Author: Buck

That has been our situation with debt. Achilles is a faster runner than the tortoise, but, if time is divisible, by the time he gets to where the tortoise was it will have moved. He moves forward, the tortoise moves forward. Achilles can never catch the slow but indefatigable tortoise.  Unlike philosophers we put a rock on the tortoise and watch it flail helplessly in the sun. Hmm, tortoise soup. Where was I? Obviously still dieting, if a philosophical paradox/ debt metaphor can be turned into a soup reverie. Anyway, the debt thing. We are finally getting on top! Huzzah! Wendy used to save, then she met me and we drank our way into constant debt. It’s only since we gave up that it started to come down. I mean, I put £5K on a credit card to do all my truck licenses. The thing is, like that over-used tortoise metaphor, as soon as we raced toward it the wily bugger would move away. Before xmas we’d got it down from about £10K to a grand or so, then there was the clarinet (fail) and the piano. (There was a solid reason for buying them, not just ‘cos we could. Mostly not just ‘cos we could.) We started to pay that back then I had no work for two months. I get work again and the car dies. Had to get a different car. Then the cooker kiffed it. You know how it is. Also there’s my laissez faire attitude to cash. That doesn’t help. (My soprano sax was a steal at the price. It more or less paid for itself. Somehow. Don’t look at me like that!) As I was saying, before all the accusations, we are getting there. Last month, seeing as we won’t be lending Luke his bond money on flat any time soon, we stuck £666 (I just liked the number) on the card. This means we have finally broken the grand barrier! Were it not for the fact we have a week’s holiday booked at sunny Craggy Island next month we could conceivably have been debt free this month. Oh wily tortoise, you tease us with your slow sprint. Of course, this is never the case. I have a year’s worth of tax to pay yet. I don’t get a bill for that until next March or April, but it’s still out there, undefined but ominous.   In diet news: a pox on the house of Oliver! Yes, you, Jamie, you mockney scamp. That veggie curry I made, and the equally delicious veggie chilli the day after, put a pound on me that didn’t move for three days. Gutted. DAMN YOU OLIVER! *shakes fist*   Luke and I (OK, mainly Luke) have spent the weekend ‘rooting’ my ‘phone. Which is to say, breaking into the locked base code for the ‘phone to gain control. Once you have control you can install a fancy-pants new software package and delete all the crap. Done. Yeah, I’m so […]

That is my main news for the week. Bloody diet. It’s a two phase thing. The first five days you flush out all the old crap from your body, then start on phase two. The good thing is you can eat as much as you like of the allowed items, so you are never really hungry. The bad bit is you are really restricted on carbs the first week. No spuds, pasta, small amounts of parsnip and carrot, no milk (apparently a surprising amount of carbs in milk, who new?) 50g of brown rice a day, or porridge but no bread. And no sugar, or prepared food. Worst of all no caffeine! Cue the three day splitting headache and milder ones since. You can have eggs and bacon by the bucketful for breakfast, cooked in butter and still lose weight. But no bread, or beans. It’s called the Harcombe diet. It diets with the body rather than fighting it. So instead of starving yourself so your body tries to turn every calorie it gets hold off into fat for the famine it thinks it’s in, it just makes your body use your stored fat whilst not storing any. Anyway, six days, not hungry (eating like a pig most of the time) and I’ve lost seven pounds. Mustn’t grumble. I can eat stuff now. I just can’t mix carbs (root veg, bread, pasta) with fat’s (“if it’s got a face, or comes from something that’s got a face it’s a fat”). Protein is in everything so you can forget about that category.  So today I made me and Wendy a lush vegetarian curry (Jamie Oliver’s recipe here: http://www.jamieshomecookingskills.com/recipe.php?title=thai-green-vegetable-curry ) for dinner and Wendy made us roast chicken for tea (I had broccoli and mange tout with mine). You’ve got to say, apart from the headaches, it’s an awesome diet. By the way, I really do recommend that curry. I’ve gone right off them the last couple of years. The Pattaks paste curry you can make is just wrong. And this one has coconut milk in. I hate coconut milk curries, all creamy and sickly. Not a bit of it. It really was a surprise how nice it was. Not mad hot, or sickly, or dry and paste-y, just really tasty and light. Kudos to the Jamester.   You can tell I’m on a diet, babbling on, extolling the virtues of food.   In other news I’ve been a bit concerned about my soprano sax. I was having real trouble with a few of the notes and I was getting nervous the bastards had sold me a dud. Turns out our wonderful Chinese comrades-in-arms had done a sterling job on a tight budget and it was just the bad workman blaming his tools. I found this out after I heard an old 80’s power ballad on the radio the other day. I quite liked it in it’s pop/rock way; Hazel O’Connor, ‘Will You’ (http://youtu.be/NJSqcvAQ8l8) what blew me away was the sax in […]

Finally it’s arrived! One day from China to Coventry, two weeks sat at customs, another couple of days being sent to London then Liverpool, then being held there until I paid the import tax (£18, plus £13 handling fee to Parcel Force, robbing bastards.) Finally got it on Friday. It’s ace. It looks titchy, but it’s surprisingly loud and the keys feel natural, just the same as playing the tenor. Here it is, the tenor and my new soprano saxophone:   Honestly, how cool is that? It’s like Dr Evil and Mini-Me of the sax world. Of course, looking at it now I am seeing the want of an alto sax (the middle sized one) in the picture. Maybe some other birthday. Yes, 46. It’s a bit of ‘meh’ birthday. 45 seems a biggie, 50 seems monumental but 46 is just…’whatever’.   All my news is good, really this week. Sax finally made it and it’s awesome. My leg was feeling iffy after doing my first ride-to-run session for ages. I pulled up short and walked it back home. I gave it a week and did a ten miler yesterday and my leg was fine. Apart from the blisters, obviously. So I did another run today (Sunday). Both times nearly killed me though, due to the phenomenal heat. Unbelievable.  After yesterdays near-death-experience I bought some factor 50+ sun cream. Stable door and horses with Lord Lucan.   Ho hum. Also this week I’ve found out about a non calorie-controlled diet. You are allowed to eat as much as you like, so you are never  hungry, but only of real food. No processed, sugar and salt added food or drink and you have to keep your carb meals separate from your fat ones. That’s about it. It’s about working with the body to diet, not starving it so it tries to turn all food into fat and eats your lean muscle tissue. Sounds too good to be true. I’ll tell you how it goes next week. Work is fine. Wendy is all recovered from her bad patch. Luke is being royally screwed by some letting agency, but I’ll have to go into that in some detail and this is just a quick one, Wendy needs to get to sleep. I’ll update that later. Better sign off in point of fact. Got to go and roast like a potato in a microwave in my sunburnt skin. Later, Buck.

I am in a bit of a dilemma with work. The job I have is steady, Mon-Fri on the same run. I know the route, I know the job, I can find the places and reverse safely into them. I’m not fantastic on that blind-side reverse still, but adequate. On Friday I was running out of driving hours, down to my last two minutes, so I surprised myself by slamming it on really well. Can’t guarantee I won’t make a total hash of it again on Monday, though. The thing is, I am doing it. However much I faff about, I’m getting it done. On Friday they also sent me to another drop, the first time I’d had to pick up from there. The yard was quite small and had obstructions along the fence so it was a tight reverse without room to pull forward to straighten up first. I had two warehouse lads leaning out to watch me, and I did it first go. I’m not boasting, this is my job after all. But I have come a long way and am actually settling down and confidently doing things. I remember the nervous wreck I was at Stobbarts. I had no idea what was going on half of the time I was reversing. My dilemma is this; do I stick with this job (steady, do-able, but short, inconvenient hours, not massive pay) or do I risk re-applying for that Igloo job? (To which I referred a few months back.) It’s better hourly pay, a lot more hours, sealed trailers (you don’t have to do anything with them to unload them, just drive them and swap them at the depots) and the shift start times are what you want (4am-6am, I would choose.) Everything about Igloo is better, except I don’t know where all their depots are. I have a map, satnav and google maps/ navigation on my ‘phone. Once I’ve found each one once I should be alright. What I’ve been doing is getting a print off of the instructions to each site and writing notes on them. Sorted for next time then. It’s really a matter of when, not if I re-apply. The thing that is holding me back is lack of confidence. I’m scared of assessments for a start, even though I sailed through my last one. Then there’s the fear of the unknown. What if it’s loads of tiny yards you have to blind-side into? What if I have another bump? You see, while I’m at this works I am getting better, and if I do have a bump can go and get a better job. If I have a bump at Igloo I’ve thrown away a steady job and buggered my chances with the good job. The idea is in my head now though.   One thing I should say, being a driver is so much better than my previous jobs. Whenever I see the warehouse lads now I’m reminded. No chilling, always rushing with […]

Yes, even I have them. The last couple of days have been pretty good. I started off shaky on Friday. The blind side reverse has been eating away at my confidence so that even when I’ve finally got it into position I’ve been having to take a few shunts to get it squarely on the bay. It’s a knock-on effect, so I’d started flapping even at my other depots where I am comfortably competent. Friday started badly, I lost position in the yard at Irlam and in my haste (and to be fair, due to a really shit truck. I know; a bad workman always blames his tools. This was shit though. Brakes that do nothing until you ram the pedal into the floor and a different automatic gearbox, which shifts down a gear when you put it into reverse, not straight into reverse gear.) I ended up bumping into another trucks wing mirror. Luckily it was mirror to mirror, and no harm was done but my confidence was shot. Again. From that nadir it started picking up. Some arsehole in a rigid truck parked across my bay so I had to do some fancy reversing around him to get on the bay. I did it OK.  My first drop was the place that had loaded me with the infamous ‘wobbly’ pallet. This time was worse. I check every load me after that, and this time they’d loaded boxes that were two pallets long (on two pallets). The boxes were stacked high, but not that wide, so were balanced in the middle of the pallets, and because they’d had to put it in length ways (Oo-er, mrs!) were on their own at the back of the trailer. So; boxes balanced on pallets, with nothing around them to support them. Ideal. If they could have packed them in sweating dynamite on egg shells it would have been perfect. I looked at it and despaired. I put two straps on the load to try and hold it in place but I wasn’t optimistic. I tried to drive as smoothly as possible. Not easy when your brakes routine is: stamp, nothing, nothing, stamp harder, nothing, HOLY SHIT! STAMP! *thrown forward* To my surprise when I opened the back doors at Northampton the load was still upright! Go me! Then I tried that manoeuvre the guy had suggested, screw the truck around as though I was going back out of the yard, pull forward until the back of my trailer was pointing in the right general direction (and here’s the thing, I could still see it! When you can see it you can steer it.) then just reverse in as normal. Through your blind side mirror, obviously, but if you are lined up it’s straight forward. I cracked it! I don’t know if there is enough room to screw it around when there are trailers with units on them, but when the yard is open like that it’s do-able. That made me very happy.   […]