A nice neighborhood to have bad habits in

Yes, I had more or less forgotten that this journal was here. An interesting cross-post by Andrew, the urge to comment, and I logged in to Dreamwidth for the first time, in, oh, a while.

How do I know it was a while? Stuff has happened.

First off, what hasn't changed.

I'm happily still in the same relationship, in the same cottage (classified as "fairy tale" by my s-i-l, and who am I to argue?) and my health is more or less (for better or worse) in the same state. I seem to have slipped on another 5kg or so, and I'll do something about that. Tomorrow.

There has been travel. Spain, again, though this time to a part I don't usually see. Seville is worth a mention, because it gave me one of the few moments that have ever rendered me genuinely speechless. I wanted to visit the cathedral (what, isn't that what everyone does when they get to a new city?), and it doesn't take a lot of finding. There's a trick, though... You pays your money at a gate, and go into a few rooms of archeological finds. Small rooms. Lowish ceilings, rough hewn walls. The rooms are linked by small doors in small archways. There's a short hall, another arch, another door. You go through it and... Wow. Another world. A vast space. Maybe it has a roof, but if so it's too far away to see. In the distance are altars, or rather pyramids of gold. There are people, in the distance, so small that they might be homunculi.

I'm sure I gasped, and, yes, I was speechless for a good couple of minutes. They knew something about cowing the masses, did those ecclesiastical architects.

Anyway, that's what not brought me here. I want to vent a little about work, because that HAS changed.

I realised last year that somehow or another I'd been with Fujitsu for 11 years, and that was probably long enough. The time had whizzed by - everytime I finished up a project or programme or a role, they offered me something else that I was interested in. But at the end of '21 I finished up a big programme, and it became gradually obvious that they weren't sure what to do with me, and there was nothing I desperately wanted to do with them. I was shunted into a role that was fairly undemanding, and it didn't take long for me to realise it wasn't a home, it was a departure lounge.

I should probably have started looking then, but I remembered the words of Eleanor Coppola when her husband phoned to tell her what a nightmare filming Apocalypse Now was becoming - "Don't quit. Make them fire you."

I wasn't that active - I just waited for an offer to come, and enjoyed a fairly leisurely summer until it came, and then an even more leisurely couple of months of negotiations until the numbers worked out (I'm paranoid about ever getting another job when I leave one, so like to have at least six months of a cushion when I go).

Once I had a leaving date agreed, I started looking, and had two sets of interesting interviews. The more interesting needed three interviews, one with each of the managing partners, and one with the company founder. I enjoyed the meetings - they seemed like a company really looking to build a culture in the UK, and they wanted someone to help develop their work in Scotland. Then they went quiet. The other was a small company in Nottingham. I drove down twice, spent half a day with them, got on well, and then they told me they were appointing an internal candidate. I can't say I was delighted, but I had a chat with my agent, and he said they had been really keen on taking me, but weren't sure they could afford me. I suggested they made an offer for a six-month contract role, and gave him a daily rate I'd be happy with. They liked the idea, and made me an offer. It was a good offer.

And then the first company got back in touch. Things had stalled because of back and forth with Denmark, but that was resolved now and they wanted to make an offer too. I explained that I had something on the table I was happy with, but that they shouldn't let that stop them.

So they did make an offer. The day-rate for the contract job would have bumped me up about 30% from my permie rate with Fujitsu - which was roughly equivalent to the package I was on. My agent said he thought I'd be happy with the offer from Denmark. He was right. Lower bonus, but basic salary boosted almost 60%.

So I joined up with the Danish mob in September, and so far everything they sold me in the interviews has come through. They're mid-size: 7,000 global, 600 in the UK. Three in Scotland. There are down-sides: I'm mostly remote, with the pros and cons that brings, after two years of having no office to go to. HQ is definitely London (a very nice floor in Pancras Square, across from Google) and I don't spend enough time there to get face-time with the partners. I'm of the level immediately below partner, with a dozen and a half others, and imposter syndrome occasionally bites hard.

But that's the story. I'm in a job with people who rate me. I get to work from home, with travel paid. I'm earning more than I ever have, and if all goes well this year I'll break a significant number I never thought I'd come close to.

I'm living in a fairly-tale cottage, and when I finish typing this I think I'll go for a hot tub.

My partner is the smartest person I know, who's been in my life for almost exactly 30 years now (and, oh, I was at a party thrown by dear friends Kay and James to celebrate their 30 years of unwedded bliss. Someone asked how I knew them - "Oh", I said, "I'm the ex").

I'm off in September to spend a couple of weeks in North America, and I'll cross the Canadian Rockies by train, something I've wanted to do since I crossed the US Rockies and the mid-West by Amtrak 30 years ago.

So, friends, console me.

It's over here:

https://wordpress.com/post/wittering2017.wordpress.com/19

I don't actually believe that LJ is going to sell all our credit card details to, er, the Russians, but it might. And anyway, I wanted somewhere to put ransom witterings up that I can link to from here, Twitter and from Facebook.

Let's see how it goes. 

Arghhhhhhh!

What the hell is getting up at 6.15 all about then? Totally uncalled for.

I have a busy week, though, since I need to prepare for a week's work visit to Japan. I'm reluctant to write too much about it before my flights get approved, but if it comes off I'll be flying out on Saturday, back the following weekend.

Given that visiting Tokyo has been on my wish-list since I was about 10 (thank you, Gigantor) I'm really looking forward to this.

Christmas and New Year didn't really give me much of a rest, since we got the keys to the new place on the 16th, and I had to move tons of stuff from the flat I was renting in Edinburgh out there. Project two was getting my place up in Ardrishaig ready to put on Air B'n'B. It's up now, despite needing some work to be finally ready to rent.

So lots of travelling, lots of lifting stuff, and I'm actually 2 and a bit pounds lighter now than I was in December.

No New Year's resolutions, beyond getting my tangled finances sorted out.

Actually, it goes pretty damn well.

Interesting stuff lately included going off to see David Greig's first production as the new creative head at The Lyceum theatre in Edinburgh. If The Suppliant Women is anything to go by, we're in for some intereresting times. I liked this review, but it did seem to get positive judgements just about everywhere.

Other stuff. I have a new car, a BMW 3 series touring this time, since I've decided I need extra space for property moving (more below) but the sensible aspect of it is balanced by having some nice toys, like 4 wheel drive and adaptive cruise control.

I've now bid on three properties in Edinburgh, and not closed on any of them, for various reasons. Currently looking at another two, one of which is conventional, the other one... isn't. More anon, maybe.

I'm also trying to get my place in Argyll in rentable shape, as part of the restoration of my frankly shonky finances.

Said finances not being helped by a long weekend in Paris I've just booked.

Work this month will be interesting - I'm spending a week in Switzerland and Germany, and there may be a week in Japan in the new year. Oh, and my Japanese Overlords are laying off 1,800 people in the UK, so there's something for me to worry about.

But time to go, as I'm cueing up Young Frankensein for a pre-halloween watch.

Be excellent to each other....

August was busy, September isn't being any quieter.

Last weekend I headed off to Lollapalooza in Berlin. There was almost a sensible reason for this - Radiohead tickets in London were going for about £150 a head, and the other headliners were Kings of Leon, who aren't touring in Europe this year as far as I know.

In the end, though, it was a thoroughly impractical idea which worked out very well (give or take an annoying blister I picked up on Saturday).

Berlin is a fascinating city, and I need to head back some time for a proper visit. Three days just didn't cut it. However, I did scratch the surface enough to see it as a haunted city, haunted by the War and the Wall. Every now and then I was reminded that almost none of the buildings around me were more than 70 years old, and the boundaries between the East and West are still stark, even if they were supposedly erased 25 years ago.

(Oh, the festival was great: good humoured, well organised, great sound. But I still prefer small gigs).

A lot of the last two months was spent trying to buy a flat. Long story short, I found a place, offered on it, the offer was accepted, surveys got done, mortgages arranged, and the seller pulled out at the last minute. I guess the best thing to say was that it was a learing experience, but it's a learing experience that's left me three or four grand out of pocket, and with a remortgage that I don't need anymore. It also meant I spent a weekend sorting the fall out, which I had better plans for.

And since three things make a post, today, I should mention that the latest iOS upgrade has left my iPad sulking and refusing to connect to the Interwebs - so I guess I'll go and try to sort that out now. 

I mean, I'm living in Edinburgh, but it's not the same thing at all, especially with the Festival about to kick off. More of that in a minute, but a general catch-up first.

1. Life as she is lived

I've been off on my holi-bags. Two weeks up in the Lecrin Valley, just south of Granada, in the village of Abunelas. It has Andalucian charm leaking from every white-washed wall, and is the place where the exiled Moors from the Alhambra settled as part of their long defeat and return to Africa. I was reminded of this every few hours, when the Moorish irrigation system sent hundreds of gallons of water underneath our tiny but beautiful house. The temperatures where in the 30s, with no air-conditioning, but the only thing that was in danger of overheating was my ipad, as I raced through a metric shit-ton of books. The living, my friends, was easy.

2. That's the way the money goes...

Work continues to be interesting. While we're waiting on the outcome of the bid I spent most of a year working on, I've been concentrating more on the Smart Cities side of my brief. That's taken me to Eindhoven, Madrid and, er, Cardiff (which is not to diss Cardiff - I only got about 5 minutes to walk around, but it showed up well). I'm off to Manchester and Aberdeen this week, which hopefully won't tire me out before seeing Van Morrison on Wednesday.

3. Yes, that's right, Van Morrison. He's playing the Kelvingrove Bandstand, which is a bit of a wonder. It's an open air venue, as the name suggests an old fashioned bandstand in the middle of a park, about half a mile from where I lived when I lived in Glasgow. I don't know how, but they've also got Tom Jones coming. I have tickets for Van, then a double-header of Lloyd Cole and Justin Currie on Sunday, then Primal Scream the week after that. This overlaps with the Festival kicking off, and that means a comedian this Friday (and maybe the Falsetto Sock Puppets) Dune sometime the week after that, and various other gigs. August will be busy.

4. Born to Write Wrong

And, to top things off, I wrote my first science fiction short-story in about 20 years this summer, for an anthology celebrating 30 years of the Glasgow Science Fiction Writers' Circle. It's been accepted, with a bit of a re-write, and I'm looking forward to the launch party now. I'm particularly pleased about that because the GSFWC is the Jonbar Hinge where my life changed. Through membership I met my future ex-wife, my best friend of 25 years standing, and, albeit indirectly, the wonderful person who shared my plunge-pool in the Lecrin Valley. The story started as one of the wist-ending shorts that I specialised in those days, heavily indebted to O Henry and Roger Zelazny. I think it improved in the rewrite (which I finished a couple of hours ago) and I'm really quite proud of it.

5. The road goes ever on...

I'm working on a couple of things now which are pretty exciting, but I don't want to jinx them by mentioning them yet. Hopefully all will be sorted and able to be revealed by the end of August. Change, my dears, is a constant that keeps on expanding.

Which is nice. 

I was just prompted to say what actually happened about my Loch Ness cycle ride, and how it all went.

The short answer is very well - I finished, I finished inside the time I'd set myself, and I raised almost 4 times my sponsorship target.

The longer answer is still very well, and it's maybe worth saying a little about how the event met my expectations.

First of all, it turns out that a lot of people were taking it more seriously than I was - there were 4,000 entrants, and I'd say more than three quarters of them were club cyclists, or at least had a lot of experience of road racing. They were the people who were looking for a time of 2-3 hours, and they were a LOT faster than I was, espescially on the hills. Oh yes, the hills - more on them later.

Next, the weather was not what I was expecting - dry and sunny the whole way round, with not a drop of rain, far less the snow we'd seen the week before. This meant I was overdressed - I could have done with a layer or two less.

I also took too much food with me - the snack stops had more than enough. I should have taken more water, though. I went through my own bottle quickly, and the refills had a horrible amount of chlorine in them.

I set my own pace going round, I got off and pushed when the hills got too steep, and I stopped at all three of the provided rest spots. The upshot of all of that was that I took just around 5 and a half hours for the 66 miles, never felt I wasn't going to finish, and even felt remarkably fresh at the end.

There's a lot that I could have done differently, and maybe will if I do it again next year, but they all involve changing my goals for the day. As you might remember, those were to make my sponsorship target, to finish, and to get an official time, and I met or exceeded all of them.

It turns out that maybe I set my goals around the ride too low - I did treat it as a tour, and didn't push myself to any limits. I now know that I'm fit enough to jump on my bike and do the 66 miles without much training or taking it to seriously. But I could have cut an hour off my time without doing anything particularly hard. My time for the first 30 miles was just over an hour and a half. That's because that part of the route is mostly flat, and I kept an easy 18 mph pace up. The next five miles are all up hill, and those took me more than an hour, because I was pushing all the way. The last 30 miles took me just over two and a half hours, partly because they had more hills, and partly because I had three rest stops (one just before the big hill). I could easily have skipped the last stop, which was about 10 miles from the end.

The biggest mistake I made in terms of time was taking the wrong bike - the gears on my racing bike mean that you need to be strong to keep it going up hills, and I'm just not built that way - my manly legs are strong enough to push me to sprints or lift a lot of weight, but I'm not set up to sustain that effort for 5 miles or so. Partly that's fitness, and partly it's practice. So, knowing that, I'd take my touring bike next year. I'd probably lose an mph or two on the flat, but I'd more than make it back on the hills.

Still, we live and learn - as I say, getting the best time wasn't my goal.

I finished, I raised £360 for MacMillans, and I had a good time.

I call that a win. 

I've made a commitment to ride a 100km Sportif for charity.
This will be run on closed roads, some of which are a bit hilly, and to get a recognised time I need to keep up an average pace of about 15 mph.
Realising that this is a bit of a challenge for an occasional cycle tourist, who likes to keep to a leisurely 10 mph or so, I downloaded a 12 week training plan that will take me up to the right level of fitness. Unfortunately, I downloaded this eight weeks ago, and the Sportif is on April 24th, and the weather has been so bad that I only just got out on my bike this weekend.

Two sessions, 7.5 miles on Saturday, at an average speed of 10.5 mph, and 12 miles on Sunday, at 12 mph. So there's a way to go, I can see.

Road racing (which is what this is, really, despite there being no prizes) is a lot different from touring. My touring bike is a sturdy beast, with panniers, lights and mud guards, and I can comfortably trundle around on it for 6 or 8 hours a day. It has kevlar tyres, 24 gears, and, though the gears are not as generous as those on my mountain bike, I can cycle it up most things.

My racking bike weighs about half that, has 16 gears, and makes no concessions to little things like potholes, or corners, and it doesn't have Granny gears.

I enjoyed being out on it this weekend, but that was in dry if cold weather, with almost no wind. And the longest I was in the saddle for was just over an hour. Over the next few weeks I'll need to take that up to at least three hours, and rides of between 40 and 50 miles - I don't see any need to do the full distance in training. I'll need to do quite a bit of hill work, and think about what sort of food I eat before, and what I take with me.

It would also be a good idea to drop a few kilos. The scales this morning said I was 92 kilos, which is a good 15 kilos under my peak weight of a few years ago, but somewhere in the 80s is a much healthier place to be. And every kilo I lose is 1,000 grams less to drag around on the ride.

So hey, ho, and off I go. 

I bought (yet) another set of headphones at the weekend, so I’m testing them out with some old, familiar tracks. I should be surprised at the surge of emotions that come on, listening to songs that once meant the world to me, but they’re hitting me hard tonight.

First up was “My Stunning Mystery Companion”, Jackson Browne’s tale of lost love. That got a fond smile from me, and gladness that she’s so happy now. People will come and go, it seems, but there will only ever be one Stunning Mystery Companion for me.

And then “All I Want Is You” by U2. And I shake my head, that at one time it meant so much, and I move on, sadly, straight to “Stolen Car” (the Patty Griffin cover, not Springsteen’s original) and it brings back the last days (months, years) of my marriage, and I shudder. I actually shudder, and remember feeling 100 years old.

Which is probably enough of that (though Loyd Cole’s “Vin Ordinaire” reminds me always, always to laugh at myself – “She’s in love with him, I’m in love with her, here we go again, so Vin Ordinaire”.)

I’m in a better place now, in a lot of ways, and all it takes to remind me of that is a song that’s oh, 25 years or so old – so in the end I have to say, let the clouds go rain on some other sucker’s parade.

Good headphones, these. 

The transition to Edinburgh continues apace.

I've just completed my acclimatisation to the odd-shaped ball game they call rugby. Apparently this involves drinking too much, following a seemingly doomed national team, and watching them fail in heart-rending circumstances. This is close enough to following the round-ball game that I feel I've got a good handle on it already. What it doesn't seem to involve is tribal hatred between teams, so that's strange.

Since I have Holyrood park on my doorstep, and I've registered for a 100km cycling sportif in April, I thought I'd take my bike out yesterday. Yes, the day of torrential rain and Force-7 gales. Suffice to say, it wasn't an unqualified sucess. On the other hand, it can't get worse, can it?

Inclement weather did mean that I spent a lot of the weekend on a sofa watching TV. This included the end of Fargo (totally worth it for Billy Bob Thornton's turn as a diabolic hit-man), the start of The Bridge (I know, I'm late to the party, but I'm enjoying it) and both QI and Have I Got News For You, which I haven't seen in the same weekend since the year dot.

No cinema, though, since there was nothing on that I fancied. SPECTRE was a bit of a let down, and Bridge Of Spies isn't out for a couple of weeks.

OK, my typing fingers are warmed up now, I guess I better get on to one of my three jobs for today.