After searching for a new tagline for this blog, I’ve finally found it. Go me!

I was surprised, after viewing the logs, at the person who left the banal comment. Actually, no, I wasn’t surprised. Just disappointed. Still, moving on…

Snow Watch 2005 appears to be over, sadly. And it was, indeed a success. We got snow at about 7AM on Friday morning. It laid, but there wasn’t enough to consider it a great fall. Another disappointment!

Well, what isn’t a disappointment is the beginning of my 2 weeks holiday. I celebrated the fact by sleeping all day. I arrived in from work at 8:20. I gobbled a sarnie I’d bought from the works machine, and went to bed.

4 lovely hours of sleep later, I awoke. It was time to get my fleece chopped. This is the worst thing about being human. Having to sit in a chair while someone you don’t know attacks your hair with a pair of scissors, and an evil looking clipper.

I can’t grow my hair. It simply just turns into some kind of greasy mop, with each individual strand going in its own direction.

Anyway, I arrive at the barbers. I sit in the queue, and thumb aimlessly through the papers. Every page had something about George Best pegging it, but the death of Mr Miyagi from Karate Kid got a teeny little section. At least The Sun had the heat to print a photo of him.

So, I sat in the chair, and while my hair fell around my ears, all I could think about was going back to bed.

We got home, and it soon became apparent just how much this haircut shows up my rapidly receeding hairline…

26 in 6 days.

Technorati Tags: bald spot, banal, Birthday, hair, haircut, lack of

Bugger. No sooner do I activate comments, I accidentally reject the first genuine one. That was in response to the hastily written post about the dogs, a few weeks ago, written purely to see how many hits I got for the word “lesbian”. Anyway, as I abandoned the experiment at 0 hits , I’m going to have to google what the word “banal” means. I’m sure it’s something really good.

*tappity*

Oh.

I do, however, like this statement from Wordsmith’s “Word of The Day”…

“How does the poet transform his banal thoughts (are not most thoughts banal?) into such stunning forms, into beauty?”
–Joyce Carol Oates, “Speaking of Books: The Formidable W.B. Yeats,” New York Times, September 7, 1969

It’s always been a bit of a strange thing, writing this blog. You’re either loved, or you’re hated. No middle ground. Nobody says “It’s OK”, or “not bad”. It’s either marriage proposals, or death threats. And, I’ve had both of them!

I discussed this in an unpublished entry I wrote just before the 5th anniversary. It’s how much this blog has changed.

Going back to the earlier days, I was pretty much fearless on what I put on this blog. After all, it was hosted on something like freeservers.com…. nobody knew about it except me, and maybe a couple of friends. I could say what I liked. The blog was some sort of therapy to me. If I didn’t like somebody, I’d write things about them in here. And it was great. The early entries (mostly now deleted) involved around an ex, who shall remain nameless, for reasons explained later.

The site grew, it got linked to, search engines inevitably picked up on the content, and it wasn’t really anonymous anymore. So, I moved. To “TonOfSpace” some time in 2001. They promised 100Mb of free web space. And I enjoyed it. Until they completely vanished overnight.

This didn’t set me back. After a couple of moves to other temporary hosts, I’d somehow started to get a following. Links appeared in other blogs. Back in 2001, I had the world at my feet. My eye operation set me up for the first full time job I’d had.

it was time to lay bricks, and set up a foundation for me to build from. In 2002, mercuryvapour.co.uk was born.

God, enough of the history. I’m boring myself now.

So, banality is what it’s came down to. Meh, I agree entirely, and have done for the past few months. It’s not possible for me to word this in a way that’s not going to sound like a strop, and an old time “Jamie storms out of whatever he’s doing because there was a comment made”. The comment, naturally means nothing, but I can understand why it’s made.

Over the past few months, I’ve not put the effort into the site I used to. There are too many reasons to list. I’ve tried to pinpoint it to one reason. It’s not possible. So let’s list them.

1. Too popular. Every segment of this site is published by search engines. By the time you’ve read this, Google’s indexed it.

2. I’m too secretive. I respect people’s privacy, and these days, if I talk about them in here, I don’t mention them by name.

3. It’s too easy to upset people when you don’t intend to. Coatesy, one of the few people I do name in this blog, commented on Sunday, “I see you slagged me off in your blog again”. No. Never my intention. I do not say anything in here I would not say to someone’s face.

4. My dad reads it. Let’s face it, I’m in a spiralling pit of depression. Back in the old days, before he knew about it, I wrote about everything. How I felt. Whether it was good or bad, I’d write it, and publish it. I don’t like doing it with him reading it.

5. The rest of my family reads it. See above. I wanted to talk, in detail, about the recent death of my great uncle, which hurt me deeply. I can’t.

6. I want to talk about things I’ve been told, but can’t. Things which I literally shed tears over this morning. But can’t. There is no longer the veil of secrecy and anonymity I relied upon in the earlier days. This is no therapy for me. I’m simply bottling it up more and more. Thinking about it to the point of exploding.

7. I have never ONCE mentioned current girlfriends relevant to the time of posting. Secrecy thing again.

8. There are only so many times you can talk about having a really big poo.

It’s official. Blogging is no longer a hobby, it’s a chore.

And, back to the original comment. That’s why my life seems banal. It’s because the non-banal stuff is kept off the site.

I’m going to publish this unedited. And then edit it later on.

(P.S. I knew what Banal meant. I just wanted an interesting opening)

Technorati Tags: banal, blogging, Death, girlfriends, giving up

What a shit couple of days.

I think Yesterday has to go down in th history books as one of the most shitty days that has ever graced the entire history of crap days. It’s been complete bollocks.

The day started abruptly. Let’s start at the beginning… midnight. Well, OK, the first few hours passed without incident. It got to 2AM, however, and I was beginning to feel a bit peckish. After raiding the cupboard for such culinary delights as 8p Tesco Supernoodles, I thought I’d have something a little more satisfying. And when I say a little more, I mean little.

I stuck my head in the freezer, and pulled out a boil-in-the-bag chicken curry. Mmm, yumstable. So, I slap it in the pan, and start my trusty stopwatch. I have a habit of forgetting what time I put stuff on, so the stopwatch is always handy.

I settled down, in the comfy chair to watch some telly while my curry happily defrosted itself to perfection. And, no doubt at some point in its life, it would have been done to perfection.

TWO HOURS AND THIRTY-EIGHT MINUTES LATER, I am awoken by the smoke alarm. Me, being the stupid fucker I am, had fallen asleep. Indeed, my curry, and its surrounding plastic bag, had turned to some smouldering black rock-like substance literally welded to the pan. A faint, foul smelling haze decended upon the house, as I took the pan out into the back garden, and threw a bucket of water over it. The poor thing was completely destroyed, naturally. However, my dad thought he’d be able to rescue the pan. Oh dear.

I’m knackered, so I’m going to cut this entry short, but something else that went shit was work, thanks to a snotty email from a “certain” member of staff… I will keep my true feelings out of this blog, because anything about work in here is truly irrelevant. I type about my life in here, and not about things that make me want to end it….

God, that email must have upset me.

Technorati Tags: burned, chicken curry, Food, melted, pan, ruined, supernoodles, tesco

Doesn’t the weekend fly over, eh? It’s Sunday already. And that’s because I witnessed approximately 6 hours of Saturday.

Still what I did see, I enjoyed. Had a nice, relaxing night in (as usual) with a few cans of high quality beverage. I treated myself, due to the fact I’ve had such a shitty time at work recently.

So, while they went back (I didn’t even have that many), I settled down for a night of quality entertainment. Up first was the XBox. I must admit I’ve neglected my XBox recently. Well, for the past year or so to be exact. I’ve not lavished the attention, or the fine, fine games I should be

This, however, was changed when I went to Newcastle, mentioned in the earlier post. The part I didn’t mention was that I picked up Tiger Woods 2005 and Burnout 3. I liked the prequels to both games, so I thought it would be money well spent. And indeed it was. I’ve hogged the big telly in order to play them.

I’ve found, from experience, that there’s absolutely no point playing driving games after a few cans. Granted, sometimes you DO play them better, but those are few and far between.

So, Tiger Woods it was. In went the disk, and on went the radio, while I sat and knocked a digitised golfball, around a digitised golf couse.

No matter how much I like the games, however, I have the attention span of a teddy bear, as I’ve mentioned more than once. So, onto my next entertainment. The films I’d recorded earlier in the week.

The one I watched was “Looney Tunes: Back In Business”. It was OK, with a couple of Laugh Out Loud moments.

Back to the XBox, and back to Tiger Woods. I completed a bit more of it, before I decided enough was enough, and that I needed something else to pass the time. Off upstairs to watch a bit more telly, then.

I’d recorded “Fact Hunt” - featuring Al Murray - the very man who, after a recording of “Time Gentlemen Please”, called me a “dozy fucker”… my one and only claim to fame! Anyway, I didn’t get to see much of Fact Hunt, as I promptly fell asleep just after the adverts. Not a slur on the show by any means, I was just a bit too warm ‘n’ cozy in my bed.

So, after only being awake 6 hours, I slept for another 6, and awoke at 7AM this morning. Not bad, a nice early start to the day. Sure to get loads done, then, eh? Yeah, right. I laid in bed, and watched Fact Hunt again, this time without falling asleep. Thoroughly enjoyable.

By this time, my throat was drier than a pandas minge. Time for juice. And, my juice of the day just happened to be Tesco’s Apple and Raspberry. A taste combination I really didn’t expect to work, but it’s very nice.

While I was down there, I thought about doing some tidying up. ‘Thought’ being the operative word, as I sat back in the armchair, and knocked out another couple of hours’ worth of Tiger Woods. I’m dead good at that game, apparently Well, you’d expect me to be with the amount of play I’ve had of it….

The only excitement of the morning came from the site of some vintage aeroplanes flying over the house. Exactly why they were over here remains a mystery. I suspect they were doing a fly-past for Remembrance Sunday, but we don’t live anywhere near the cenotaph.. Strange.

And, after I got bored with the Xbox, or rather, after it crashed, I came upstairs and pissed around on the patooter for a bit. I was determined to get Hamster (my news server updating automatically. Finally, with a little help, I managed to get it working. Hurrah! No more manual updating for meeeee!

So, that brings us nicely to now. As in, right this very second. I’m currently sat at Daddykins’ computer, connecting to my computer via VNC, which in turn is connected via VNC to the computer directly behind me, which is busy converting CD’s to music files… 4 down, 600 to go!

Technorati Tags: al murray, beer, game, hamster, newsserver, tiger woods, xbox

Quite unbelievably, I’ve witnessed the first house to have their Xmas decorations up already. It’s NOVEMBER 10TH. IT IS NOT EVEN CLOSE TO DECEMBER, NEVER MIND XMAS.

I have two weeks off coming up shortly. Woohoo.

Technorati Tags: christmas, decorations, early, Holidays, xmas