write.as/jonbeckett

I’m sitting in the dark of the junk room at home, debating with myself it it’s worth staying up to watch the fight between Connor McGregor, and Floyd Mayweather. If I do stay up, I’ll admit now that I’m not going to pay for it – so unless I can find somebody streaming it, I will listen on the radio – BBC Radio are broadcasting live. I still can’t believe how much the pay-per-view is going to cost in the US. I think over here it will cost less than half as much.

If I do stay up, I have to find something to amuse myself with for the next four hours – either that, or set the alarm clock and go to bed now.

Decisions, decisions.

After scraping myself out of bed this morning, jumping in the shower (not literally), having a shave to reverse the very impressive neanderthal impersonation, and clearing the washing up that had mysteriously manifested itself in the kitchen overnight, I wandered out into our jungle of a back garden to see if I might do something about the forest of grass that was threatening to overtake everything.

I’m not really sure how our back garden works. It has something to do with sunshine and rain. I’m sure if I read a gardening book everything would be explained, but my only real references are my other half choosing to wreck the garden a soon as I’ve got it somewhere near straight, and the weatherman from the Rupert Books spotting that I’ve cut the grass, and then subjecting it to days of sunshine and rain to undo everything I’ve worked towards. It’s obviously a conspiracy.

I’m not sure if you’ll remember, but several months ago I bought a “push along” lawn mower. It follows the same line of thought that led me to purchase a single speed bicycle – if there is less to go wrong with something, the chances of it going wrong are far less. The petrol lawn mower had “just worked” for the better part of fifteen years – and then it didn’t – and I’m not a mechanic. Faced with the decision of either replacing the lawn mower, or buying a simple push-along replacement that might never go wrong, I went for the simple option. Of course I didn’t figure on how much hard work might be involved in pushing a manual lawn mower into a field of long grass. Turns out it’s a bit of a bastard.

By mid morning I had cut the grass, and looked like I had been standing in a rain storm – only it wasn’t raining. Let’s just say I didn’t smell too great either.

A couple hours later, two loads through the washing machine and dryer, enough clothes hung on the line in the garden to almost cause it’s structural integrity to fail, the dishwasher emptied, and most of the family still sitting watching TV, and the rest of the weekend is opening up with all sorts of procrastination possibilities. Of course this won’t last.

Miss 12 just walked in and reminded me that I would take her out for lunch in town.

“If you have a shower and get changed into some clean clothes, maybe”

“I’m having a shower now” (her hair was “interesting”)

I’m presently waiting for Miss 13 to finish in the shower. She entered it under duress, but her resistance appears to have been defeated by the thought of a burger and chips in town. I’m pretty sure she would throw us all under a bus for a hotdog.

I have nothing to write about today, so will prove that nothing is something by writing this. Tada!

Seriously though, today is proving very slow indeed. Highlight so far – discovering that the HTTP Status code “418” means “I’m a teapot”. I kid you not. If you were to send a message over the internet to a tea making machine, asking it to make a cup of coffee, it would respond with “418”. I can’t imagine why anybody would have done it, but the code has made it’s way into the software that exists on web servers all over the world.

It makes you wonder what other oddities exist, baked into the fabric of systems for decades. I didn’t realise for years what the flip-out plastic lugs were for on Macbook chargers, for example. Turns out you can wrap the wire around them. Then there’s the cartons that takeaway food comes in – did you know the carton can be folded out to make a dish? Well now you do.

I guess more than anything, this post proves that you need to have a daily life to write anything about daily life. Getting up, having a shower, getting dressed, cycling to work, cycling home, eating dinner, washing up, and repeating the process over and over again doesn’t make for the most exciting “day in the life” posts.

Maybe it’s not about the big stories though. Maybe it’s about the little things. The third cup of coffee before lunchtime that makes you feel sick. The co-worker who brought donuts in this morning. The lady that lives opposite the office moving out (has she met somebody? has her job changed?). The temptation to make everybody yet another coffee purely to go stand in the kitchen for ten minutes and not be hassled about anything.

I haven’t really stopped all day. I planned to – I planned to give myself an hour at lunchtime to write some thoughts into the blog, but then one thing after another happened, lunchtime didn’t happen, and before I knew it I was telling a friend in a chat window that popped up that it was almost 4pm, and I should probably take a break. Then I realised I had a conference call, several emails, and a call to a client – the entire week has been a bit like that to be honest. I think I now have a greater understanding of the phrase “best laid plans”.

Anyway! (it’s been a while since I changed subject with a single “Anyway!”)

I don’t really have anything earth shatteringly important on my mind this evening. Nothing momentous or thought provoking to share. I’m just kind of plodding at the moment – putting one foot in front of the other. Getting from one day to the next. I’m good at it. Probably too good at it.

When I got in from work this evening I discovered the freezer had been left open all day – and had busied itself with building it’s own ice climbing wall for borrowers. I had emptied most of it’s contents across the kitchen when the rest of the family arrived, and begun the process of thawing it out. I dread to think how much food we’re having to throw away – most of it is in unmarked pots – the leftovers of chilli, bolognese, and various curries that were kept for meals that never happened.

Because the kitchen was out of bounds we sat in the lounge together and bought a movie from Amazon – “Guardians of the Galaxy 2”. I’m not entirely sure why we never made it to the cinema to watch it – perhaps it appeared in the middle of the rugby and football seasons, when we never manage to do anything at weekends other than stand at the side of football and rugby pitches clutching paper cups of tea.

I won’t write any sort of capsule review, because they are without doubt the most boring, useless, pointless posts on the internet. I loved the movie. I tend to love all movies though – my “bar” is incredibly low. I always find it amusing when critics pull movies to pieces because they didn’t agree with the existential subtext, or some other such tripe.

Roll on tomorrow, and another adventure in conference calls, emails, and fire fighting lunacy.

Today has been interesting. Of course I don’t really mean interesting – I mean tiring, frustrating, irritating, and all those other words. You don’t really want to hear about me fire-fighting source code that has worked for months and chose not to this morning though, do you. I can’t really tell you anyway, because it’s all to do with the secret super-hero job in the hollowed out mountain. Or something like that.

So yes – today has been interesting.

The highlight of the day – that I CAN tell you about – was almost certainly my abortive attempts to book a hotel room in Germany for a few weeks time. Why did nobody tell me that Oktoberfest is kind of a massively significant thing in Germany, and that it causes the cost of hotel rooms to multiply? I accidentally thought the cost of a single room at the Holiday Inn was for four nights. Nope. When the receipt arrived in my email, the blood quickly drained from me, and I made a panicked phone call. I was super-nice, and they cancelled the reservation for me, even though they really didn’t have to.

The next two hours were spent scouring every place in Frankfurt for somewhere to stay. I ended up choosing a hotel perhaps a couple of kilometres further away – a hostel. It’s still going to cost an arm and a leg, but there was really no other option. I’m hoping there are some places to eat nearby – I’ll have to do some research.

What else has been going on? Not much, to be honest. I’m persevering with the Bullet Journal, fighting a losing battle against the great clothes washing mountain, winning sporadic battles with the washing up, and wondering who the hell rebooted the computer in the junk room while I was out earlier (the one I’m using right now). Pencil shavings have appeared all over the carpet too – guess who will be retrieving the vaccum cleaner from it’s hiding place in a minute.

Roll on the weekend. I only discovered this morning that Monday will be a bank holiday. Hoorah!

While headbutting my desk spectacularly this afternoon after discovering yet another bug in a major software product sold by the biggest operating system manufacturer in the world (I’m being deliberately vague), a project manager wandered up to my desk and reminded me about the meeting invite that had been blinking on my screen for the last fifteen minutes – that I had taken no notice of what so ever. I had to search an old email out to remind myself what the meeting was about.

Germany. I’m returning to Germany. In a couple of weeks time. I have a phone call tomorrow to confirm dates, then I need to book hotel reservations and flight tickets. I’ll be heading back to Frankfurt – the same place I visited earlier this year. At least this time I will know my way around – how things work, where things are, where to get meals, and so on. There’s a good chance I will be travelling for two consecutive weeks – at least I’ll get to know the route through the airports well.

I suppose it might be an idea to sort out my work clothes this weekend – to figure out how many sets I have. Yes, you read that right – “sets”. Whenever I work on-site, I tend to take several sets of exactly the same clothes – the same trousers, and shirts. It avoids having to think about anything while I’m there. Along with a sweater, a pair of jeans, and clean t-shirts, socks, and underwear for each day, I suppose I travel light compared to many people.

I’m already thinking it might be a good chance to read a book or two. At home I tend to be surrounded by distractions – holed up in a hotel in a foreign country, I’m less likely to burn the midnight oil watching YouTube videos.

You never know – I might actually learn some German this time.

I think it’s fair to say I’ve been dreading returning to work – for the last two weeks I’ve been burying my head in the sand. After wading through the worst of the email mountain this morning, and getting my head down, I began to wonder if stress is sometimes a matter of perspective. Before returning I started playing over what might be waiting for me, but once in the thick of it, it’s just a question of working on one thing at a time – putting one foot in front of the other. Luckily it just so happens that I’m quite good at putting one foot in front of the other.

I ate lunch half an hour before lunchtime – which is a ridiculous thing to say, because surely the time you eat your lunch is “lunchtime”. Perhaps I should say “I ate much lunch half an hour before mid-day”. It’s now 3pm and I’m starving.

I’m forcing myself to take a break – writing this instead of submerging myself in source code. I didn’t stop at lunchtime, so have rationalised with myself that this is the right thing to do. The one good thing about stress is that it keeps you awake. I suppose coffee also keeps you awake, but after drinking two cups of instant coffee so far today, it’s making me feel sick. It’s going to take time to get used to the levels of coffee required to make it through the day again.

I can’t help feeling that if I didn’t care so much about what I do, or what people think of what I have done, I wouldn’t become so stressed. Of course if I didn’t care about such things, I would be no better than those that quietly infuriate me (this is where I open the brochure offering future careers painting suspension bridges, or cleaning windows).

While skimming updates posted to the social internet by far flung friends earlier this evening, I got sucked into reading a post recalling somebody’s formative years – and how many of their favourite memories were attached to Washington Square Park. I stopped in my tracks, opened a chat window, and asked the author directly:

“Is that THE Washington Square Park, in New York ?”

“Yes!”

I then had to admit that my frame of reference doesn’t come from hanging out with adolescent friends, meeting for coffee, or forging life long coming-of-age memories. My Washington Square Park exists in books, movies, and stories about chess players that once sat at the tables in the corner of the park.

For many people who become interested in chess, Washington Square Park is kind of hallowed ground. In recent years the park has become synonymous with the late Bobby Fischer, through the movie “Searching for Bobby Fischer” (about the childhood of chess prodigy Josh Waitzkin), and latterly when various Grandmasters have visited to play the various hustlers before posting their exploits to YouTube. There are so many other characters though – mostly lost in history, but some burning brightly among the stories told in old books. Hustlers, tramps, and vagrants who lost everything to their obsession with the game, and vanished into a world of drugs, alcohol, and a whirlpool of mental illnesses.

Thinking of Washington Square Park takes me back to a visit to Paris with my other half, several years before we had children. While wandering around the city we discovered the “Jardin de Luxembourg”, which also has a corner filled with chess players. The memory has never left me of an old man agonising over his next move against an old friend – rocking back and forth, clutching the top of his head with his hand.

I can’t remember the last time I played a half-serious game of chess. I have of course taught all of our children to play, and several friend’s children – but haven’t played competitively for many, many years. There was a time when I read books about the game, it’s history, and it’s historical characters. Truth be told, I always found the history more fascinating than the game itself – which perhaps explains why I never became that good. I guess being able to string a few moves together will forever remain something I can use to scare the life out of people who ever invite me to play them over a drink after dinner.

A little after waking up this morning a little voice called from the children’s rooms. I grinned at my other half, and predicted the next sentence.

“Are we going swimming?”

I looked at the clock. Half past eight. There went the plan to get up before 7am again. Another empty square in the bullet journal – I really am doing fabulously badly at the whole “accountability” thing. I’ve eaten chocolate today too. Go me. Not.

An hour later we were all downstairs, I was out of the shower, freshly shaven, shorts and a scruffy t-shirt on, and a swim bag slung over my shoulder with a towel and underwear in it. Miss 12 had been wearing her swimsuit since the moment she got out of bed, and burst out laughing.

“Your swim bag is PINK Dad!”

“And? It’s just a bag.”

“BUT IT’S PINK!” (more laughter)

Three daughters, and a grown up lady in the house has kind of bashed any kind of gender stereotypes out of me. Where we might once have daydreamed about weekends watching ballet lessons, volleyball, and netball matches, instead we have always been stood on the touchlines of football and rugby fields – or at judo tournaments. We never pushed the kids in a particular direction. Apparently Dad’s carrying pink swim bags are hilarious though.

An hour later we got off the train in a nearby town that has a much-more-fun swimming pool than any of the local ones. By “fun”, I mean it isn’t full of lane markers, and grumpy old arseholes swimming up and down. This pool is filled with families not unlike my own, with tired parents attempting to either make sure their young children don’t drown, or having circles swam around them by pre-teen future olympians (me). Miss 12 recovers from a couple of lengths shifting thousands of gallons of water in less time than it takes me to take my goggles off and rub my eyes.

Oh yes – goggles. I bought some goggles today. Last time we visited this particular pool, I suspect somebody read the quantity on the chlorine bottle wrong, and almost burned everybody’s eyeballs out. I therefore stopped on the way into the pool and picked up a pair of the most reasonable looking goggles I could find. Here’s the thing about goggles though – surely if you wear them, that marks you out as a potential pervert – sitting on the bottom of the pool, oggling the young mums figures as they dance past distracted by their young charges. I therefore made damn sure I only put the goggles on to do Mark Spitz impersonations chasing after Miss 12.

The thing about swimming – apart from being absolutely knackering – is that it gives you a raging hunger. After an hour and a half, I caught up with Miss 12 and suggested we get out and go have some lunch somewhere. Before we even got out of the pool, she asked if we could go to McDonalds. I think perhaps swimming may have been secondary in her “real” itinerary – a Big Mac Meal was probably at the top of the list, underlined in rainbow colours, and decorated with stick-on stars.

At least the coffee in McDonalds is great though, right?

After feeding our faces, we wandered around the shops – killing time until the next train might appear to spirit us back towards home. A second hand game store was selling Pokemon cards. Apparently these are “the thing to collect” at the moment, according to Miss 12. While she salivated over them, much to the amusement of the shop staff, I spotted something else. Something from the past. If not for the store not having a later model Playstation 2 in stock, I would have had some explaining to do when I got home. I spotted “Jak and Daxter”, and “Ratchet and Clank” on the shelf of used games. They were easily my favourite games about fifteen years ago. I’m tempted to look them up on E-Bay to see if I can get a PS2 with them. Somebody remind me I’m supposed to be saving money.

While writing this the rest of the family is out buying groceries for the week ahead. I suppose I should go and throw half the contents of the fridge away (you know – the stuff that is actually being held prisoner in the fridge, to stop it escaping to the rest of the house and evolving into new life-forms).

Back to work tomorrow. Waaaah.

It’s heading towards 9:30am on Saturday morning. The washing machine and tumble dryer are rumbling away in the background, the dishwasher has been emptied, the younger children are camped out in the lounge watching cartoons, and the same washing that has been hanging on the line for two days is still out there – hopefully I will be around to bring it in when it gets dry for the third time.

I’m hoping to do NOTHING today. Of course we know that won’t happen. Miss 12 just wandered up to me in her pyjamas and asked if we are going out today. I shook my head, and explained that every day of the last four or five has cost us a lot of money – and that we just can’t afford to keep spending money like that. She has now tiptoed upstairs to my other half (who will probably still be asleep), to no doubt try and play us off against one another. Give it half an hour and I’ll receive my instructions for the day. And tomorrow.

I’m fighting the temptation to slip into my Mr Cranky Pants alter-ego today – my “stay-cation” is coming to an end. On Monday morning I’ll get back on the bike (which needs to be cleaned), cycle the few miles to the office, and discover what horrors await in my work email account. Before that happens I’m going to bury my head in the sand. It’s a skill.

I just took a look at the Bullet Journal, and discovered an unanticipated consequence of making myself accountable for doing things – I become accountable for doing things. I know that sounds funny, but when I started the damn thing I was having a good day, and thought of all these things I should be doing. Now of course I have to do them. They are all easy things – simple things – but when you’re having a cranky day, even getting up out of a chair to retrieve the remote control for the television becomes a hassle.

The easiest list of things to do is an email out to friends and acquaintances I haven’t been in touch with for a long time. I’m terrible at keeping in touch with people – I think we all are in one way or another. I’ve crossed paths with all sorts of people on the internet over the years, and have made some wonderful friends. I think because the sands of the internet shift like those in a fast flowing river, and are filled with so many interesting voices, it’s easy to forget those we once knew well.

For some stupid reason I made a chart in the bullet journal to record various aspirational habits – getting up before a certain time, going to bed before a certain time – that kind of thing. I’m doing REALLY badly at it. What should have been a shaded block of achievements looks more like a sieve that was hit by a shotgun. It’s not like any of it is hard either – well, except going to bed before a certain time. If nobody had ever invented the damn internet, this colossal rabbit hole wouldn’t exist, and I’d have nothing to do but watch re-runs of NCIS, Criminal Minds, and Big Bang Theory.

Why can’t there be a TV channel showing episodes of Community back-to-back ? Actually, that’s probably a really bad idea, because they I might never sleep again.