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So we’re loving the house, we’re loving Basingstoke, we’re even kind of enjoying the 45-minute drive to work in the mornings…
However…
I am so tired all day! We get home, I cook, we have dinner, we work a bit on the house (paint, build furniture..) and before I realise it, it is 10pm and it’s bed time!! No time to watch any telly and even less time for a whole film!
Going to bed at 10 pm? I hadn’t done that since secondary school.. And the thing is that I am used to my beauty sleep, my +8 hours every night, and now I am lucky if I get that.. 7,5 hours is my average so far. And I miss that 1/2 hour… Oh god, do I miss it…
I spend most of the time in the office closing my eyes and wishing I was in bed, yawning, stretching, yawning again and closing my eyes once more. I don’t drink coffee, but I am starting to believe that I’m going to need to inject some caffeine into my blood to get me going.
I am so tired that I am even struggling to write this!
I am so tired that I am not even enjoying the Cheesy Tunes of this Friday!
I am so tired…
In honour to the old-skool dance classic, Things that make me go mmm, I’ve decided to twist the title a little and create a little list of things that have made me laugh out loud recently.
When we lived in Byfleet, the “journey” every morning to work used to average 3 to 5 minutes by car. Sometimes we would put a CD on the player and we would reach the office before the first song in the album had finished.
Now that we are in Basingstoke, we are currently doing the journey to work in 45-50 minutes. This gives us plenty of time to listen to CDs or the radio. So for the last two weeks we’ve been listening to Radio 1, the Chris Moyles show, but without Chris Moyles because he has been on holiday for these two weeks. Scott Mills and Beccy have been covering for him and I must say that I haven’t laughed so much in my life. What a fantastic way to wake up in the mornings!
I’ve never been a radio listener here in the UK. Ok, sometimes we would listen to the radio whilst in the car, but they never were “chat” programmes. They were more focused on the music. This Scott Mills show is just hilarious. They play music, of course, but that’s not what the programme is about.
Some of the things that have made me laugh out loud the most in the last few days are:
- The trololololo man
- The posh lady from Radio 4 (aka PR4L) reading the Dear Scott letters
- The descriptions of film trailers like “Birdemic”
Scott Mills & Beccy: I love you. You’re my heroes. I am so going to miss you when Chris Moyles comes back from hols!
An ex-workmate had a curious tradition at work that I decided to pick up after he left. Something curiously called: Cheesy tunes on the Friday afternoon.
During the week, people play whatever music they like at their desks, at a normal/low volume so it doesn’t disturb the rest. On Fridays, however, it is Cheesy Tunes Time!! And we will play all kinds of, yes, you guessed it, cheesy tunes! It can be anything from an 80s power ballad to a 90s dance song or anything that would simply not be played on any normal day.
My usual Cheesy Tunes playlist includes, among many others:
  – Loco in Acapulco, by the Four Tops
  – We built this city, by Starship
  – Ready or not, by the Fugees
  – It’s my life, by Dr. Alban
  – Running in the familt, by Level 42
  – Kingston Town, by UB40
  – Don’t stop believin’, by Journey
  – Caravan of love, by the Housemartins
  – Brother Louie, by Modern Talking
  – Ridin’, by Chamillionaire
  – Scatman, by Scatman John
Obviously, I wouldn’t normally listen to most of this music, but there’s a time and a place for everything. And it seems that Friday afternoons in the office are the right place and time for this stuff 
Have a great and sunny weekend!!
We’ve been living in Basingstoke for about a week and a half now. We have been working in the house, painting walls, coving, buying and building furniture, sorting out the mess we brought from the old house, etc. So we haven’t had that much time to explore the town we live in.
However, we DO know all the DIY shops and other stores in a 3 mile radius around us. We are so lucky to have: Wickes, B&Q, Homebase, Screwfix, Harveys, Maplin, Halfords, Staples, Comet, Argos, Dreams, Toys R us, Mothercare…. and that’s before going anywhere near the town centre!
Since we have been doing lots of DIY, going to the DIY shops two and even three times a day was something quite normal for the last few days. Something that I am very impressed about Basingstoke so far is the road system. Unlike Coventry’s Ringway, Basingstoke’s Ringway actually makes sense and is easy to use. It goes round town but in almost straight lines and with enough roundabouts to make it easy to turn around if you take the wrong exit.
It only took me a couple of days to learn my way in and out our estate, and I found the fastest route to all the important shops pretty quickly (Morrisons, Tesco, Asda, Lidl and Sainsbury’s within 10 minutes drive).
Since we live in the “outskirts” and have to take the car almost for everything, having a good road system is heaven sent.
I haven’t ventured myself into the town centre (apart from Festival Place) just yet. We’ll see if it turns out to be as easy as the rest!
Someone I know (or knew, rather) recently died. It wasn’t natural death, it wasn’t after illness, it wasn’t an accident. He decided to take his own life.
When I first heard the news I just couldn’t comprehend the magnitude of the fact. I simply would never see this person again. Talk to him. Laugh with him. Work with him. And the funny thing is that we weren’t even that close. He just happened to work in the same project that I am working on at the moment. For a different company.
But you know how sometimes you meet someone and you instantly like them? That’s what happened with him.
A man in his very early sixties, with a grown up family, a stable job.. what could have possibly gone so wrong in his life to decide to end it?
I’ve heard of people killing themselves in the past, but this is the first time that it was someone I actually knew. The boyfriend of a girl in my class in secondary school killed himself (he was an Emo of the 90s) and it was quite a shock in the whole town. I think I was too young to fully understand the implications of losing someone like that.
Jon has got the theory that there is some kind of mental process/illness or deficiency that takes place in the minds of the people who commit suicide. Like a temporary derangement. The problem is that this can’t be studied or analysed, as it normally is too late before you can “test the subjects”.
I want to agree with this theory, simply because I don’t want to believe that someone can actually be under such an amount of pressure in any aspect of their lives that would make them commit such a horrible act. I have always thought that people who kill themselves are coward and selfish, but now that I know such a case first hand, I want to think differently. I want to believe that there was a chemical in his mind that made him lose his head, that nothing was premeditated, that everything was just so sudden that he didn’t have the time to realise what he was doing.
—oo—
It’s been a few days since I wrote the text above, and I have now been told his “reason”. Apparently he was overloaded with work for several projects. working evenings and weekends, and one day realised that he had screwed up, and that was it. He killed himself because he couldn’t cope with the shame of having screwed up. I still want to believe that he was somehow unbalanced for a period of time, that this wasn’t completely premeditated. Any other person would have accepted being publicly shamed and coped with having lost their job… But taking your life? Yes, I still think that’s for cowards.
