You’ll be surprised to find out that I actually started typing typing this on November 9th. It’s a Tuesday, and the autumn leaves are falling from the trees. By the time you read this, it’ll be 2011, and 2010 will be a long distant memory. And by that, I mean distant by 1 minute. You gotta love scheduled/postponed posts.

Anyway. 2010. after the disaster of 2009, I’ve had a pretty uneventful year. Work is still work, I’m still single, and somewhere along the line, I’ve managed to save money and lose a bit of weight. Yay. Let’s get underway with… 2010 in pictures! I’ll try to choose, wherever possible, my favourite pic of the month which I’ve not put on here previously.

JANUARY 2010

The year started as it ended, with snow. And lots of it. Probably the most snow I’ve seen since I was a wee nipper. For the first week, I don’t think there was a day where there wasn’t some snow on the ground.

I strugged through the freezing conditions, however, to see Accidents By Design play their last ever gig at The Studio…

Somebody should really sack my cameraman.

FEBRUARY 2010

A month where, quite literally, nothing happened. For the first time in a long while, the entire monthly archive fitted on one page. I don’t know why I linked to it, because it’s not really worth reading, unless you want to know more about “ass knives”. In this month, I took 5 photos, and 3 of those were of the local hospital…

I got paid for use of the pic, so it’s not all doom and gloom! The removal and replacement of the ancient streetlights on Lancaster Road and Clarence Road also began…

MARCH 2010

The month of long walks, and the month where I broke my Acer camera…

As mentioned in the previous month, the remaining old columns from Lancaster Road, and Clarence Road, got removed. Andy The Iridium fan saved one of the lanterns for my collection. Awesome!

Also, for some unknown reason, my right foot started giving me a hell of a pain. There was no rhyme or reason behind it. I hadn’t jarred it, sprained it, anything. It wasn’t even swollen…

APRIL 2010

This shall be the month that is recognised solely for my change in hairstyle. Or rather, the admission that I am indeed, going rather bald…

A trip to Jedburgh also saw me break my personal camera-to-flickr record of 11 minutes, though it did involve me knowing where there was a good, free wi-fi connection, and lugging the laptop in the back of the car with me. It was six months ago. It seems so primitive. I also stole a chilli from Tesco.

MAY 2010

Just looking at the thumbnails in this months collection brings back fond, and harrowing, memories.

Let’s start of with the fond…

And then move onto the harrowing….

Those photos are, of course, the aftermath of the “huge wasp” incident of 2010. There’s at least one of these a year, and I always almost end up with brown streaks running down the back of my leg. I used two cans of fly-killer to take care of this little bastard. I’d have loved to have been able to get better photos on it, but the “delivery” of my little Canon didn’t take place until May 27th.

Despite the whole new camera situation, the biggest change had to be the construction of a new door for the off-shot. I’m not sure which I enjoyed more, the manual labour, of the fact that me and Daddykins actually did something together for once.

JUNE 2010

I’m really struggling to think of something exciting that happened in this month. I lost my headphones in a field. Twitter was dominated with ITV’s shocking coverage of the World Cup, awful weather, and a half-cooked chicken lying in the middle of Warren Road…

This was the only time in the whole year I played darts.

The rest of the year continued, with a faint glimmer of hope that something exciting may happen… you’ll need to wait for Part 2, which should be on here some time tomorrow…

(EDIT: fixed broken photo…)

Firstly, let me start off by apologising to the people who I normally speak to on Xmas day. Unfortunately, this year, I’ve been mega-ill with some type of chesty-flu type thing. Gah.

I woke up on Xmas day on,y to find that someone had sneaked into Mercuryvapour Towers during the night, and poured molten lava directly into my trachea, which means when I finally woke up, I had a pair of lungs that were on fire with every breath. Well, that is, if I could get a decent breath in between the coughing.

So, the whole day was spent, moping around the house, feling sorry for myself. There were good parts to it, however. As Daddykins was having dinner somewhere else, he got me a lovely piece of pork, which I demolished. I didn’t watch much telly, just caught up on a few things, and by something like 10PM, I was in bed, after only managing 1 can of lager. I must have been ill.

I fell asleep, knowing that things were only going to get worse. Indeed it did. I remember some pretty crazy dreams ‘n’ shit

I awoke, still coughing like a maniac, but this time part of my inner ear had been removed, as I could barely stand up straight. Everything hurt. I went for a piss. The afore-mentioned lava had now made its way out of my lungs, and was being drained out of my bladder.

Literally, the entire day was spent on the couch, drifting in and out of sleep, with only the coughing keeping me awake. The highlight of the day was the epic tea Daddykins cooked, which included his first liberal use of cayenne pepper. Delicious!

It’s now 3:25AM on the morning after Boxing day. Dare I say I’m feeling a bit better? Every so often though, I know my lungs are going to collapse into spasms, and I’m going to be rolling around the floor, coughing them up…

So this is Christmas, and what have you done? I’ll tell you exactly what I’ve done. I’ve copied and pasted an introduction to a post I first used back in 2003. And, in fact, those previous two sentences are an exact copy and paste from last years’ blog. Now who said I wasn’t one of the laziest people on the planet?

I’ll tell you what, I’m even lazier than I was last year, as the whole of the above paragraph was copied and pasted from last years’ blog entry, and I’m sure that this trend will continue, expect to see this paragraph in the introduction for the 2011 Xmas blog entry too…

Unforuntely, unlike last years blog entry, I don’t have a draft ready to publish, nor do I have a a long string of drunken text I’d written several months earlier on the subject of Cliff Richard. Instead, you have me, sat at home, after the most pointless shift at work ever, drinking from room-temperature cans of Fosters, waiting for the TV to vacate, so I can put something I want on.

I’d like to wish both of my readers a very merry Xmas, and if I don’t get chance to speak to them personally before the new year, all the best for 2011. In fact, why do we say that? Why do we wish them best wishes for 20xx? Why not wish them all the best for every year of their lives and just get it over with?

It’s also time to break out this classic…

EDIT: Clearing out my comment spam queue (which is still growing in size, annoyingly, but at least the emails have stopped being sent), I found this corker of a joke… “I once bought my kids a set of batteries for Christmas with a note on it saying, toys not included.”.

And on that note, what type of motorbike does Santa ride? A Holly-Davidson.

Merry fucking Xmas…

Well, 2010 is finally here, and I’m happy to report that 2009 is a mere distant memory, floating away like a rancid piece of turd in the big, stinking sewer of recent history.

I’d just like to wish both of my readers all the best for 2010, and that the next 364 days, 23 hours and 59 minutes brings you everything you wish for!

2010, for me, brings a new start. A new emphasis on life, perhaps. The beginning of the end of blogging, definitely. All of the blog posts pre 2008 have now been removed from the site. There have been many things happening over the past 9 years, which I have documented in great detail, and although they have been a good reference over the years, there’s no point keeping hold of the past, and there’s certainly no need to publish it for the world to see.

I no longer enjoy blogging. It’s a chore. I’ve not enjoyed it for a good while now. It’s fine when I have something to type about, like a day out, but when it involves some of the cack I’ve typed about in the past 6 months, it just seems altogether pointless, especially when I look at myself in the mirror and see myself growing older by the minute. Life, as Ronan Keating would say, is a rollercoaster. Maybe it’s time I started sharing the rollercoaster with just the people I care about.

Well, I last left you, teetering over the ege of June, and falling into July, which just so happened to be the worst month of my life, on record, ever. Ever. It started as bad as it was going to get.

JULY 2009

I’ll try to keep this short, and I’ll probably fail miserably. Following on from my earlier sunburn issues, I thought I’d make the situaltion worse by going back out in the sun and attending the Hartlepool dockfest, in order to get some photos. The photos were successfully obtained, but after waiting in a queue for at least an hour for what I thought was goingto be an action packed opening ceremony, it turned out to be the worst thing I’ve waited for in the whole history of anything ever. Infortunately, the damage was done, and I spent the rest of the two days walking around like an embarrased lobster. the fact I was wearing a bright white t-shirt never really helped matters.

Mid July was next, and I happened to be pointing the camera out of the window, to record the black clouds on the horizon, as shown in this photo, the first time it’s been shown.

OK, technically, those clouds aren’t on the horizon, neither were the clouds directly above my head. I was personally depressed about the fact that I hadn’t gone abroad this year. There were a few reasons behind this that couldn’t be changed, but I still felt that it was something to do with me, and spent a good few days moping about it. Obviously this was infinitely insignificant compred to what was about to happen.

Maybe there is such a thing such as fate? The day that we were “due” to go away (as in, the day that we’d gone away on the previous two years, and originally planned to this year), my dad suffered a heart attack. At this point, I went into “offline mode”, meaning that the rest of July was totally written off.

The Google car did visit Hartlepool too.

AUGUST 2009

Computer problems dominated August, with Beastbits constantly switching off. I thought I’d found the cause of the problem after inspecting the video card in Beastbits, and its broken fan. In this never-before-seen photo, you can see that the lead on the graphics card had became disconnected.

Actually, you can’t. That’s a really shit photo.

I didn’t do much in August. I was still off work for the first few weeks. I had only been back at work a few days, when we all learned about the sudden death of Stu, the security guard, of a heart attack. After what had happened in the weeks previous to that, it hit home. Hard.

On a lighter note, I met up with Chad the prolific troller who haunts this site with witty anecdotes (sarcasm), and long forgotten, often embarrasing memories of our childhood. Saying that, it was nice to see him after all of these years.

SEPTEMBER 2009

Quite literally, nothing happened in September. There were a few site issues, and a day trip to York. That really is it. There’s nothing in either the blog archive or my flickr account to show that anything happened at all.

OCTOBER

The occasional site problems continued into October, though the whole month appeared to be dominated by a hunk of metal and magnets. Yes, that was the month where that bloody Samsung hard drive arrived, and spent a good few days trying to get it working.

Photograph-wise, it was even more barren than September, with a mere 91 photos being uploaded to flickr, though one of these was part of my “bargain of the century”…

I went to a radio rally with Daddykins, and met one of my Flickr contacts, which was nice. I also got “knocked back” at Asda, and no matter how cheap their buns were, the humiliation meant I never returned there for over two months.

NOVEMBER

The flickr meet I attended at the Historic Quay was the highlight of the month, even though there were only a few photos that were actually any good. It was good to get the camera out for the first time since September and actually get some shots took. My computer problems officially ended when I gave Beastbits the right royal kicking it deserved, and it is now an ex-machine – its parts used to update and repair the scribcam.co.uk server.

The old video card from the server was a bit broken…

… well, it was after I’d finished with it. The new machine gave me my first glimpses of Windows 7, and… well, it’s not Vista, so that’s a plus point, I suppose.

DECEMBER

December has seen something we don’t usually se a lot of this time of year – snow. It also became the month where it occured to me, that I am officially old.

You are officially old, the second you look out of the window, see snow, and instead of jumping up and down like a kid, you slowly turn away from the window and think “If I go out in that, I’m going to break something”. Instead, I stayed in the confines of Mercuryvapour Towers, and took plenty of photos of it.

It takes a lot to get something hanging from a wheely bin to look insanely festive, but I think this manages it quite nicely…

Although at the time of typing, it’s actually Xmas Eve (thanks to the wonderment of scheduled posts, you’ll be seeing this a couple of days later), I doubt anything else is going to happen within that time, so this leaves me to wish both of my readers a very happy 2010, and I hope that it’s a much better year than what 2009 was.