2014 sucked, and here's why!

Yes, I know I thought 2014 would be better than 2013, but I was way wrong. That lovely girl I was seeing went back to her country, leaving me with this gaping chasm of nothing to do. But I have nothing bad to say about her. She was (and still is) awesome! Easy come, easy go I suppose :/
That job I started, that I quit consulting for because it was full of promise, turned out to be pretty lame. It's a great company to work for but not if you work in IT. That Mercedes 190E 2.3-16 I bought? Needed about £2000 of repairs, and still doesn't feel right. And I started to suffer from epic knee problems. Bummer...

But something must have gone right?

Yes, I met an awesome person when I was in Barcelona for work. She is the awesomes. It's not often I make such a good friend in such a short time. I went to my first Formula 1 race while I was in Barcelona. I was invited to join a research alliance of senior IT leaders (and I accepted the invitation). I bought a cheap Mercedes E240 estate car to replace the dodgy BMW I'd bought in 2013, and it's given me 13000 (almost) trouble-free miles including 3 epic road trips. Bargain! I generally had lots of cool adventures and a great summer. The ski trip I organised to Tignes went really well. That calls for another list of lessons learned I suppose...

1. Tignes Les Boisses is on the far edge of Tignes.
2. When booking a ski holiday in a block of apartments that is newly-constructed, be prepared for construction to still be ongoing when you get there.
3. There is only one pub in Tignes Les Boisses, and it's miles away from the apartments.
4. If you decide to have lunch at 2pm in Le Fornet with a snowstorm brewing, be prepared for an epic mission to get back to Tignes before the last lift closes. Do not expect to get all the way back to Les Boisses. It just isn't going to happen.
5. Private bus companies will print pretty much anything you want on the sign they put in the bus.
6. There is a free bus service between Tignes Val Claret, Le Lac and Les Boisses.
7. If you go to Tignes, stay in Val Claret or Le Lac. It's worth the extra money.
8. Eurostar will make a seperate group area for you if you tell them you are expecting a group of 45 people to show up.
9. My skiing has considerable room for improvement.
10. I seem to have misplaced my snowboard mojo.

2013 was pretty good... 2014 will be better!

Wow!

So... I didn't post anything since March 2013! What happened since then? Well, a lovely new lady entered my life (actually she entered it a bit before March but she stayed in it for a while and is kind of still there, in spirit if not in person). Actually we just returned from a lovely trip to Italy where we had a weekend of shopping in Milan and a sunny ski trip in Cervinia. A few trips to see ballet at the Royal Opera House and Teatro alla Scala, nice food and nice smiles; It was great. Sadly she's had to return to her own country, much to my dismay as I need a visa to go there!

We also had a few other nice trips. Several road trips to France, where we discovered some wonderful places in Normandy, another ski trip in Italy and a road trip in the UK to Wales and the Lake District, which was just as lovely as Normandy but in different ways.

Many gastronomic delights were discovered, many beautiful sunsets observed, and many good times were had.

Long may it continue :)

What else has happened?

Well, I tried mountain biking for the first time.

I bought this cool mountain bike in 2007 with the intention of using it abroad, but it's not been used off road much at all, only the occasional forest trail. It was a bit like buying a Range Rover to use on the school run. I have a group of friends who try to get me to go to the Alps every summer but it's always my birthday, but this year they were away the week after so I joined them for a long weekend. It was awesome! We were in Sauze D'Oulx where I've been a few times for skiing. It was really nice to see the place in summer, especially as my first mountain experience was in the summer in the piedmont region anyway. I'm hoping to go back this year, maybe for a bit longer this time. But it depends on holiday allowance, which is massively constrained due to my next topic:

Lots of politics at my last employer, a public sector transport organisation which is the most wasteful place I have ever seen. Individually everyone seemed quite reasonable but as a collective it was trying to move a herd of drunk rhinos through a swamp. Pure madness. Eventually politics killed me off as the part of the organization I was in got absorbed into the parent company and the project I'd spent the last year working on got cancelled. £2 million of public money wasted on what would have been a fantastic project if only people would listen!

And then I was enticed to work for a fresh fashion brand company where so far everyone is lovely and the office is grey on the outside but sunny on the inside. I've only been here a few weeks but so far I'm enjoying the work and the people. If only I could do something about my evil commute in the morning!

What else? Oh yeah, Amsterdam. 30 people came with me to Amsterdam for my birthday where we did the Friday skate and spent the rest of the time enjoying nice sunny weather and relaxing. I was surprised how many of them chose to stay in the Hilton DoubleTree hotel with me. We had a good deal on the pricing and it was right next to Centraal station so well located for the city. It also had a skybar with awesome views!

And I bought Mr Wolf, my ongoing restoration project:

He's a 1987 Mercedes-Benz 190E 2.3-16 which to those in the know is a pretty special car. I might post about him later :)

What's coming in 2014?

Well it got off to a pretty good start with a nice New Year celebration enjoyed with some close friends. I've just come back from a ski trip with my wonderful lady...

...and I went to France last weekend for someone's birthday. I haven't seen her for 10 years and her husband asked me on facebook if I could come. Last time I saw her it was a surprise for her 30th birthday also secretly arranged by her husband. It was pretty cool :)

I managed to take this cool photo from the plane on the way back... Wish my iPhone camera was a bit better!

And next week I am off on an absolutely epic ski trip to Tignes, with a group of about 45 people. I've arranged the whole trip and it's getting pretty stressful at the moment but I'm hoping we have good snow. Good snow makes everyone happy, regardless of what goes on après-ski!

I suppose then, that my next post might be about the ski trip.... though at the rate I'm going it will probably be about 2 trips and an entire year worth of adventures compressed into a few paragraphs.

Bring it on! :)

Bad things always come in threes...

Yep, like the title says.

What am I talking about?

Well you may have noticed that I haven't posted on here for quite some time. There are some reasons for this. That said, perhaps you hadn't noticed because I still highly doubt whether anyone reads this blog. Which means I am just typing something completely irrelevant. Wahay!

So... bad times.

Went snowboarding shortly after my last post. Things were looking sweet. The thing is, I broke my shoulder on the 2nd day, and so began my transformation. The broken shoulder sucked. I came home early and was in a lot of pain, and had to stay home for a couple of weeks, off work. While I was off work, the project I was working on started to go pear-shaped, but this isn't one of the bad things; I'm just mentioning it as an aside. So I worked from home for a couple of weeks nad HR called asking where I was. Little did I know at the time, but they wanted to know where I was because they wanted to fire me. So anyway, I also found out that HR had never sent my Bupa form off, so I am relying on the NHS for my rehabilitation, and because I am registered with my GP near my family home, I have to go to Barnet hospital all the time. This is quite inconvenient.

So anyway, shortly before I was due to go back to work (in fact the very day before), I got a phonecall at about 1.30am from my sister, via my brother's phone. Turns out my Dad had a heart attack. I raced home in record time (Tower Hill to Finchley in 18 minutes) but the ambulances were still there when I arrived, and sadly there was nothing that could be done.

It was a bad time for us all. You really don't realise what you have until it's gone and I am still incredibly sad about everything that happened. It was a stressful time and there were (and still are) many problems to deal with.

I returned to work and continued working on my project, making some good progress, but then at the end of May I was summoned into a meeting with HR at very short notice. I kind of knew what was going to happen as there hadn't been any client work for me, but they confirmed that they were making me redundant. This was bad news. Last time I was unemployed, it wiped out all my savings and racked up lots of debts; times were bad then, and I expected the worst this time round. Unfortunately due to the problems with my Dad I was also out of pocket and had no savings to fall back on, as I had previously... Apparently HR wanted to fire me a few weeks earlier but they waited until I was back in the office. How kind of them - this is from a Times top 100 employer.

So my lesson taught me a few things:

1. There's not much point in having a permanent job because they might fire you anyway.

2. Contracting pays way more than permanent work anyway, and who knows when HR might not give you the benefits you thought you were getting as part of your package.

So, I started looking for work. And it was like the olden days - I was getting loads of calls. I was worried that I wouldn't get a job but I've now got one, as an Interim Operations & Service Delivery manager for a charity. I started yesterday, and aside from a nightmare commute and the offices being in the middle of nowhere, it seems good so far (as well as I can tell after a day).

I have a project as a result of my Dad's departure. He left me his old Mercedes 190E (which I'd given to him) and the last conversation we had together was about spending a bit of money on it and getting it back on the road. So I intend to restore it to its former glory, and I am hoping to fit a 5-litre V8 engine from a 500SL, or a 3.2 litre supercharged V6 from a C36 AMG car. I just have to find someone with an engineering workshop and the skills to do the work for me, as I don't even have a place to park the thing at the moment! It's also in the bodyshop at the moment, being resprayed, and I am after a leather interior for it, as well as some replacement parts here and there. I also plan on replacing the stereo with something more modern, preferably a double-DIN unit which should fit nicely. I'll get a similar setup to my BMW, which sounds fabulous :)

That's it for now. I am not sure what to update next. I can't update about cool coffee shops or cycling to work or skiing and snowboarding, so err, this may well be my last post.

F1 and other things

Wow I haven't followed Formula 1 racing for a loooong time. Probably not since I started skating really.

So Michael Schumacher is back. I was always a fan of him but even I got bored when he kept winning. He seems slower than he was, so I can take comfort in knowing that even the fastest people slow down with age.

It's also nice to see Lotus returning to racing, though would be way cooler if they could be sponsored by John Player Special again (yes the cigarette brand) to get the black and gold colours they used to race with. Then it would remind me of my old Lotus Scalextric car :)

What else is nice? Oh yeah, it's back on the BBC. What's not nice is that I can't seem to get rid of the bit in the corner that says 'Sport Home' with a red button.

Now I am torn between watching the race tomorrow and going to see some random film I never heard of at an obscene hour (something like 10am).