Well, it’s the first time for a good few years that I’ve actually been able to get out and photograph the June 21st sunrise, though I almost never made it.

Through some stroke of odd luck, I managed to bag a 2PM – 2AM shift, meaning I would return home in good enough time to judge the weather, and whether it was worth taking the walk to a decent vantage point to catch the sunrise. After I got home, I was a little tired, and thought that the walk simply wouldn’t be worth it, so instead got the big Canon, and the tripod out, and began to take photos in the street. Admittedly, these weren’t up to much, and sadly, it turns out that my camera remote has bitten the dust, so I won’t show any on here.

Onme thing I did capture, however, is my own sign that the summer had started. If I’m awake, I watch it every year, yet this year was the first time I had actually photographed it.

Yes, it’s the instant that the streetlight outside of Mercuryvapour Towers extinguishes. I must have sat there, with my finger over the trigger button for about 10 minutes, waiting for the trademark clunk of the photocell’s relay clicking over, and the sudden lack of artificial light in the vacinity.

Shortly after, I decided that the cloud cover wasn’t bad enough to ruin a good photo oppportunity, donned the new pocket Canon, and headed off into the general direction of the fields. Well, I say fields, it’s been a housing estate for about 8 years, but there’s still a bit of undeveloped land which gives you a good view of any possible sunrise. I thought I was too late from the view of this photo…

I knew I only had a few minutes to make it to higher ground. I power-strutted like I’ve never strutted before, to the tune of “Don’t Go” by Yazoo. I am happy to report that I made it to higher ground before it was too late…

Admittedly, it’d have been better if those streetlights weren’t there.

On the way home, I did manage to photograph one thing which has been in existence for the majority of my childhood, but is soon to disappear behind a wall of ivy, are the old cricket stumps I used as a child. You’ll have to forgive me if I get a little reminiscent here, but I know one rather quiet troll reader who will no doubt get a shiver down his spine by viewing these…

Here’s a closer shot after some of the ivy had been removed….

Finally, here’s s shot if you were stood in the ‘crease’.

A place I wouldn’t see very often, as I was shit at cricket, and used to receive unfair bowls from Chad, such as “grass cutters”. Chad, you will note that many of the features we used to use have been removed. It’s no longer possible to lose a ball in “Carl’s bush”, and that the impossibly rare 100 runs for hitting Ringwood’s garage can no longer be achieved. A 6 or 4 can still be earned by hitting it up his driveway, though he’s not lived there for many years since Mrs Ringwood died. I can no longer hit a ball into Kevin’s pond (Kevin, you may remember had more than a passing resemblance for Ex-Tottenham footballer Vinny Samways) thanks to a growth of elderberry to the left of where I stood, and the fact that the pond disappeared years ago. The pile of rubbish is pretty much where we bowled from – the house is currently empty and undergoing renovation, hence the rubbish.

And on that note, I’m off to bed. Morning!

Would you beilieve it’s almost 2 months since I actually sat down here, and wrote about what’s going on in my life? the rest of the postings have been “recaps”, “best ofs”, or posts which I’d written well in advance, and then set the publish timer to look like I’ve actually been giving time to this site. Crafty old me. Oh yes, and I installed an automatic Twitter thing, which in hindsight was a stupid idea, and I probably should disable it.

Anyway, I have been, and still am, incredibly busy with stuff, which is one of the reasons I’ve not been updating this, plus I’ve had writers block up to the eyeballs. My “drafts” folder is, as usual, full of little snippets of posts I started, then never finished.

Music is one of the things which has been seriously influencing the past couple of months, especially an 8-second clip of a Kraftwerk song.

I was at work about six months ago. Ian, who sits behind me, had a bit of a “Kraftwek” night, and was playing some of their tunes. An 8 second piece of music got stuck in my head. It had been used as a sample in another song, and could I hell remember which song it was. I later found that the song he was playing was “The Robots”, but even after an extensive interwebs search, I couldn’t find out where else I’d heard it. I knew it was in a song from the 1990s.

Off to #speccy, nope, nobody had heard it there, not even Marko who is normally good at this type of stuff. I uploaded it to my phone, and played it to everyone I knew, in the vain hope that it would jog the memory. I even set it as my ringtone, thinking that if someone rang me, and I heard it out of the blue, I’d pick up on it straight away.

Sadly not. I joked to Chris (who also didn’t know it) about me hearing it when I least expect it, totally out of the blue.

That was months ago, fast forward to yesterday. After looking for a few things, I happened to spy my old video recorder in a box. It hadn’t been used for about 6 years, not since my TV card died. I hooked it up to the telly downstairs, and played some old tapes with the intention of transferring them to DVD. There was one particular tape I was after saving. A non-descript looking tape, with a ripped label. Amongst hours of me playing in the garden as a kid, with our old black and white camera, was the very last edition of “Northern Life”. Halfway through, they had an “outtake reel”, with music dubbed over it.

The track was a song I liked, instantly recognisable to me anyway. All of a sudden, 32 seconds into it, there it was. THAT BLOODY KRAFTWERK SAMPLE! I was delighted. And unsurprised that my prediction was right.

The Kraftwerk tune was “The Robots, and the sing I remembered was “I Can’t Stand It by Twenty 4 Seven. Chris shuld be bitterly disappointed that he didn’t get it, but then he doesn’t read here anymore!

Speaking of which, it was Wayne’s 30th the other day. I sent him an email, but it looks as if he’s gone AWOL again.

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.

A catchy, and to-the-point title. As we watch the final hours of 2009 dwindle away, it is time for me to look back over the past 12 months, and recap on what has, quite literally been the worst year of my life. I have achieved nothing, in fact, I am in exactly the same position I was a year ago, but feeling even more depressed for it. I am now 30 years old, there has been no holiday, very little communication with fellow human beings, and I’ve finally experienced what a panic attack is.

The sooner 2009 ends, the sooner I can get on with life, and start afresh…

JANUARY 2009

The first proper post saw me killing off the video blogs. They were unpopular and embarrassing. I took the first of a handful of walks throughout the year, and documented it with photos. Work continued to get me down, for reasons I can’t think of, and I survived the great Google outage. The first death of 2009 came in the form of my 4Gb memory stick, which succombed to a shorted out USB port…

FEBRUARY 2009

It snowed a little, more than once. JT moved onto the other rotation, and I started blethering on about creating backups using Clonezilla. Unfortunately, this was not going to be the last long-winded post about my computer experimentations. In fact, this seemed to be the whole theme of the year. Work started on building houses on the vacant land on Warren Road, despite it being heavily landscaped only a few years before, no doubt at great cost to the Hartlepudlian taxpayer.

Dick Brown, webmaster of www.dick-brown.com (the w’s stand for wankstain) received an insanely full bottle of orange squash.

MARCH 2009

An entirely forgettable month, if I’m honest. I worked overtime for only the second time in my life, and I went to Durham with Chris at some point, to give my camera its first test. I ended up misjudging a step and twatting my knee off the floor. The cooler on the sarnie machine also malfunctioned, casuing it to display “HEALTH CONTROL” on its VFD display.

APRIL 2009

April 1st consisted of vast amounts of kitchen cleaning. April 4th consisted of my Grand National faux pas, and mercuryvapour.co.uk once again moved servers.

A bird took residence in Mercuryvapour Towers, and it became apparent that nobody reads this blog anymore.

MAY 2009

Unperturbed about the bad news regarding the blog “statistics”, I still continued to write. On May 7th, Andy The Iridium Fan donated the second mercury lantern into my streetlighting collection, in the form of an unused Revo Prefect.

The biggest overhaul came towards the end of this particular month wne I took delivery of a new dartboard.

A lot of spare time was taken with this particular hobby from this moment on.

Dick Brown received some money from MS, on May 13th. I have no idea what for, but I was on-hand with cameraphone, to record the historic event…

JUNE 2009

So, everyone will be asking, where were you when he died? Yes, surely, the biggest, most famously untimely death of 2009, according to the mercuryvapour.co.uk super-statistic website generator, is…

Yes, sod Michael Jackson. This was the most untimely death for me anyway

Apart from death, June consisted of record breaking sunburn, after climbing Christchurch, and spending about an hour up there.

It really was crustier than it looked.

Unfortunately, it turned out that a sunburned scalp was to be the least of my worries, as July rearerd its ugly head… stay tuned for Part 2

I really dislike them.

For the past two nights, there has been one of these little shits in the office. I happened to be the first one to spot it the other night, as it happened to land on my “umbilical cord” (the wire from my headset leading to my phone). I froze, slowly backing up, unplugging my headset, and then legging it. As I reversed it headed towards me. I think everyone thought I was mad.

It turned out that 4 of the 5 people who were in the office with me also severely disliked the little stripy buggers. The only person to not admit to disliking them was Dick Brown, webmaster of short-lived shitfest