A Personal Update

It seems I’ve been neglecting my blogs somewhat, in my defence I’ve had a very busy few months.

I don’t often talk in too much detail about my work, I usually just moan about it or complain about, what I see as, poor decision making or lack of understanding in the companies upper management structure. I’m a low level manager heading up the estimation team, my team is the smallest in the company, normally consisting of myself, two product estimators and an estimation apprentice. The company I work for is quite fortunate in that it is part of the building industry and hasn’t really been affected by the pandemic. In all honesty the current situation has actually been beneficial to our business as it’s restricted the flow of cheaper, lower quality, alternative products, manufactured abroad, from flooding the market and has allowed us to pick up a larger market share. As product estimators this has meant my teams workload has increased, couple this with one of my estimators leaving in august, it has meant that we’ve had to pick up a lot of the extra workload. Because of my teams hard work we’ve managed to cope fairly well, though it does make our jobs very intense and often means skipping breaks and working extra time (I’m not referring to this as overtime because we don’t get paid overtime), unfortunately our success has meant that I’ve not been able to convince upper management to replace the estimator that left further intensifying my teams jobs.

What this means to me is that most nights, when I get home from work, I generally don’t have the energy to sit at my computer or laptop and write anything. It also means that I’ve not had the drive to actually try out any new recipes or think too much about reviewing anything that I’ve bought or anywhere that I’ve visited. Since my blogs are generally just my own personal thoughts, recipes or product reviews, I’ve not really written anything about anything at all.

It also means that I’ve been somewhat neglecting my diet and exercise regimes and have slipped back into some of my old habits. This has led to me putting on quite a bit of weight, has lowered my self-confidence and has led to me not feeling comfortable with sharing selfies or other images of myself.

Hopefully in the New Year I’ll be able to get in a new employee, get myself back on a more even keel, lose a little bit of the weight and find more time for myself.

I want to embrace my slightly eccentric aesthetic, be a little more wizardy (yes, wizardy is definitely a word) and learn about herbal remedies, foraging, vegetable and herb gardening and tarot reading (more because I love the artwork and the idea of interpreting a narrative than any actual belief in physic abilities or the cards power to tell the future).

Obviously I intend to write and post about my exploits, but whether I do or not remains to be seen.

I hope anyone reading this has an excellent holiday period and finds the opportunity and time to visit, or at least talk to, family and friends.

Be safe.

Lockdown Life

I’ve been in lockdown for a full 3 weeks now, my company went into shutdown later than most, and for the first few days of which I was working from home. I work for a manufacturing company producing for the construction industry and that has been allowed to keep operating throughout the crisis, though after the first few days of lockdown most companies went into shut down of their own accord. I’ll have been on furlough for 3 weeks as of Friday evening and that essentially means I’ll have had a full 3 weeks of not working, I didn’t want to risk losing the money I am getting by continuing to work from home despite being furloughed, though I’m sure some people will have.

It took a few days to get used to it, but now I’m really enjoying not being at work, though I do wish I’d had slightly more notice to get a few things in so I could do a few of the odd jobs I’ve been lazily (partially due to lack of free time) putting off. So far in the past few weeks I’ve helped repair some fencing that came down in the most recent storms, I’ve cleared out and turned a bit of garden into a veg patch and set some seeds into pots to grow a little before being put out (we still get occasional morning frosts at this time of year), I’ve cooked a few bits and bobs that I particularly enjoy, I’ve set myself an exercise regime and dietary controls with the aim of increasing my physical fitness, I've listened to a lot of podcasts (thank you CheapShow, www.thecheapshow.co.uk, for being thoroughly entertaining) and I’ve played a few video games that I’ve been meaning to play for a while (though I still haven’t started replaying the Witcher 3). It has now gotten to the stage where I’m genuinely dreading life going back to normal, me having to put back on my mask (metaphorically speaking... I’m an antisocial, neurotic git and it takes a lot of work and fakery for me to be around people), returning to work and having to deal with the general shit show that is humanity (I’d like to hope that all this will make people more thoughtful of others, but I’m almost 100% certain it wont and that people will return to their normal cuntish selves very quickly).

As I’ve not really done anything of note, and because I’m boring as all hell so I don’t have anything interesting to say, I’ve been very inactive on the social media/blogging front recently and the current crisis we are all suffering through hasn’t really helped. I thought I should at least add some sort of narcissistic update as to how I’m doing and what my daily life currently entails and here it is.

Thank you for reading.

Just A Bit Of An Update

I've been meaning to write something on here for a while, but every time I start I realise I just can't be bothered. The only time I really get to post these days is at night and by the time I've settled in from work and feel relaxed enough to actually write something then I feel like I'd rather spend that time either with my partner, in person, via the net or what ever or doing one of the many things that bring me pleasure. Now I'm not saying I don't enjoy writing on here, cause I clearly do, I'm just saying my music, my books, my games, my films, my friends etc. etc. seem like a better way of spending my time so blogging ends up being treated like a second class citizen of sorts.

Anyways today my lady is busy preping her lesson plans for next week, she's a teacher, and I have a new phone to play with so have discovered the joys of having, more or less, round the clock internet access and figured I could drop in an impromptu update. Now me and my lady have been talking about moving in together for months now, but, as of yet have failed to make much of an in road, it recently came to our realisation that a possible reason for this was that renting a house didn't appeal as much to us as buying our own. I dunno maybe its just me but when I think about it, it seems you pay someone for the pleasure of looking after their house for them and then when they're sick of you they kick you out, perhaps I'm just being overly cynical. So basically after months of unsuccessful searches for rental properties we've come to the decision that maybe some intense saving with a look to putting down a good size deposit on an actual house of our own is the best way forward for us. It's really good to have something to look forward too, I just hope it really works out.

Anyway thats enough for now, its Sunday afternoon, its raining and I want to just enjoy the weather for a while. It seems the older I get the more I enjoy the bleakness of wet, windy weather and grey sky's.