The Life of (br)Ian

So my folks got back from Florida yesterday morning. They have returned following a two week absence, during which time myself and my younger sister have had the run of the house. Oh, it's been a glorious time, apart from the mess caused by said sister. This is an irksome situation, and I'll tell you how.

After spending most of the day out of the house at work (from around 7:45am - 5:20pm), I would return home to find the kitchen in a state comparable to the house of an old man who never threw anything away and then died. It was much like an episode of "Life Of Grime", where those poor clean-up crews would have to go in to houses where the dirty old occupant had hoarded all their garbage so that every room was filled to the brim with crap, usually in carrier bags.

Okay, so it wasn't that bad in our house, but my sister does seem to have an aversion to the dishwasher, choosing instead to pile the dirty dishes into the sink and leave them there for all eternity. In fact, one day I returned home and found that her and a friend had prepared an eaten a couple of plates of nachos. I deduced this from the trails of cheese and doritos crisscrossing the kitchen floor. And the dirty plates in the sink smelt of salsa and melted cheese. When confronted with the obvious question: "Why didn't you clean up after yourself?" the reply came back. "I was sunbathing". Well, that's a concrete argument right there.

So I would get into the habit of cleaning up after myself as I went along. This was the righteous and true path, taken by someone who has lived in poverty for three years of their life. On a couple of occasions I was not able to load my spent utensils and crockery into the dishwasher, as it was full of stuff already. I say "full" but it was just really badly loaded. If there was a course you could take in how to load a dishwasher, my sister would get a big fat "F". Epic fail.

You can imagine my outrage when my sister implied that I hadn't done my fair share of cleaning up. My philosophy? If you've used it, you clean it. Seems like one of those statements that goes without saying, but with my sister being who she is, she just couldn't let it slide, even bringing up the fact that I almost ran over our next door neighbour the other day. My bad.

All things aside, my parents returned with a few American jovialties. You see, they have just completed the transaction of buying a house in Florida, just outside of Orlando. Orlando, it turns out, is not the capital city of Florida. No no, I was wrong in my assumptions. It's actually a place called Tallahassee. But anyway, I'm getting off the beaten track here.

They've bought this place, it sounds quite good. So this is another place that we can go and spend Christmas at, and it provides an excellent opportunity for Summer holidays. The only succinct disadvantage is that there tends to be a lot of Americans in America. And I noted that, amongst the sweets and various American foodstuffs that my parents brought back with them, 95% of the goods contained peanut butter. They do peanut butter everything. I don't think I'll ever understand the American obsession with peanut butter. I'll eat it, but I don't want to have it with everything.

We've got peanut butter M&Ms, peanut butter Oreos, peanut butter Reese's Cups (which are actually pretty good), peanut butter peanut butter, and anything else you want to put peanut butter with. It's absolutely ridiculous.

Another thing I heard, which made me laugh no end, was that they have drive-in banks in America. Drive-in banks! What's next, a drive-in toilet? Drive-in hairdressers? These people must be stopped. If all they do is eat peanut butter and sit in their cars while making transactions, then it's no small wonder that they're all fat bastards.

I'm looking forward to visiting and driving through a bank. I'll take photos, rest assured.

During my time spent working in an office, I have experienced a number of strange "Office Phenomena". Office phenomena are unexplainable happenings within the office environ. There may be a variety of strange phenoms, but none are stranger than that of the male pee cycle.

At certain times of the working day, I catch the urge to make use of the facilities for waste management. These urges usually appear at roughly the same time every day, but can occasionally fluctuate depending on environmental factors (hot weather, cold weather, hangover, etc). So whenever nature comes a-knocking on my pelvic floor like a Jehovah's Witness at the door, I tend to respond more or less immediately to the call.

Now then, once I have arrived at the toilet, I make my way into the cubicle and perform the necessary task. Come on, we've all done it, there's no shame in it. It is whilst I am in the cubicle that I take note of the comings and goings of other facility users. It has gotten to the point where I can identify a number of people based solely (no pun intended) by the sound that their shoes make on the tiled floor. If someone blows their nose, it's a dead giveaway, don't even try to test me.

This is all circumstantial, I'm here to talk about the pee cycle.

I'm sure you have heard of the phenomenon of the female menstrual cycle. It is supposed that women who spend a long period (no pun intended) of time in close proximity can end up unknowingly synchronising their cycles so that they all have the painters in around the same time. It's never been explained, but it is scientific fact.

Well, I'm proposing that men who spend a long period of time in close proximity can end up unknowingly synchronising their toilet breaks so that they all need to go at roughly the same time. I've not been able to wholly prove this as there have been a number of variables, but riddle (no pun intended) me this:

Why is it that every time I go for a slash, I end up seeing the same people entering or leaving the toilet?

Here is a list of some of the things that I have done whilst playing "Grand Theft Auto IV". Some things were done in single player mode, whilst others were performed during "Free Mode" in online multiplayer:

1. Carjacked a truck and drove off with the owner clinging to the door handle. Braked hard so that he flew forwards. Slowly rolled over his head as a final act of indignance.

2. Ran myself over whilst going to the bowling alley on a date.

3. Got chopped into little pieces by helicopter blades whilst trying to board it.

4. Waited for the train to arrive and fill with passengers. Fired a rocket into it just as the doors were closing.

5. Jumped off the tallest building in the game, landing on an old woman. No one survived.

6. Crashed into a lampost whilst escorting a date to a restaurant. Date catapulted through windscreen. Drove off, leaving date to bleed to death.

7. Surrendered to Police Officer after hitting squad car. Accidentally pressed the "Stab" button. Backup Police Officers used a shotgun on my face.

8. Bought hot dog for $5. Ate hot dog. Killed hot dog vendor. $5 back.

9. Hailed taxi. Approached taxi. Shot tyre with pistol. Taxi driver annoyed. Shot taxi driver.

10. Picked up passenger. Drove towards cliff at high speed. Jumped out of car. Passenger falls to certain death.

11. Drove through flaming wreckage. Tyres on fire. Blew up outside hospital.

12. Knocked down lamposts because street was too bright. Changed mind and set car on fire because street was too dark.

13. Scored 180 in one turn at darts.

14. Just missed out on a turkey in bowling.

15. Asked someone out on a date. Stood them up. Went and got drunk with another person.

16. Drove past Police car whilst drunk. Got out of car and tried to run off. Fell over in a drunken heap. Police laugh.

Against my better judgement, I have ventured into work today. The turning point for me was when I went downstairs at 8am, only to be greeted by my Sister.

"Are you not going into work today?" she asks.
"Nope, I still feel like crap" I reply.
"Well that didn't stop you playing your guitar really loud last night".
"What?".
"You shouldn't be listening to loud music when you're ill".
"It's too early for this...".

So I marched upstairs, jumped in the shower, got dressed, and walked out the door. It was the latest that I have left the house in a long time, but I managed to get into work at 8:30am sharp. Not bad going.

I had convinced myself that I would be able to handle a full day at work, but now I'm not so sure. I perked up a little before lunch, but now I'm struggling to concentrate. Those 3 hours of sleep have not prepared me for this.

Monday: This Will Destroy You

On Monday evening I took a trip down to Brighton to see "This Will Destroy You" play at The Engine Room. I had two tickets, for I had originally planned to go with Chris Light, but seeing as he is in Australia (and has been for the last two weeks) I had resigned myself to going alone. Then, at 3pm on Monday afternoon, Jay Joseph stated that he would like to join me as he had never been to a gig before. Result.

So we got there around 6:45pm, parked up on the seafront and walked to The Engine Room. We walked straight past it the first time, ending up making a massive circle that encompassed most of Brighton. After some incorrect directions from a cab driver ("I'm definitely, 100% sure it's on Ship Lane"), we found it on Preston Road, which was quite some distance from Ship Lane.

Nice venue, really small. Two support bands, who were both phenomenal, and the main act. Here's a sample of one of their songs, played live:

During the gig I could feel a cold coming on, my nose was becoming congested and I was sneezing a fair bit. I put it all down to working in an open plan office. After the gig, I drove back. We stopped at McDonald's at Gatwick for something to eat. Their late night menu sucks the big one. Only Big Macs and Quarter Pounders. Where's the beef, yo?

Upon returning home, I was safe in the knowledge that I had booked off Tuesday as annual leave, so as to recover from the heaviest weekend in a while, and also the late night bestowed upon me by the gig.

Tuesday: Annual Leave/Sick As A Dog

Woke up at 11am on Tuesday and felt like shit warmed up. I was very angry with myself for having effectively wasted a day's holiday by falling ill. It is common knowledge that I am rarely sick, so this was serious. Luckily I didn't have to undertake my least favourite task: Phoning in sick. I spent the day watching TV and playing guitar. I watched "Sicko" by Michael Moore, and now I have a newfound love for the NHS. Cheers, Mikey.

At 6pm I retired to bed to watch an episode or two of "Oz". After promptly falling asleep during the show, I woke up at 12:30am and found that I simply couldn't return to sleep. I concluded that perhaps another attempted viewing of "Oz" would send me off, but it didn't. Instead I woke up, had something to eat, and commandeered the sofa downstairs. I watched "Thank You For Smoking", which was quite alright. Before I knew it, it was 6am and I jumped in the shower.

Wednesday: Back To Work, But For How Long?

I had convinced myself that I would be 100% fit for work, even though I had already been awake for 6 hours whilst the whole world slept. I got into work at 7am and sorted out the emails that had been sent in my absence. By the time everyone else started arriving, I was in serious trouble. My team leader spotted my ailments and suggested that I leave. So I finished off a few tasks that were in need of my attention, and I left work around 10:50am. I got home at 11am and tried to sleep on the sofa. It wasn't happening, so I played Gran Turismo 5 Prologue until it bored me to sleep. I nodded off watching an episode of Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares.

Woke up at 6:43. I jumped out of bed, and followed the sound of the television to the front room. My Sister was in there, fully dressed. "What are you doing up this early?" I asked. "Early?" she replied, "It's not even 7pm yet". You see, I thought that I had slept for 15 hours and woken up on Thursday morning. It was a sign that I was very confused and possibly retarded. I was happy that I had not missed the Champions League clash between United and Roma. Nice.

After the match, I watched the first episode of "The Wire". I think I'm going to like this. Then I went to bed.

Today: 3am

Woke up with a horrible burning sensation in my throat. You see, I am prone to occasional and mild bouts of acid reflux (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_reflux), and this was proving to be very uncomfortable indeed. I raced downstairs to locate any form of antacid that I could get my hands on. Luckily I found two Rennie soft chews, and both of them in unison managed to tame the fury in my throat. But it would not be for long.

At 5:30am, after a couple of episodes of "The Office: An American Workplace" I decided to drive to the 24 hour Tesco in order to stock up on more Rennies and cold relief tablets. I plumped for the Beecham's Cold & Flu Relief caplets, they're orange in colour. I also filled up my car with high quality unleaded while I was in the area. I then returned home for 6am, and this is where I am now.

I'm still not up to returning to work, but I hate phoning in sick. I will have to ring in around 8:45am. I now have a lovely cough to add to my list of symptoms, my nose is still running like a tap, I've got a dodgy stomach, I'm sneezing indefinitely, my ears are blocked. I think I'm ill.

If you head on over to Songs We Made (http://songswemade.blog.co.uk) then you'll find two new songs that I have been working on today.

The first one is called "Brassed Off", and it's an original idea. I think it sounds rather well produced. The trumpets are rather fantastic.

The second one is called "Surreptitious Snakes", which is a remix of a song by Steven Paul Allen entitled "Snakes". I received a text message at 20:33 this evening saying "Can you please remix snakes?". So I did.

Please have a listen. Tell me your thoughts. Write it all down.

Lunch was a bit of a misnomer today. We set off at 12:30pm with the express interest of going to The Beehive, which is a pub just down the road from the workplace. So we gathered our coats and Bruno Fountain drove down there. This is when it all started to go wrong.

When we got to the pub, there were no parking spaces. This irked all of us four, so Bruno parked in an ungainly "non-space" in front of a van. The reasoning for this? It would be easier to spot people dressed in van attire, at which point Bruno could move his vehicle to a more comely spot. I think you will agree that this was the best course of action, given the limited resources that we had at our disposal.

So we went inside and got to the bar. There were a great many people from work waiting to be served. These are people that we do not tend to hang around with on a day-to-day basis, so we exchanged basic platitudes and carried on with our waiting. Well, we must have been there for ten minutes, and the queue was showing no sign of easing up. I put this down to a combination of slow service and awkward customers. There, I said it. So with all of us four suitably annoyed, we decided to leave in search of greener pastures.

When we set off again, Bruno noticed that he did not have enough petrol to transport us far afield. Indeed, I can concur that the needle was almost at zero. We delegated that we would go to the fish n' chip shop whilst Bruno filled up his car. This seemed like a good idea, so we did this. We all ordered a cheeseburger with chips. Four of them, that is, not just one to share between us. It took a while, but once we received our goods we went back to work and ate in the canteen.

Now then, as I tucked into my cheeseburger and chips, I experienced a distinctly underwhelming emotion. The food was basically rubbish, the chips tasted like sawdust and the burger was messy. It brought to mind that video of David Hasselhoff eating a burger off the floor and mumbling "I'm making a mess". I wasn't impressed with the level of mess. This is another rhyme. Once it was eaten I mused "That was pretty awful".

Not even the can of Cherry Tango could save it from the depths of food purgatory.

Had a bit of a windfall at work earlier. Why? Here's why.

Last week one of my colleagues in another department decided to have a "friendly bet" between a handful of people regarding the UEFA Champions League matches that were to be played on Wednesday evening. The bet was to guess how many fouls and corners would be awarded in all four matches. My guess was 98, but I was way off. The correct number was 147. The guy who started the bet had won, very well played.

So on Friday the same man decided to hold another "friendly bet", this time on the Saturday matches involving Premier League, Championship, Scottish Premier League and Scottish Division One games. The bet was to guess how many goals were scored in all matches for these leagues. I went for 68, just because it sounded good to me. There were 7 other people involved, which would have brought in the princely sum of seven English drachma. Nevertheless, I got the number spot on. Hit the nail on the head, I did. 68 of the buggers went into the nets up and down the United Kingdom. Yeah, cough up fella.

So this leads me to the weekend that just was.

Friday night was quite alright (it's a rhyme). It'll be alright on Friday night. I went to play some pool and did OK, won a few, lost a few, had a few drinks. "Few" was the featured word in today's sentence. Then we went for a curry. I tried my hand at a meat samosa, then onwards and upwards to Chicken Tikka Masala and Eggs Fried Rice (I say "Eggs" because that's how it is spelt on the menu at the Curry Garden in Redhill). I ordered the Eggs Fried Rice in exactly the same way as it is written. This garnered little response from the waiter, but significant responses from my fellow eaters. Usually I only try "Eggs" Fried Rice at the Chinese restaurants of England, The Year Of Our Lord, but I thought I'd change things up a bit in the Indian restaurants of our great nation. As a result, the "Eggs" Fried Rice was very tasty. They have also spelt "Almond Powder" incorrectly: they put "Almond Power", which sounds like a pro-nut pop group. The lesser-known beneficial properties of almonds.

After the curry I went to The Sun in Redhill. It was proper packed bruv. It was also filled with clones. Imagine "Multiplicity" crossed with "Grange Hill" and you'll be halfway there. Everyone looked the same. The blokes were all meat-heads with fashionable hair, and the girls were all wearing short shorts and leopard print tops. It was like I had died and ended up in the 80's. Again.

So we stayed in The Sun until closing time. After everyone had cleared off to Liquid & Envy we had the place to ourselves. I was holding in a massive dump and large amounts of methane gas, which I chose to expel in strategic locations. At one point I was pretending to grab a drinks menu from a distant table, just so I could blow off. Unfortunately as I tried to break wind it felt spicy, so I sucked it back in, fearful that perhaps more than gas would reveal itself. In not so many words, I thought I was going to soil myself. This is why I retreated the spicy guest back into my bowels. Whew, that was a close one.

At lunchtime we made a little trip, Steve and I, to purchase some speaker cable for his stereo system.

First of all we went to his house, checked out the situation there. Once we were happy that we knew what we would be getting, we set off for Richer Sounds. We bought the cable easily enough. Then we went to a newsagents where I bought a drink. Then it was back to work for us.

I proposed a rota that we should stick to, please find it below, along with notes:

They've only bloody gone and norsed it up, haven't they? Came in early yesterday morning expecting to crack on with my work and knock out a good solid performance during my overtime session, but I was met with a revamped PC and a couple of sheets of technological notes to support. What happened was this:

The IT service department decided to update our computers to the latest "European Image". I'm not sure exactly why they wanted to do this, but now that it's been done I can't access half of the stuff that I would normally have been able to get my grubby mitts on. All this means that I have been professionally castrated, unable to carry out my normal job role. This has left a sour taste in my mouth, and don't let there be any mistake about it. Everything was working so well, why did they have to go and fiddle around with it?

The first thing I noticed was a rather horrible new desktop background. I quickly changed this because it is appalling. And also it was painful trying to read white fonts on a white background. After this, I saw that all my old desktop items had been done away with. This angered me, so I hopped on the bad foot and did the good thing. Sorted.

Then the printer drivers were all messed up, so I fixed that. Job's a good 'un. I also re-organised all my quickstart icons and the like, but it's still not to my satisfaction. You could say that I spent the entire morning session - running up to lunch - undoing all the hard work that the IT department had put into upgrading my PC. I didn't get anything else done.

I also sorted out problems with other people's computers. I should be getting paid more for all this IT support. It's really gotten my goat, as you can tell.