or whatever TV show they were watching. I was an absolute nuisance of the highest order!

The Paramount Comedy channel had letters/jokes pages, 40 odd pages of them, which I used to sit through and watch at 2am in the morning after finishing a shift in the pub.   It took about an hour (I honestly had nothing better to do).  The highlight of my teletexting life peaked in about 97/98 when I got a joke published on their joke pages.   Actually, this remains the highlight of my life to date.

‘Digitiser’ was on Channel 4 and read daily for all the computer games reviews.  Then there was my old friend Bambler Boozler and Bamboozle who lived at “390” also on Channel 4.  Many hours were spent in front of this absolute frustrating, yet addictive quiz and arguing with my brother about the correct answer; (where getting a question wrong on page 9 – after starting 15 minutes earlier – would mean having to go back to page 1 and starting again) :

“It’s green. Green. Press the green buttooooonnn. GREEEEEEEEEEEEEN you knob”  He presses red and gets it wrong.

“ARRRGGGGHHHHHHHH!!”

…and then the remote would get launched at the wall (that’s why there was sellotape wrapped all over it to keep it together).

Teletext, you may be (almost) gone forever, but you won’t be forgotten.

*solemnly doffs a cap*

Bamber Boozler

“I told you it was wrong”

Talking and texting device upgrade

My monthly phone contract has just ended, therefore I can now upgrade my talking and texting device.  Being a bit of a nerdy gadget geek on these type of things means that now I’m eligible to get one…I want to get a new phone, but I don’t know which one.

Almost every time I’ve been due a phone upgrade something has been available which has jumped out at me and shouted “GET ME”!  This time, there are only 2 phones which appeal to me:

• The sheep like iPhone which, even though it will do everything but  shag me, I really really don’t want one.

• Or the HTC Hero.  However this poses another ‘problem’ as it’s already 6 months old which means it’ll be Sinclair Spectrum like in another couple of months.  Especially with HTC releasing new stuff in a few months.

The inpatient bastard in me doesn’t want to wait though.

What phones do you good people have and would you recommend anything?

Humbug

Christmas should be over by now; judging by the length of time the ‘run up to Christmas’ is taking.  It’s been going on for donkeys years already, I swear it’s starting earlier every year.

“My name is Cynical Scribble and I’m officially fed up with Christmas”

…yet there are still 17 days to go until “The Big Day”.

If its not the jingly jangly sound of Christmas bells ringing out every time you put the television on, step into a shop or turn the radio on, it’s faux Christmas scenes everywhere. 

I’ll concede some ground and say now-ish (8-10th Dec…with 2 weeks to go) is an ok time to start the run up to ‘festivities’, but all this shite started weeks ago.  You can’t escape…every single shop in the world has tinsel hanging up with them flickery fairy lights -  the ones that will cause an epileptic fit to some poor unsuspecting customer. 

Even worse, my fellow office workers have ‘decorated’ our office with that shit thin tinsel stuff.  You know the stuff…the bits that have been in someone’s loft for 10 years with most of the tassels ripped off?  There are one or two decent bits of tinsel which have been put up, the rest are just basically bits of gold/silver string.  The place is starting to resemble a pikeys grotto.

The whole thing just starts too early and I’m all christmased out already.

17 days to go.  Sigh and double sigh.

Cynical Scribble sat at his desk

Leaving behind a little box of convenience

I’m thinking of getting rid of my car (not now during winter though, sod that for a game of soldiers, after the winter obviously).  I’ve been doing my sums lately and my car mileage to car cost ratio doesn’t add up economically wise.  I’m basically paying over the odds to keep myself warm and tucked up in bed for an extra hour.  So I may take the bold leap back into the heady world of public transport and trains.  I’ve never liked using trains though.

In massive stations, there can be multiple platforms with multiple trains on the same stretch of track.  The smaller stations I’ve been at are, at best, poor for sign postage.  It can be about as clear as mud where you should be to get the train you want.  I always have that pang of apprehension wondering if I’m on the right platform and always double check with someone – as if I’m not confident in my own reading ability…

In the past I’ve never lived/worked anywhere close to an accessible train route.  It’s only on the odd occasion when I’ve ventured out of the city without the brum brum that I’ve had to get the choo choo. 

Many moons ago I successfully made it cross country from Amsterdam to Brussels on a train and of all the times I’ve used a train (literally a maximum of 20 times) I’ve never got on the wrong one or had any mishaps.  So my apprehensions of the big metal tubes, that go dead dead fast with insane people, all herded like cattle into them, is at best…mental.

Buses never give me apprehension.  If you get on the wrong bus, it’s simple enough to get off at the next stop a few hundred yards up the road, or ask the driver to drop you at the lights.  You can’t exactly go up to a train driver and say “eh mate, can you let me off at the next junction?”! Instead you end up on some platform in the middle of nowhere with a trek and a (probable) long wait to go a few miles back to whence you came. 

The only thing I really use my car for is to get to work.  If I swapped to public transport *shudder*, it’d cost me a fraction of what I pay out now.  Moneywise it seems like a no-brainer.  So the metal box of convenience may be going and I’ll be stepping back into the gloomy, but brave, world of public transport again (only after winter though).

Like a rabbit caught in headlights

The gig going yet again continued over the weekend, this time it was the turn of Arctic Monkeys to embrace my ears.  I’ve now seen them 6 times.  I like them, but I don’t like them enough to warrant seeing them 6 times so I don’t know how that’s happened.  I think I’m just wanting them to repeat that first gig I seen them at in a university hall just as they came onto the pop pickers chart.  Whilst Saturday didn’t see them hit them highs, they were solid and probably the best I’ve seen them since the first time.  T’was a very fine performance overall.  As we all know I can’t do music reviews so I’ll leave that here!

Before the show however, we discovered the Manchester Christmas market.  Little wooden sheds (or chalets if you’re posh) selling all kinds of Christmassy stuff.  It didn’t take us long to find the German beer she…sorry…chalet and it was here we took shelter from the pissing down rain for a few hours.

It was also here I was ‘introduced’ to a member of the opposite sex…by her mate.  Now, the worst thing that ever happens to me on a night out with my brother is that he attempts to embarrass me in the same way when I mention someone being good looking.  Grabbing the girls attention: “Hello, this is my brother Cynical, what’s your name?”  and then he cajoles the unsuspecting female into awkward conversation.

This very thing happened to me on Saturday: given it seems to be my brothers forté I had to stop myself laughing from shock that the shoe was almost on the other foot…I now know how awkward it feels.  I was embarrassed and I seen her awkwardness straight away, especially with 5 of her mates all staring at me as if I was an animal in a zoo.  I mean what exactly are you supposed to say?  It was only about 6pm too, I hadn’t got nearly enough liquid confidence inside me!  I made my excuses and left…and left the safety of the shed.  We were leaving anyway but it probably looked like I was running away.  Sorry embarrassed female!

Given I moan about being single from time to time it’s probably these situations I should take advantage of.  However whilst I’m probably not too bad at small talk and teeing things up (so to speak), I’m utterly rubbish at going in for the kill….(I’m just staying on the zoo theme here, I don’t mean literally gnawing at her until death).  I’m not really sure what age of the female spectrum I’m attracting either because whilst this female seemed to be a few years older than me I was then chatted up on the train on the way home, by someone who was probably about 20.

I never normally get chatted up, it’s not normal and when it does, like at the weekend, I freeze like a rabbit caught in headlights!  That’s three times in the past 2 weeks.  I must be giving off some wild pheromones lately or something.

Maybe it’s the extra splashings of Brut?!  Hooah.