Holiday good, gloomy home weather bad

What's happened to the weather? I go away for a week, ok - 9 days, and suddenly winter's crept in the back door whilst I wasn't looking. Not happy with this.

Anyway, we got back yesterday, so the memory of our stay in a brilliant villa in San Juan de los Terreros, which is here. The satellite photo was taken a little while back, so it doesn't look like the houses on our street are finished yet, which they all were.

It was a week of 30+ temperatures, lots of sleeping, both beside and in the pool, plenty of brilliant food, both in and out, and some truly excellent wines, the best from the Ribeira del Duero.

I have to say though, that Almeria, which we flew into, is a bit of a dump. We were lucky enough to chance upon a really good restaurant for dinner, but otherwise it's not all that. The one thing it has to recommend it is this hulking great contraption sticking out into the harbour.

It's some sort of industrial revolution-era device originally used to allow freight trains to drop stuff into waiting boats. Most cities built docks and the like, but the Almerians did this instead, and when it was decommissioned (assuming it actually was...) the mayor of the town decided that, given it was one of the only things the town had to differentiate itself, it should stay. Interesting, yes, but the appeal is somewhat limited as a tourist attraction.

The rest of the coast, up through Pulpi towards Alicante, alternates between beautiful desolation and near-desert conditions, and massive, semi-built urbanisations forming either second homes for wealthier Spanish families, or boxes for sunburnt cabbies from Romford to stash their horrible kids and sullen wives in for a week or two's drinking and complaining there's no chips on the menu.

Fortunately the Kiwi, in her infinite wisdom and skill, chose a predominantly Spanish town for us to stay in, so the only football shirts we saw were in Murcia airport on the way back. Seriously - whole families in them. I really feel for respectable football fans, like the Mighty Melvin - this lot really gives that garment, which I'm sure some people quite rightly wear with pride, a terrible name.

So anyway, the week's bookends aside, the holiday itself was one of the best to date. The villa we rented was pretty much perfect, with loads of space, air conditioning and a large enough pool to actually get a proper swim in of a morning. The perfect way to get us both to chill out a bit, before we begin the 11-week countdown to leaving London. The remaining diary pages are beginning to look very small indeed...

Bicycles

I've just opened up Windows Live Writer to find a blog post I started writing on Monday but didn't actually get round to posting, so you'll have to do without tales of me 'n' the Kiwi cycling to Hampton Pool on the weekend, oh yes we did - all 17k there and back. We're so proud of ourselves. It's probably about time I got the Black Panther* out again to be honest - the Duathlon's in about 6 weeks' time and I've not bestridden** it in almost two years.

It's hard to believe we're in August already. This means there are only four months left before we leave London; five months until we arrive in New Zealand and it all suddenly becomes very real. The excitement's really starting to build now, both of us I think just really want to DO IT. In the meantime, there's a ton of stuff to do; my visa application needs to start this month, really, and that's just the start of it.

This weekend we're off up to Manchester - I'm getting all the visits in that I can before we leave as you can imagine. Should be fun; lunch with the family tomorrow and spending a bit of time with Yoog on Saturday night. Presumably the latter will feature a Guitar Hero challenge, presumably with me getting my arse kicked again despite buying my own one in an attempt to get better at it.

Something tells me August is going to be a fun month. Watch this space - I'll try to document as much as possible...

Oh, and the new addition to my page on the right? Wordle is a truly brilliant application - try it for yourself, it's completely addictive.

 

*ironic macho naming of my bike. Ironic in that with me on its back, it's anything but.

**is this a word? it is now.

Happy Birthday!

Apparently, blogging is ten years old this year (at some point). Which makes me feel not only tremendously old, but way behind the curve. Thanks be to the Lord for the lovely new Super Furry Animals album to keep my spirits up. Despite the fact that I'm at work at 0800 and alone in the office, for the sole reason that the Kiwi gets up early and thus so do I.

Does get me thinking about the whole blogging thing though. Bloggers always used to really get on my nerves - all that baseless ranting and opinion-mongery - but I came to see it as a way of documenting your own personal experiences for your own record, plus that of those close friends and family you might invite to view.

Personally, I reckon that it's purely the high profile of the medium that's giving it a bad name. It's an open, public media platform, available for free (which is a first in history), so naturally those with an axe to grind will get on board and grind away in full public view. The sort of nasally self-righteous muppet who's more than happy to proclaim forth on any topic in any situation for a bit of attention. Who tends to start sentences with 'What I don't understand is...' followed by an inexpert and poorly-informed view of why they know better than a multi-million pound corporation guided by hundreds of years of direct experience.

So unfortunately the loudest voices in the blogosphere (can't believe I actually used that word) are consequently the most idiotic. It's a shame, really. They're spoiling it for everyone else.

Update etc

So, you've probably noticed that it's been a while since my last entry, and so it has. I've not got bored of this blogging thing, I've been alternately manically busy and avoiding getting online for non-work purposes in a kind of 'laptop brings pain' sort of way. So here I am, with a rare Saturday to myself and in a bit of a communicative mood. Work is finished for the day, having spent this morning trying to get something right that's been plaguing me all week.

On that. One of the major frustrations I'm finding at the moment is that whole thing about just not knowing stuff. There are things that are expected of me which I'm just not being told about, and of course when it turns out that I've not done whatever it was, I end up looking a bit rubbish. There's also the annoying thing about knowing what it is I need to say or communicate, but not knowing the 'proper' ways of doing it. These have been a recurrent themes over the past week or so and have been getting on my nerves somewhat. I think we're almost over the worst though, for now.

This particular phase of this project has slipped by a week, which isn't great news. The Project Manager came back from holiday on Monday (my 30th, incidentally, more on that later) and predictably was appalled by how random it'd all got in his absence. Personally I reckon that properly briefing the team and formally appointing a de facto team leader might've helped, but there you go, what do I know? One more week to go, looks like a bit of a week of absolute hell to me, most of it spent in Ireland with nowhere to hide.

On a more fun note, I turned 30 on Monday, which was horrifying. I'd never really been that bothered about it, but all of a sudden towards the end of last week I was starting to feel like I'd really not got to where I wanted to be in general by this age. I reckon I was being a bit too hard on myself, but it got to me a bit all the same. The pain was eased slightly by an afternoon in the park with some friends on Saturday and lunch at the River Cafe on Monday, which was absolutely tremendous, something I'd wanted to do for years.

The Kiwi, continuing her trend in buying me potentially lethal gifts (last Christmas she had me thrown out of a plane at 15,000ft), has bought me a first helicopter flying lesson. I'm really looking forwards to it - one of my life's ambitions has been to learn to fly a helicopter, so she's done well, I'm amazed and so touched that she's picked up on it. I suppose the only worrying thing about it (apart from the fact that there's no reason to be found in most schools of physics why something like that should actually fly) is that having wished for it for so long I turn out to be rubbish at it. We'll see. I'm bracing myself for my Christmas present, which will no doubt be a 'Beginner's Lion Wrestling' course or something. She's ace - always helping me push my boundaries.

Speaking of continuing trends, I've discovered that for the first time in my life, I'm actually getting fat. This is truly horrific. I've always been slim, and yes, sometimes tended towards a little beer belly, but I've never actually noticed wobbliness. Until now. I've cut out beer (sob), bread (making finding lunch more tricky) and I'm trying to get some exercise in where I can. Which reminds me - must go for a swim. In fact, I think I'll do that right now.