Furniture

It's expensive isn't it? I've been undertaking a bit of a remodelling exercise at home, which included buying new brown goods and furniture. It's annoying too, especially the delivery. People send stuff out without consulting you on the best time for you to receive it. Some companies do Saturdays which is good but others just send stuff out overnight and you have no idea until it's too late!

So this morning I got a courtesy text from one of them saying they want to deliver this Thursday. At lunchtime. I will be at work on Thursday at this time... How annoying :(

My flat is looking pretty good though :D

Holy Cow!

So, apart from testing a random iPhone app, I haven't posted on here for a while.

What's going on?

Well, I suppose I ought to write about the personal training sessions I've been having. I've lost 2kg so far, and it's looking good. So big shout out to the IgnitePT massive, who found me on Qype many moons ago and who I ended up going to for pain and torture in the name of good health.

I've also been working on some stuff at home. Had an electrician in the other day to mount my TVs on the wall... I was going to get a new sofa too, so I would have a nice new comfy place to sit and open up some space in my living room. Unfortunately now the TVs look too small, so I had to order a bigger one for the living room. I may have gone overboard though, as I got a bargain on a 56" Cinema screen 21:9 ratio TV. D'oh! Anyway the tv came out of the sofa fund, so I ordered some cheaper sofas from Poland, on ebay. They actually look quite good and at half the price of the other one I was looking at in Marks and Spencer, they might be the bargain of the decade!

Oh and I think I'm cleaned of my burrito addiction. I haven't had one for a while and the last one I had was a Poncho No. 8 (which my friend called ponchoi lol), of which I could only finish half. No wait, I forgot I had one (well half) last week too, from Chilango in Bluewater. Fail... guess I'm still addicted!

I've got a bunch more stuff to write but I'll save that for later posts :)

Testing, 123

So, if this works it means I can blog from my iPhone

Location:Crosswall,City of London,United Kingdom

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.

How Rude!

Yesterday I was innocently minding my own business cycling to work, overtaking cars in the correct position (to their right) when a stupid cyclist whose path was blocked while undertaking the cars swung out into my path without looking. I said “whoa” and he proceeded to swear at me, so I had a go at him and then sped off. He seemed unable to keep up with me, which is strange considering how light his bike looked.
On Friday, I was stuck behind a bus, the driver of which was beeping the horn. I passed the bus to see he was driving about 10cm away from a cyclist in front who was doing her best to keep moving. This was completely out of order.
The irony of the bus incident is that there was an advert on the back of it for the Road Hug campaign being run by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. The campaign aims to get every road user treating other road users as if they were friends. An admirable cause.
They are giving away free stuff – a hi-vis and some lights… get yours now at www.roadhug.org
In other news… well I suppose there isn’t much other news. I am going snowboarding again next week though. Bring it on

*edit 12/9/2011 - I never received my road hug pack :(

Newsflash!

dotmit is now in a relationship on facebook. This generated many comments within minutes of being posted.

facebook makes the world a very small place...

Oh and I have a twitter account now. Not that I do much with it. About as much as I do with this blog. No, not even that much.

My fabulous tour of London's finest Burritos... on skates.

So... last year, I used to regularly run street skates on Wednesday evenings during the winter (there's already a far more official organised Wednesday skate during the summer).
Part of the fun was that I'd make the route up as I went along, and pretty much everyone who joins in really likes this.
I haven't run one for a while now though, partly because I got lazy and partly because of my fabulous girlfriend who I'd rather spend time with... but she's out of town at the moment, so I ran a skate. Yay! I was so pleased with the turnout - about 12 people, which isn't bad for a freezing Wednesday night.

This time though, I had no idea which way to go. It had been so long... and what was the first thing that sprang to mind? Burritos of course! So my route consisted of skating to one burrito place, and then from there to the next. At one point I was thinking 3 places ahead to plan the best route...

We covered Poncho No. 8, Daddy Donkey x2, The Flying Burrito, Burro Burrito, Mas Burritos x3, Tortilla x2, Buen Provecho, Picante, Benito's Hat x2, Chipotle, Freebird, Adobo, Burrito Bros and Luardo's.

Unfortunately my route didn't take us past Chilango, partly because of a failure to route well on my part, and partly because they seem to have their own exclusive coverage area that no other burrito places dare encroach on, which is kind of cool, but also not cool because it means it's really awkward for me to get there at lunchtime!

In other news, Steve Ells (founder of Chipotle) was in Chipotle on Tuesday, which was cool :D
Oh and I went to Daddy Donkey again, who are back up there on quality so I'll have to revise my ranking. And they are across the road from Prufrock which is a fabulous coffee place. So fabulous in fact, that they let us sit there and eat our burritos. Yummy!