The alien years... the 2010s... call them what you will, but we're now one month in, already! Hope it's going well for you so far.
I started the year full of optimism about the new decade, and I guess I'm still in that frame of mind, despite the usual feelings that kick in around this time of year. I still have nagging doubts that I could be doing more with my time, but I think I've done OK considering. There's no less than three projects I've got going and I've made some progress with them all.
Firstly there's the old favourite - simplifying and decluttering, something I've wanted to do for years. My house is very small, and every bit of it is crammed with various stuff, most of which date back to the last century and a fair amount I probably don't need. Every year I say to myself I'm going to get rid of a lot of it, and every year I start and then give up after a while because I get overwhelmed by it all. Well, this year it finally seems to be happening. My bedroom floor isn't being used as a laundry basket anymore for a start, something I've been guilty of doing since my late teens and a bad habit of mine that I thought was pretty much unbreakable. Turns out the carpet in my bedroom was green after all... At some point, I'll have to get rid of all my CDs (I never use them anymore, they've all been digitized, so why keep them?) and then some of those old magazines that have been residing under my bed for ages (think I've proved to myself I don't need them by now)
Project two is the return to the poker tables, and it's great to be back! I may do some monthly excerpts from my poker diary here - I don't want to turn this place into a poker blog and risk alienating my readers who aren't interested in the game, but I do want to talk about it here as it is a part of my life and that's fundamentally what I'm writing about here. Suffice to say I end the month with about 20% more money in my bankroll than I started with, which is great (although the sums involved are very small) Hopefully I will continue to move in that direction!
As for the third project, well, I can't actually talk about that at the moment - it's a collaboration with GroupieGirl and I wouldn't feel comfortable talking about it until it was complete. Let's just say if this comes off there could be another very interesting story to tell :)
Anyway, I've spent pretty much all of the last day of January 2010 sleeping to try and reset the body clock. I keep saying that this biphasic sleeping regime is going to have to go, but it's difficult with the circumstances I find myself in. Going to bed around 21.00 isn't something I've done on a regular basis since the 1970s, and I have no real wish to go back to those days (except maybe musically, heh heh) The other alternative is to go nocturnal, sleeping from mid-afternoon till midnight, which would cause even more problems...
Right, I'm going to fix myself something to eat, watch the snow falling for a while and then do the washing up which has been piling up over the last few days due to my extreme tiredness. I have no wish to enter February with crockery in the sink, even if they are my lovely black plates!
My sleeping pattern has completely lost touch with reality at the moment. I seem to be getting more and more confused about what time of day or night it is, and my habit of biphasic sleeping doesn't seem to help. The original plan of sleeping four hours in the day and four in the night came from my rather unorthodox working hours - it seemed to be the only way to deal with a 05.00 alarm call! Lately though, I've not been sleeping properly either by day or by night, and just seem to be getting more and more tired as the days go on. The fact that this is one of the rare weeks that I'm working five consecutive days probably doesn't help matters. Neither does the fact that my natural sleeping cycle appears to be the complete opposite of what I need it to be - when left to my own devices I find myself going to bed about the time I have to get up for work...
This morning was sheer hell, as I staggered around assembling some sort of a breakfast after another night of broken sleep. "If only I could take six months off and get myself sorted out" I thought. That would probably be a great idea, to be honest. I've a few projects I could get done in that time, projects which don't seem to be getting anywhere at the moment. I find when I wake up after my four hour naps, I'm not really in the mood to do anything - I don't even want to watch TV or play poker! Just staring into a screen for hours aimlessly websurfing is not a productive way to spend one's time, and yet I seem to keep doing it at the moment.
Mmm - six months off - that would be nice. Maybe followed by changing jobs to something with more natural working hours - more natural for me that is. I actually thought about applying to be a croupier when the new casino in town was being built, that seemed perfect - until I looked at the salary they were offering and worked out I'd be taking a 33% pay cut! But then, there's no point in both me and GroupieGirl being between jobs - they're still hard to come by. So, I just had to grit my teeth and drag myself to work once again...
I'm glad I did though, because something strange happened today. Some surreal things seem to happen in my life from time to time, and now I've got another thing to add to the list. Walking down the street today I saw what appeared to be some money lying in the road. OK, I've found money in the street on several occasions in the past... but never American money before. I looked again - it was a one hundred dollar bill, on the street in my town, on the other side of the Atlantic from its home country. How on earth did it get here?
With no-one around, I picked it up, and put it in my pocket. Maybe it's a sign of some sort. Perhaps something to do with America is in my future. Who knows?
48 hours on and this still hurts to write...oh Zog...
I decided to spend Sunday night out in the rural wilds of Aberdeenshire seeing my parents, who I've not actually seen since November 2008. If you think that sounds terrible, I suggest you read this which was the blog entry about that trip, and that'll give you some idea as to why it's been so long since I've been up that way. Still, glorious new decade and all that stuff, I thought maybe I would go visit them. I'd actually wanted to do it at New Year but thought I'd wait until the large quantities of snow disappeared first. I also asked GroupieGirl if she'd like to come over, mainly because I thought the whole thing would be more bearable if I had a sidekick with me...
If you have read that entry from 2008, well... to be honest, there's not much point in writing this one, because it was pretty much a carbon copy of what went on then. They were pleased enough to see me in the evening, but in the morning all the old tensions and arguments came right back to the surface. The character assassinations on me carried on for pretty much the whole stay. And when my mum started talking about GroupieGirl literally behind her back, I just lost it. "Shut up" I hissed "or I won't come back..."
And I mean it. Right now I'm thinking if I never saw these people again I wouldn't bat an eyelid. I posted to Twitter "the idea of faking my own death and going to live on a narrowboat somewhere seems so appealing at the moment". I probably won't do this, as I'm rather enjoying living in my little house now it's less cluttered with stuff I don't need. (Just the house, mind you. The area I live in is still a hell-hole, but once you're inside, just keep the curtains closed and it's no longer a problem, yeah?)
I feel a whole lot happier away from them, frankly. I had hoped that I'd see them more often in 2010 - my parents are both in their late 70s now, and there's a whole new generation of Camdens growing up who know little or nothing about their alien uncle - but I have to ask, what is the bloody point of going out there if I'm going to come home feeling like this?
You know what? The hell with them. I'll just be me. I shall live my own life, doing the things I enjoy, and if I feel like it - IF I feel like it - perhaps I'll send these people the odd text message or two about it. They may have created me, but that was thirty-odd years ago. I don't owe them a thing now.
I do insist on doing these things to myself, don't I? Didn't get to bed last night until after 06.00 due to entering a poker tournament last night (or was it this morning?) Admittedly it was a freeroll so it's not as if I was risking any money on it, and it was a different style of poker than the kind you've probably seen played. Not many people have heard of Razz, and my brain's too tired to give a thorough explanation of the game, but basically you're trying to get the five lowest cards you can out of a possible seven, Aces count as the lowest, and pairs are no good. And I enjoyed the game very much, finishing 538th out of 7,500 starters. Nowhere near good enough to get paid, but enough to beat 92% of the field, which would normally get you paid in a tournament. Added to the fact that I'd been playing for three and a half hours by this time, and Saturday night had well and truly become Sunday morning, and that may explain why I didn't get any further.
I will play Razz again, that much is definite!
I also will have to get my brain back in gear fairly soon as I'm going to visit my parents & my sister Cat later this afternoon and staying over there tonight - something you really have to be on top form to cope with. Thankfully GroupieGirl will be coming with me, and she's baking scones to take with her. We had some last night and they're not bad... not bad at all...
There must be something about Week 3 in a particular year. There was the so-called "blue monday" earlier this week, which is the first time I've heard of the media covering it, and certainly the first time I've heard it called by that name. But it's a concept I'm sadly all too familiar with. We're pretty much in mid-winter now, the snow has all gone but the short days remain, and even though they're getting longer it's a very slow process. It's cold, I'm tired all the time and want to hibernate. As usual in Week 3, I'm starting to think about the year so far and wondering if I could have done more with the two weeks we've already had, however much I've actually done with them. Irrational I know, but it happens. And the whole thing just feels like it's becoming a grind.
My blog title comes from a phrase I used to shout out whenever I played a poker tournament and things started to go wrong after a good start. And with a mindset like what I have now, it's probably no wonder I booked a losing session at poker for the first time since my return to the tables - after winning $2.50 up until yesterday, I've given about half of that back in one hit, and there's no worse feeling than knowing your hand is beat yet still putting your chips in because you feel you've got to - and then seeing your initial judgement was right and wondering why the hell you did what you did. My Ace/King happened to run into pocket Kings - bad luck, but then I had extremely good luck last week so maybe this is just evening itself out as luck eventually does. However, I did feel a little intimidated by a couple of players at the table who clearly were better than me, and of course there's the "week 3" feeling in my head - so probably no wonder I booked a loss.
Right now I'm just sitting staring into space listening to the local lowlife scum shouting at each other and indulging in a little low-level vandalism. There's tons of stuff I want to get done but I just can't motivate myself to do it. GroupieGirl's also finding life a little tough at the moment and really I should invite her over - I think she's missing me - but I just can't seem to be bothered doing that either. Or maybe I'm scared that things will start going wrong again there too. Like it did last winter, yeah?
I'm coming home from work and sleeping until 20.00 - and by then, it's a little late to invite her over - staring into a screen until 24.00 or 01.00 before dragging my butt to bed and sleeping for a few hours until my alarm call at 05.00. I then try to get myself awake with coffee and go to work, usually in a very emotionally fragile state (and thank Zog for the earplugs, I can assure you). After a hard day at work I come home and usually feel like going straight to bed again. Put that on repeat. Perhaps it doesn't help that this week I'm working five days straight with no break in the middle like there usually is.
The only thing going well at the moment is the rather vivid dreams I'm having, and while they fade from the memory after a few hours they're good while they're happening. Last night I had a really nice one featuring someone I know from social media - or at least parallel universe versions of us. As I made breakfast this morning I was feeling quite fragile and not really in a mood to face the world at all, but still with a nice feeling from the dream, and with this song in my head which was playing in it. Probably one of the most upbeat songs about death in musical history, and certainly hugely popular at the time (biggest seller in the UK of 1979, as I said when I blipped it on waking)
It does get better. I've been through this cycle every winter for two decades now. But it's not much fun while it's happening. The alien years weren't supposed to be like this.
Practically every single person who lived in the UK during the 1980s will remember this advert...
This has got to be amongst the most successful ad campaigns in TV, and even now you probably can't listen to Desmond Dekker's original without thinking about this advert (or possibly the one for Maxell cassettes, which used the same track) GroupieGirl and I, who were both teenagers in the 1980s, were reminiscing about the times and this advert happened to come up in discussion. I pointed out that I'd never actually tasted Vitalite as my mum always bought stuff like Flora or St.Ivel Gold and I wasn't a huge fan of margarine - peanut butter being my sandwich filling of choice back then.
"I wonder if they still sell the stuff?" I said. "Of course they do, I saw some in the shops at the weekend" Groupie replied.
So I added a tub of Vitalite to my grocery order this week. And now it's in my fridge.
It tastes...OK, I guess, we'll have to see what it's like on toast of a morning...
Apologies in advance - this is another long entry... grab a coffee...
I've always had a fascination with the game of poker, ever since my early teens when I watched the BBC drama series "Big Deal" which was about the (mis)adventures of a compulsive gambler and his long-suffering girlfriend. My dad's always been a fan of westerns, which was another place to see this strange game played with five cards where it was apparently possible to win - or usually, lose - an absolute boatload of money. I found a book of card games in the school library containing the rules - Zog alone knows what the librarian thought when I checked that out! Later on, a friend of mine got hold of a strip poker game for the computer, which I got a copy of. Let's just say if you promise nudity to a teenage boy, you can get him to learn almost anything...
However, once I'd left school, I forgot about the game. There was nowhere to play it here anyway, and not many people who even knew the rules. And those that did - well, you wouldn't want to play for money against these guys. So it wasn't until the new century dawned that I rediscovered my love for the game, and again it was due to television. A series called "Late Night Poker" had started being shown, and I started recording it and watching it with interest. Five card draw was the style of poker I'd learned back in the day, but this was completely different - two cards to each player, then five cards in the middle of the table, and they called it "Texas Hold'em". But two pairs still beat a pair and lost to three of a kind, so there was some familiarity.
As the series progressed, I grew more interested in the characters playing the game, with nicknames like the Devilfish. Then I got satellite TV and found more such series there, mainly from the USA with a new set of characters calling themselves things like the Unabomber and the Poker Brat. I learned about "tournament style" poker - where everyone buys in with the same amount of money, gets the same amount of chips and keep playing till they either lose all their chips or are the last person standing. And I began to read about places where you could play the game on the internet, for real money. "I'd like to try that" I thought. "Pity they don't seem to cater for Apple Macs. Still, it's nice to watch it on the telly."
Then I discovered a site (Pokerroom.com, which has since closed) which did work on an Apple Mac. After researching the site, I opened an account there, and at Christmas 2005, anted up $1 to play in my first ever online poker tournament. And I won $3!! Nice one! This coincided with the "online poker boom" where lots of websites, magazines, podcasts and even a TV channel dealing solely with poker cropped up, and I tried to soak up as much information as I could. I found poker a lot of fun, even though I wasn't exactly a poker ace. Although I lost money overall, the sums involved were quite small, and it was nice to have the occasional win.
But then, I stopped playing, because it stopped being fun - and not because of anything that was happening at the tables, but the attitudes of various people. There seems to be something about the "typical" poker player online - they have the attitude that they know everything about the game, and some of the discussions I saw in the forums were just a real turn-off for me. You do have to be "aggressive" to be successful in poker - it helps if you're a bully, and while I try to do that when I'm betting and raising, I am nothing like that in real life and I hate being around people like that in real life. There were also comments from coworkers along the lines of "you'll always lose in the long run" and "you'll never make money at it". Maybe so, but I wasn't advocating quitting my job and turning professional. If someone decided they wanted to take up golf, would you say "why bother, you'll never be as good as Tiger Woods"?
The real killer was when my (then) boss found out about my poker playing. He clearly did not understand anything about the game and flat out asked me if I had a gambling problem. This really put me off, because one of the first things I did when starting to play was read about things like bankroll management and the importance of not playing with money you couldn't afford to lose. I know what it's like to be a compulsive gambler - there were two in my family - and I was determined not to become the third.
I was also finding it difficult to schedule time to play tournaments - there were other things I wanted to do with my time. The problems I had with GroupieGirl also meant I often wasn't in a fit state emotionally to play (another thing I learned - never play when you're not able to concentrate on the game). And when Pokerroom.com closed its operations, as part of the fall-out of the American government's decision to effectively make online poker for real money illegal, I decided that was pretty much the end of my online poker forays. I still watched a lot of the game on TV, but I didn't play anymore.
In 2009 though, I found myself re-apprasing various aspects of my life, some of which have been chronicled on these pages. I began to think how much fun I had playing poker in the past. I enjoyed the game, it was just the baggage that went with it that turned me off. Why should I let scumbags who I would cross the street to avoid put me off participating in an enjoyable activity in the comfort of my own home? As long as I wasn't risking money I couldn't afford to lose, and wasn't neglecting other aspects of my life, what was the harm in playing?
And so, for the third time in my life, I discovered poker. This time, it would be different. I would not discuss the game with people at work - they either weren't interested or didn't understand, and there was no point giving them ammunition to take pot-shots at me. I also decided if I was going to be a good player, I had to learn from the best - the professionals. So I enrolled in the Full Tilt poker academy, where you can get tips and advice from the professionals and then get credits for putting that information into practice on the tables. Finally, I decided I would look again at the "cash game" side of things, where you play each hand with real money rather than buying tournament chips. In these games, you can enter and leave whenever you wish, so you don't have to set aside an entire evening to play a tournament (and then find yourself with nothing to do for a few hours after you bust out early) I could play in short bursts whenever I had the time.
I had a balance of $15 from winning a freeroll tournament - beating almost exactly a thousand players in a game that took five and a half hours :) so that became my initial bankroll, and I decided to start in the smallest stake games. And I mean small stakes - a 2 cent minimum bet (and a 60 cent maximum bet per hand). In these games, the most you can sit down with initially is $2, so that means I could get completely busted eight times before I had to deposit more money. Despite the tiny stakes involved, I am richly enjoying being back in the game, and after almost a couple of hours at the tables this week I've got my bankroll up to $17 - moving in the right direction at least!!
I'm going to end this entry with the theme tune from the "Big Deal" series which I enjoyed a quarter of a century ago. Hopefully I won't become like the main character Robbie Box - I shouldn't think so, I'd like to think I'm much too sensible to do that.
It seems strange to look out of the window and see things like grass and sidewalks and tarmac again. Apart from a few stubborn areas, all trace of the big freeze of 2010 has now vanished, and we've returned to the seasonal average temperatures of 5 or 6 degrees Celsius...not exactly bikini weather, but a real change compared to what we've had for the last month!
In fact, it's been exactly 4 weeks since the snow began to fall. One of the first entries I made here dealt with how much I love snow, so I've been quite happy with the scenes outside. Even when I've had to be outside in it, I've still felt happy. I remember wondering whether it would be a white Christmas. Oh Zog, did we get a white Christmas... Then as 2009 turned to 2010, the temperatures started to plummet. I have a weather widget on my MacMini's dashboard, and it was amazing to see just how low the temperatures were going. We got as far as -13 one morning when I woke up, and that's in town - in open country, out in the highlands, it was -18, and to give you an idea of just how cold that is, that's the standard temperature for a freezer.
What I'll remember from this winter is the build up of pack ice just about everywhere. Several centimetres thick in some places. Never thought I'd ever see people with ice-picks and sledgehammers trying to break up the ice outside their driveways. OK, the ice isn't much fun - the night I walked GroupieGirl home across the sheet-ice wasn't exactly a laugh, the two of us inching across like pensioners - but you're OK with the snow on top of it, it gives you more traction. And we got plenty of snow on top of it all right.
And then, as the night temperatures got ever lower, the icicles began to appear. As I left for work one morning, I opened my door to discover the biggest icicle I had ever seen. About a metre long, and about 4cm thick, I actually had to walk around it to get out. But not before I'd taken some photos of it with my iPhone to post on Twitter, as I believed "mere words could not do this icicle justice". I noticed several houses in my street had large icicles, but none were as fearsome as the one outside Zaph's place. The following morning it was joined by another one about half the size, which made me think "if that grows to a similar length I'll need to learn how to limbo dance to leave the house!". However, the next day all trace of the ice giant was gone. I'm not sure whether the rising temperatures melted it, or whether it had just grown so big it couldn't support it's own weight anymore. Nevertheless, I will always remember the great icicle of 2010.
I miss the snow. One good thing about white ground is that it reflects a lot of light, and that's important when you live this far north, as light tends to be in short supply in December and January. I think it could be a combination of this and optimism towards the dawn of a new decade that's made this winter quite a happy one for me so far. Certainly better than last year's, and Groupie feels the same. Whether this can continue now the snow's all gone is another story. Still, the two of us have got various projects that have the potential to keep us busy until the alien new year on March 20 when the longer days return.
To be honest, we could do with more winters like this. Despite the news stories of the country grinding to a halt, I think we should have this every year. Maybe then we'd be better prepared for it. People in countries like Norway and Canada are laughing at us and how a few flakes of snow causes so much disruption. There, they get on with things. And the travel chaos? Well, you were warned "not to make journeys unless absolutely necessary" and maybe we should listen to those warnings a bit more. Never mind what the boss thinks, is he going to sack everyone? (And you may have legal recourse if he does) Can't get to the family over Xmas? Regrettable, but there are 364 other days in the year when you can make the trip - what is so special about December 25? And as I said to someone during a rather heated argument "listen, we're at 50-odd degrees north, we should get snow in the winter. If you don't like it, move to ****ing Gibraltar. They speak English, you don't need a work permit and you can even watch Sky Sports and go to fish & chip shops"
Groupie's thinking it may be a good idea to get those ice spikes you can attach to your shoes. They'd have come in handy on a few occasions over the last few weeks. Maybe we'll both get some and keep them on hand so we'll be ready next time. If there is a next time, and I hope there is.
Well, it took two weeks, but this is officially my first entry of twenty:10. I sincerely hope my readers (assuming I still have readers) had a good New Year period and wish them all the very best for the coming year, and indeed the coming decade. We've already started the debate on what to call the thing - I've heard the most ridiculous suggestions like "ten-sies" - but hopefully we'll choose something more sensible like "the tens". I myself am going to call them "the alien years", for no other reason other than it sounds good (I referred to January 2 as "the second day of the future" on Twitter, but I'm not going to get away with that for long) GroupieGirl likes the sound of "the X-years" since the roman numeral dates at the end of TV programmes etc. will all start MMX.
You may wonder why I didn't write this earlier. - after all, we're two weeks into the alien years by now! Well, if you remember, one of the last things I did in the 00s was to upgrade the operating system on my MacMini from Leopard (10.5) to Snow Leopard (10.6). The upgrade worked a treat but it fried my internet connection - I simply could not get online at all. Thankfully my iPhone allowed me to keep in touch with Twitter and various other things through 3G, but this obviously couldn't be sustained for ever. If I wanted to order groceries online, for example, there's no substitute for the big screen and a broadband connection.
I initially thought it was a problem with my router - there'd been talk on the internet about D-Link gear having problems with 10.6. Subsequent updates to Snow Leopard apparently fixes this, but it's a bit hard to download updates to your operating system when you can't get online in the first place... so I got myself a new router as my last purchase of 2009 and tried that. No dice. I didn't really want to call my ISP's technical support line - they'd probably not be up and running till after New Year and most ISP tech support staff don't understand why anyone wouldn't be running a version of Windows (and believe me, I speak from experience...) Could it be my phone line? Well, it seemed to work OK with the phone, and I could access my router's start-up page... I could even get an IP address, I just couldn't get the bloody thing to download anything!! Very strange.
And so, I found myself making an appointment at the Apple Genius Bar for the first time. This is a lot easier now that we have an Apple Store of our own in the centre of town. I didn't take the MacMini with me because I thought a simple discussion of what was wrong would lead me to a solution, but the genius was rather confused about why the internet connection wasn't working and told me I'd really have to bring the thing in so they could have a look at it. Which would mean making another appointment.
I decided that while the look of Snow Leopard was quite nice, having an internet connection was far more important. My MacMini was currently a silver and white doorstop underneath my TV without it. So I decided to simply move all my files to an external hard disc, do a clean install of Leopard and then copy everything back. Since the problem only started once I changed operating systems, that looked like the best solution. Certainly, it seemed the simplest solution. So, that's what I did - and would you believe it, it worked!! My connection has been rock solid ever since, and I'm a happy alien again.
Before the Windows contingent say anything, let me point out that this is the first time in eight and a half years keeping the Apple faith that I've ever had to re-install an operating system, and the whole thing was quite simple and took less time that I thought. Not that I get involved in all this Mac vs PC nonsense - I've tried both and I'm simply going with what I like.
Ever wondered what the current national debt of the UK is? Well, this is it - so big that the commas are in the wrong place! That's over a trillion pounds and rising.
the alien's greatest hits...
Some of my favourite tracks. Expect a heavy bias towards the 1980s :)
There's over an hour's worth of music here. Once started, the playlist will change tracks automatically, but you can use the arrows at either side (or the second button on the player bar) to skip forward and back. Enjoy!
ZAPHOD CAMDEN, MMXI
Do what you will shall be the whole of the law.Love is the law, love under will.
"...although progressing well academically, his personal behaviour tends to label him as eccentric..."
(From my school report, 1989 - but what did they know, eh?)
Posts
