Hi there. The title is a reference to Apocalypse Now, in case any one missed it. I’ve sent my T.A. application back. If all goes (well?) to plan that should be the start of it. Back to the army. Different war, same shit. Saigon….shit! Got to be done. I need trucking experience to get a decent civvy driving job. The catch 22 is they won’t give you a job without experience and you can’t get experience without a job. So I’m screwed. Work is really pissing me off. They keep telling me they don’t know when the new trucks are arriving. They have just paid shit loads of thousands of pounds for these trucks, you’d think they’d have some interest and idea when they were actually going to arrive. It’s not like they could have been lost in the post, they are bloody great big things, hard to mislay.In the mean time I have been plodding on in my role as an order picker. Now they’ve gone and screwed that up as well. We have a minimum pick target we have to hit each shift, but now they have slowed the trucks down and expect us to still hit our target figure. And they are gearing up for xmas, so we had to do a 2-10 yesterday (Saturday night!) and because there was no work for us in grocery they sent us all into the freezer. They joy never stops. So I’ve seen my arse, spat my dummy and generally am miffed. Off to the army I jolly well (try to) go. In an odd kind of way I would like a tour of duty in a ‘hot’ warzone. Last time we were all primed but it was a (desert) storm in a teacup. They told us we were being sent out as bait (to get killed so they could discover the position of the Iraqi artillery) and we were to man our guns and keep doing the job even if our best mate was lying screaming next to us, then…..nothing. We got away with only a handful of deaths. (on our side.) Kind of hard to get over that. All steeled and prepared then no release. Anywho, in a way it would be good to get back to it. The manager I previously discussed the T.A. with was saying that if I do get mobilised (and the CD ROM the army sent me said, reading between the lines, ‘you will get mobilised’) work has to pay me whilst I’m on active service and the army pays me as well. And I get all the driving experience I need. The M6 will seem a bit tame after that. Going to have issues with Wendy over this. She thinks it would be a bit of a risky venture. One thing at a time. I might not get in. I might not be mobilised. If I am mobilised it might not be in warzone. If I am mobilised in a warzone I […]
Continue readingCategory: Life
This an’ that (innit!)
Hi, I’m enjoying a long weekend off work. I was off Thursday, in Friday, off Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Bloody lovely! I’m just waiting for an email from the National Lottery and all will be perfect. The one blight on my well being is my poorly thumb. I dropped a pallet container door on it at work. The door itself is only light, you could pick it up with one finger. It is five foot tall and tubular steel and it fell over just as I was reaching to pick the one beneath it up. It cracked me across the quick of my thumbnail and sweet Jesus did it hurt. I was hopping around for a couple of minutes, swearing and laughing, unable to believe it was hurting so much! For that much pain you want to be sticking a limb back on, not fannying around with a small bruise under your nail. The lack of street cred was crippling. Wendy said I’m a big baby. Thanks for the support there, wifey. It woke me up and I had to go and ice pack it (and neck some ibuprofen) at two in the morning. This has a knock on effect on the comfort of my saxing. Yesterday my saxing was as painful to me as it is to those who hear it. It’s my right thumb, the one that takes the weight of the sax and holds it forward in position. Poor Bucky. I’ve known suffering. Wendy was banging on about the time she broke her arm and had to try and sleep with four steel rods drilled through the bones in her arm. Small fish compared to a bruised thumb. But we men don’t like to make a fuss. No point is there? It always gravitates to ‘ I was in labour for thirty six hours’, anyway. The saxing is progressing apace, despite the suffering for my art and the withering lack of sympathy I endure. As I said on my Blogger blog (will have to pick one or the other soon, it feels like I’m developing a typing stammer) Pete, the sax sensei, isn’t giving me chance to master one chapter of the book from which I’m learning, before he’s turned the page onto two new chapters. I’m always playing catch-up. He said he’s pushing me because he thinks I’m capable. Little consolation as I spend an hour murdering new notes I can’t read, and times I can’t do. Hey ho, it means I should get up to speed quicker, just harder. Finding his way down to Baker Street… Which is another point, all the bloody sax bits I’ve been looking up from pop songs seem to be played on alto sax’s. Dammnit! The floor! I’ve finally got around to lending that forty five degree angle cutting device off Wendy’s brother, and whilst by no means perfect the job became do-able as the colonials would have it. Look: I never said I was a floor laying woodwork monkey, […]
Continue readingNazi apologists!
I posted this on my blogger blog, (http://thegoodbuck.blogspot.com/) but I’ll post it here as well, as I’m not sure which one will win out. There has been something of kerfuffle in these sceptred isles of late. A minority party of holocaust deniers, non-white deporters, and gay haters has been saying they are being unfairly portrayed as neo-nazis. In the interests of balance the BBC let their Fuhrer, sorry, leader, on to a political programme. Some thought this was implying a legitimacy to his views and granting a perceived equivalence to the mainstream political parties with whom he shared the panel. Others laughed up their sleeves at the thought of him trying to rationalise the indefensible and relished the prospect of him exposing his views. In fairness I have to say I didn’t watch it. I have pretty firm views when it comes to politics. Not necessarily on policies, but on principles. The point being; New Labour is too right wing for me, so I have no interest in anything the British National Party have to say. That having been said, I did follow the story. Jon Snow (of Channel 4 news) said in his blog that the fuhrer was no match for the women on the panel. The impression I received was of a rout. Wendy’s brother and sister-in-law saw it and said he was reduced to incoherence. All good and well. Job done, back to the normal run of politics, where the torturing, murdering, and war crimes are at least denied. And are done without thought to gender, sexual orientation or ethnicity. Equal opportunities fascism. Admittedly some are more equal than others, but if they will go around living where there are oil reserves or being vaguely brown coloured on the underground they are asking for it, really. Back to the plot. All was well re the openly fascist party. Then I went into work this morning. I work in a warehouse. This means I am paid for how fast I work and how much I sweat, not for having an above room temperature I.Q., sadly it means all the people I work with are the same. There was only one topic of conversation, the bloody B.N.P.! These Sun reading, Sky watching, never questioning sorts were all saying what a good job the fuhrer had done! One chap was quoting him as saying " You’re saying I’m a nazi, but my grandad was in the R.A.F. in the war, Jack Straw’s grandad was in jail for refusing to fight." As though that was a point scored. If we were voting for their grandads that might have been relevant. It also sidesteps the issue of his grandad being willing to die to fight a country that was espousing the views he now professes. Later in the canteen they were still banging on about it, saying that foreigners have more rights than the English and somehow linking the BNP to a P.C. backlash. Quoting all those dubious stories the sensationalist right […]
Continue readingOMG!
Hi, just a quick note; I was wandering about today, getting myself a bowl of cereal. Wendy had just turned the telly on and was flicking through the channels. I heard the news so wandered into the front room but it was about that boy-band lad’s funeral, and it was saying that the crowd had cheered when they saw some other pop people, so I quickly exited in disgust. I heard the reporter starting to ask inane questions to inappropriate people as I sat down in the back kitchen to eat my cereal. The next thing I heard was "…so, it is heaven or hell?" DO WHAT? Wendy had switched channels to some cookery programme where the guest has to eat something prepared for them, as voted for by…, someone (viewers?), either a dish they would really like or something they think they would hate. The spot is called something like ‘ cookery heaven or hell’. Not really funny, but extraordinary. I nearly choked on my cereal. I couldn’t believe my ears. That would have been the worst piece of reporting in the history of the medium. In other news, I have replaced that really crap plank on my flooring, and have bought some of the skirting board type stuff. When I lend the device to cut the damn stuff at a proper forty five degrees it will look quite presentable. Covers all the sins of my crapness. Huzzah. (I’ll pop a photo’ up when I get it done.) Another huzzah goes out to the fact that I’ve not had a headache for a whole three days! And my sax-ing is improving and I can knock out a couple of tunes now. Yay. Another lovely day off tomorrow and then I hope to have my wagon waiting for me when I go back. Fingers crossed. Later, Buck.
Continue readingHow hard can it be?
So very, very hard. I thought I’d surprise Wendy by doing the hall in the wooden plank effect flooring she wanted. I started a bit before ten o’clock, it’s only about nine foot square, so I thought I could have it well cracked before she returned from work. The first two planks went down relatively easily, and looked quite good. I made a few mistakes, but learnt from them and was beginning to feel quite confident. Then I tried to put down the third. Straight planks, cut one to length and that was it. No corners to cut out or anything, easy life. Would it join up? Would it buggery. I must have spent over an hour trying to get the third plank down. In the end I convinced myself that it was because the first two widths had come from a part pack we had left over from moving in, the third was from the new pack I’d just bought. So I took it up and cut out some more fiddly corners from new planks. The first two went down a treat, then guess what? Bet your arse. The third wouldn’t fit. Out of options I just banged them together as best as I was able and carried on. Half past two and I was still struggling with the last plank. In my haste to get out (I had a sax lesson at three) I made a further balls of the final piece. From the stairs it looks reasonable… then you look a bit closer… and regret it. Oh dear, oh deary me. To rub salt into the wounds the front room (done by Peter, Wendy’s brother, and his father-in-law Terry) looks great, three years after it was laid. Bottoms. Tomorrow I’ll have a ponder. There’s only that third plank and the last one that are irredeemably dire. To replace them I’d have to buy another pack from Ikea. £17 and a trip around Ikea. *shudders* But I don’t know if I could get the third plank to join up even on a third attempt. Which means £17 to improve one plank. Either way I’ll have to commence operation ‘Turd Polish’ (fitting the skirting board things to hold down the floor, and more importantly to hide the gaps) ASAP. There is a reason why people employ tradesmen. It ain’t just laziness. I’m pretty miffed now. I’ve spent the most of today sweating, sawing, and swearing, and the end result is a bag of tits. I don’t mind grafting all day if I get a good (hell, adequate) result, but I feel like I wasted my time and money today, and made a mess of Wendy’s dream home. Rough and ready is fine by me, if it works it’s good enough. Wendy likes things to be aesthetic as well. Or, to put it another way not a total balls-up. Ho hum. Low of mood am I. Still, my headache today has been manageable, small mercies and all. Back to the […]
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