Tag Archives: bad start

A Bad Start to the Day

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Farmer Ted lectures on sheep

I just did 550 words on a lead medallion I have in my collection. I did a write up for the Numismatic Society Facebook page a while ago and thought I’d expand it a bit for the blog. As usual, I thought this was simpler than starting from scratch, and as usual, I was wrong. When I finished and went to the folder for my photos, I found I didn’t have any. Not sure what I’ve done with them. As usual, I have also put the medallion in a box, and it will take me ages to find. Not all is lost though, my brain  has had some exercise.

The dream is that one day I will be able to go straight to the appropriate box and find the medallion in minutes. Reality is still a little way off that ideal.

Narcissi, but I expect you knew that

I’ve been told off (gently) by Julia for becoming a recluse and sitting in my office/study/den/man cave all day. It’s quite an indeterminate room at the moment – not really productive or organised for an office, not studious enough for a study and not personal or decorated enough for either of the other two. Another that comes to mind is writing space, you often see that. But mostly I spend the time sighing and staring into space, so there’s not a lot of writing going on. It’s not the spare bedroom, because we already have one of those, so it must be the box room. Small pokey and full of boxes – yes, that sounds right. Life was so much simpler when I had no choices and worked in the dining room.

Primroses at Wilford, Notts

I’ve just been charging batteries, ready for a trip out. There was a moment of panic when I couldn’t get any of them to fit back in the camera, but that turned out to be a problem with my brain rather than the batteries. I convinced myself they fitted one way, when they actually fit the other way round. Senior moment or the beginning of a terminal decline? At one point I worried I had broken something in the battery bay. We did that with an expensive camera once and ended up having to replace it. Fortunately this is not the case here.

We are off out soon, as part of my non-recluse policy. It could be a great adventure. Or it could be an anti-climax.

This is the bookshop at Brierlow Bar before they finally ruined it

Photos are a random springtime selection.

Organising My Writing

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I need 27 tanka and 13 Haibun/Tanka Prose to send off before the end of the month. It seems like a lot, but to be honest, I have a few tanka done and even if I didn’t I can easily knock two dozen off in a couple of days. They won’t be my best work but if I’m honest, I could spend a lifetime writing 24 poems and still not feel they were good enough. Do them, move on, learn, improve.

The Haibun and Tanka Prose, look like more of a problem, though I do actually have about 23 that are complete or nearly complete when I count them up. Again, it’s that old story – I can mess with them for years without them seeming good enough, so I may as well just send them as soon as they seem acceptable. I hope that if I keep writing I will eventually learn to write better.

Next month I need 3 Haibun and 3 Tanka Prose. That will be easy as most editors ask for up to three then return two. I can almost guarantee that if I send the rejects out some will be accepted.

Talking of working on Haibun for years, there are several that have been knocking about for a couple of years now, including some that I’ve never sent out. The truth is that no matter how much you improve the writing, some of the subjects are so dull or so convoluted that they just don’t work.  I will have  Spring Clean next month and send them into storage.

There is a variety in this lot – ducks (one of my favourite subjects), insomnia, age, family stories, religion, funerals, pigs, wheelbarrows, prostate problems . . .

My life is a rich seam of inspiration, though it’s fair to say that my mind does not inhabit the higher planes of human existence.

As for the rest of the day, I slept badly and woke up feeling tired. However, it is Sunday, so I turned over, ignored Julia’s suggestion that I might like to get up and make her breakfast, and woke two hours later with a bad back.

Yes, I too believe that sleep was cursed by my cavalier disregard for my wife’s feelings regarding breakfast.

Unfortunately, one thing goes wrong and everything else follows. I dressed slowly, got my feet stuck in my trousers and struggled to get my slipper socks on. If you put them on before your trousers they get caught, if you put them on after it can be tricky bending your knees enough to reach. And if you don’t put them on, your feet get cold.

It’s not been too bad since then, though the decision to watch Supervized proved to be a bad one. It’s a film with a good central concept, a generally mediocre cast (though I always like to see Clive Russell, and a poor script.

We are having pork and roast veg for tea, and Julia has just walked past with it, so if you will excuse me, I need to go . . .

(It was very good, so good that I ate, watched the Pottery Throw-Down and forgot to post this until I woke, still asleep in my chair.)

Orange Parker Pen

 

A Bad Start, but it Improved

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Moorhen at Arnot Hill Park

Today started badly. I woke up, noted the degree of daylight coming through the curtains and checked that Julia had already got up. I was just deciding to turn over and snooze until the alarm went (which I estimated would be quite soon), when Julia shouted up and asked if I was getting up. It seems, after I looked at the clock, that I had set the alarm for the wrong time and should have been up ten minutes ago. It’s not a good start to the day.

Then I realised, as I set off, that I had forgotten my glasses. Fortunately I have spare pairs. My arms have been getting shorter over the years and I can no longer hold things far enough away from my face to let my eyes focus. It’s very annoying, as nobody warned me about this. I’d have carried weights around if I’d known I would need to stop my arms shrinking.

Arnot Hill Park, Arnold, Nottingham

I arrived at work, trying to act as if I was bright and early, switched everything on and started getting the things together for parcels. The spare glasses I keep on my desk have tortoiseshell frames and seem very bright after wearing black frames. The first twenty minutes felt like I was staring through a luminous orange porthole. Fortunately my eyes soon adjusted.

Last night I had a problem with my injector pen. I couldn’t get the plunger to click and release the needle, which was a bit annoying.  This was multiplied by the feeling that it was caused by the abundant nature of the fat pad I was trying to inject into. The trick, for those of you who don’t know, is to pinch some abdominal fat and inject into that instead of the abdominal muscles. It’s much easier with the needles that you press yourself because they don’t need much pressure. However, they don’t seem to do the arthritis drugs in that form – they come in a massive spring-loaded contraption that has to be pressed firmly against the injection site. When you press hard enough the plunger trips the release and what feels like a massive needle is driven into your flesh. It’s actually quite a fine needle, it’s just the strength of the spring that makes it feel so bad.

Arnot Hill Park, Arnold, Nottingham

In fact, after I failed to trip the spring, i pressed it against a piece of plastic to see if it was working. It was. It narrowly missed my finger and I sprayed immunosuppressant all over my hand. I also ascertained, to my surprise, that it is a very fine needle.

The rest of the day, I’m glad to report, was better than the start. We made last night’s stew into soup and had it with crisps and a pasty whilst watching quizzes on TV. I am better than some of the Mastermind contestants on general knowledge (though I am sitting comfortably at home), got a few of the links on Only Connect (though some were childishly easy tonight) and then entered the world of University Challenge. I still think the team members are part of some freakish experiment, but I did manage to get a few right, including one or two that they got wrong. However, many of the questions went right over my head, because the world of University Challenge is very different from the one which I inhabit.

Mallard

That’s it for now. I will post some photographs, do a bit of reading, attempt to write a few tanka and then go to bed.

 

A Bad Start . . .

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Today started badly when I woke up at 4.30 am in my chair. Normally Julia wakes, realises I am not in bed and wakes me up. Today she slept. It could have been worse, at least I was generally fit and well, and the fire was on so I was warm. I was, in fact, warmer than I had been for much of the evening.

Later, after almost three hours in bed we had a milkless breakfast, due to our inability to  buy milk on the way back from work, we walked out to find the remains of a McDonalds spread across the road. We have had problems with this before. A few months ago we had a run of littering that followed the same pattern. It’s always at the same point in the road, give or take a few yards and it always involves paper bags, lettuce and pots of sauce. It also involves all our other neighbours ignoring the mess, even though it is actually in front of their house, not ours. Experience shows that if we don’t move it, it will spread all over the road as cars drive over it, so it’s easier just to clear it.

Could things get worse? Surprisingly, they didn’t seem to. My car went into the garage today and, for instance, only needed one new tyre rather than the expected two. And while they were doing that they checked the others and found a  nail in one, so they repaired the hole. As we will be driving several hundred miles tomorrow, this is a good thing to find. All in all, I am chalking this up as a day that ended well, despite n unpromising start.

The pictures – just random, I’m afraid.

A Bad Start. A Really Bad Start…

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Things started badly this morning. As I followed my normal matutinal routine I turned to flush the toilet and my glasses fell off.

I will allow you a moment for thought here.

If I had planned the whole thing my glasses would have either missed completely or hit the seat and bounced off to safety. As it was unplanned, and I was hurrying, they didn’t miss. At another time, and if they had hit a different target, I might have been proud of my effort. Today, pride was not the first feeling I experienced.

I couldn’t leave them there, in case the flushing took them somewhere where it might cause an expensive blockage, and it was unlikely I was going to persuade anyone else to help me out. There was only one solution.

Fortunately I used to work on a farm, so this wasn’t the worst place I’d ever had to put my hand. (In case you were wondering, it IS the worst place I’ve ever lost my glasses).

It’s all fixed now and I am wearing my glasses once again. All that remains of the episode is a vaguely disturbing memory and the faint smell of TCP that lingers round my glasses.

And yes, before you ask. We do have rubber gloves in the house, I just didn’t think of it at the time.

After that, unsurprisingly, things improved.