THE GOOD BUCK

Category: Life

  • And there’s more…

    Well it’s proving a good week for us. Wendy had her interview today, passed with flying colours, and is back to being a (part-time) wages slave as of next week!

    When she was last with the C.A.B. she worked on a project called G.P. Outreach as a sort of independent advisor. She would go to doctors surgeries and deal with people the doctor referred, such as people with debts, housing issues, benefits problems etc. The idea was that she could then deal with people who were too loony or simple to just attend the regular bureau. Then, in dealing with the some of the causes of stress and misery in their lives it would let the doctor offer a more holistic package whilst freeing the doctor up to just deal with the medical issues.

    I only mention that to explain that in her last role Wendy had to take on a whole lot of issues then deal with most of them herself as the clients weren’t capable, and keep on dealing with every little issue that arose in their lives. She was constantly having ongoing clients calling her and then she was worrying over every thing in their sad lives.

    Although on the one hand rewarding, it was emotionally draining and too much of a burden for her.

    Which brings us to her present job; trainee debt specialist.

    In this capacity she is specialising in her favourite subject (debt), she is part of a team, and because of the massive (and inevitably increasing) workload in that field that the bureau faces, it is her boss’s policy to deal with all of the clients problems in one, or at the most two interviews. Then case closed. These are going to be compos mentis clients so there is no need to hand-hold and take over their cases. It’s sort everything out, tell them what to do, or arrange it, then let them get on with it.

    Also it is one very short bus ride away from where we live, her previous job entailed two buses, or a bus and a train, or if I happened to be off, an hour’s drive in rush hour traffic (to cover about seven miles!)

    So, old job bad in all sorts of ways, new job better in just as many, and having the added bonus of letting Wendy specialise in her favourite subject.

    Also she’s lost the best part of another stone since we returned from Scotland, so everything is peachy in the world of the Wendster.

    I have made a decision about my martial arts. I went to a Karate class the other day to try it out. It was weird, but I expect it was good if you stuck at it. The only reason I went is, as I’ve mentioned previously, Taekwondo more or less ignores the fact you have hands. They are just handy (as it were) counterbalances for when you are kicking. This is fine in a competition where your opponent won’t be trying to punch you, not so great in a street fight.

    So anyway, I went. It was weird, but I could see the point. Then they tried to show me how they do their kicks. Oh, no indeed. So gay!

    I was all of a tizzy when I got home. Trying to learn two styles, with opposite techniques, would be a nightmare. It made me think longingly of Wing Chun Kung Fu. That was all about punching, blocking and all that is to do with using your hands to knock the crap out of someone. With hardly any emphasis on kicks. TKD and Wing Chun would be the ultimate combination. The only reason I stopped going was because it was seven pounds a lesson which, on top of  Taekwondo, would have meant that  when you had paid for the gradings, the insurance, the uniforms etc, spending over a thousand pounds a year on martial arts. We were dirt poor so I had to quit.

    Then I passed my test.

    And now Wendy has a job.

    Can you see where I am going with this?

    I’ve decided not to bother learning Karate. I’m going to wait until I have a driving job and know what hours I am doing then go back to the Kung Fu. Assuming the swine flu doesn’t kill me, I could be an all-round lethal martial artist in five years. Which would make me forty eight years old, and at my martial prime. Weird.

    Still, I don’t drink, smoke, or do any other drugs (apart from caffeine) so I have to  have something in life I enjoy. Also if I do end up sat on my arse for twelve of thirteen hours a day as a driver I really will need the exercise.

    Talking of which, my examiner yesterday (bezzy mate Glen) was saying he goes down the gym for two hours a night. I was suitably horrified at the prospect, so he explained he used to be thirty eight stone! He’s down to seventeen, and carries it well, but two of those he has put on recently so it’s two hours at the gym every night before he really starts banging it on. My admiration was immense though. If you are thirty eight stone how can you motivate yourself to start dieting? I have been trying to get from ten stone twelve back down to ten and a half, ideally ten stone, and it is taking for ever.

    I work like a Trojan every day and sweat buckets at every TKD lesson. How can you even start to consider starving for years at a stretch? Apparently he had to have nine kilo’s of excess skin surgically removed when he had lost it all.

    Well, all’s well in Bucksterville.

    Happy days.

    Buck.

  • Finally!

    Hi and a big huzzah!

    Finally passed that bloody test today. Glen, the examiner, was desperate for me to pass, I think if I’d have failed it this time he would have driven for me next go. He was telling me to relax, not panic, then when things got dodgy he was saying ‘not your fault, you’re in your lane, that was his fault’, telling me not to go to pieces as I’d not failed yet, etc.

    Bless him, he really did want me to pass.

    I had a few moments, pinched some of an oncoming lane for a turn when, strictly speaking, I didn’t need to, went into some situations a little too fast, and felt I was overcautious in others, but my new best-mate Glen said it was good enough. I came away with eight minor driver faults, and one of them was for taking a shunt on my reverse manoeuvre (I’d left it a bit tight and thought it was better to take a shunt, and the consequent driver fault, rather than possibly fail the test there and then).

    I have been saying, since my last test, that I can pass it now, that I should get it this time. When I knew I’d only failed on missing a gear and pulling over on a single yellow line, I thought ‘I can do this’.

    Which is all good and well until you get back in the cab. You’ve already failed eight times, an infinity of variables await you and everything is riding on the next fifty minutes as you pull out of the (infeasibly tight) corner from the test centre onto the road.

    Huge gulp, massive deep breath, chi focused, and off we go.

    God it is horrible. The fatalist in me is saying ‘you are never going to pass this’ while I’m so desperate to pass it. You just have to brace yourself for failure whilst trying your damnedest not to. It is truly horrible. The money you are throwing out the window, the doubt that you will ever pass and the knowledge that you’ve invested too much to be able to quit. You have to keep on trying until you pass, be it nine or ninety tests.

    Then when he told me I’d passed…, really there are no words. The emotional overload of joy that is primarily inexpressible relief, it feels like this:, sort of.

    Bloody hell, I’m glad that’s over.

    I felt like my hands were shaking, though they weren’t, and I thought I might need surgery to remove the grin.

    Sent my license off today to have the three penalty points stuck on it (couldn’t send it away before as you have to present your license to take the test) when it gets back I send it off again (with my pass certificate) and when that returns I can start looking for work.

    Which reminds me, I’ll have to get a really good photocopy of my pass certificate in case they keep the original when they upgrade my  license. I think I’ll frame my certificates for in my computer room. Sad, I know, but no one else need see them, and the amount of commitment and anxiety that has gone in to achieving them, well, they will make me happy to see them there.

    So, a mere £5,615 and thirteen tests later, I am a qualified articulated lorry driver. Bargain.

    There’s other stuff afoot, but quite frankly I don’t care. ("If you could squeeze ‘rats ass’ into that sentence it would be perfect." To quote Niles from Frasier)

    Happy/ relieved Bucky.

    Later,

    Buck.

    PS I forgot to mention, when I told Wendy she was obviously delighted, but then admitted she had thought I was never going to pass! There’s supportiveness. She didn’t think I could do it, but encouraged me each time I failed and voiced no dissent when I then put us in another £283 of debt on the credit card by booking another test. If she had put us five grand+ in debt for something I thought she clearly couldn’t do, I don’t know if I’d have been able to do the same.

    Done now, thankfully.

  • Days off, huzzah!

    Today is my first of five whole, glorious, non-working days! Big yay!

    I’ve sorted out a bunch of videos, (all the TKD poomse -required patterns- for all of the grades to black belt) numbered them, put them in sequence, chucked them into a file with the photo’ of my badge on the front, (you still wish you had one) and now have written about it.

    Sad, sad, sad.

    I have also been making the most of the non-torrential moments to do a bit about the garden. Many’s the suspected weed that has felt the pitiless brutality of the dark side of my gardening. Also I collected a nosegay of sweetpeas and roses, an eye-candy of crocosmia and dahlia, and a touch of hosta and butterfly bush to make an arrangement. I call it ‘Summer in a glass’.

    Nice, don’t you think?

    Also I decided to try an idea I’ve been mulling over. For a while now I’ve fancied putting some plants out the front of the house, but we have no garden and the local pre-convict youth would have trashed any plant pots with their relentless football. Now however, the darling youth have mostly moved their delinquency to some other poor bugger’s domain. Mostly. It would only take one hit to knock a plant over, possibly to break the pot. Then I noticed I’ve had to start weeding in the 10" gap between the house and the pavement. It is covered in large stones, with more of the same and sandy gravel below. I thought it would be too inhospitable a terrain to support plant life. But if weeds can do it, why not try some of the hardier plants?

    So today I’ve been excavating small holes in the stones/ gravel, filling them full of compost and heavy soil, then planting lavender. I had one small lavender growing independently, but the other two were just branches I’d pinned down to root (layered). They were still attached to the mother plant until today. I’ve just snipped them off, cut them right back (to encourage rooting and decrease water loss through the leaves) and stuck them in the front. Watered them in, obviously. Now we wait. If anything can take it it will be lavender. Hot, dry, and poor (to the point of non-existent) soil. Nothing lost, I’m layering another bunch of branches now.

    While I was at it I potted up one of my dwarf firs and buried the pot in a whole I made in the stones. It’s a nice fir, but I can’t really find a home for it in my garden, so it’s an ideal experimental candidate.

    Talking of firs, whilst we were in Scotland we were surrounded by the buggers. One particular flavour caught my eye. I went rooting around for pine cones, trying to find one bearing seeds, but they were all wide-open, dried husks (due to it being totally the wrong season). Not to be put off I ripped a few cones apart to try to find any recalcitrant seeds (ones with issues) and amongst the few runtish looking seeds I found one that was rooting! I quickly ripped it out, put it in wet bog-roll, and left if for the rest of the holiday. I brought it home and potted it, not really expecting a result, but check this out:

    Oh yes! Verdant growth! To put it into perspective that is a 3" diameter pot, but still, it’s not dead.

    My other gardening thing of note is that, as I predicted, the ground cover is filling out:

     

    I’m going to sort my push bike out while I’m off and start biking to work. No more tickets, improve my stamina, strengthen my cardio/ vascular, stretch my tendons (apparently) and save us some money. All good.

    I wanted to do it before, but it is about six or so miles each way, and when I was in de-kit I simply didn’t have the excess energy to waste. Now would be the perfect time to start.

    Which reminds me, after getting kicked out of de-kit I put on half a stone in about two weeks. This is bad news, for, unlike Wendy, I do not have it in me to diet. I work hard, sweat buckets at Taekwondo, and eat like a pig. Dieting and further exercise are anathema to me. So I was worried. I went from around 10, 6 to 10,12 ish. The worrying thing was; would I ever stop or just balloon into the thirteen stone bloater I was when I was drinking?

    I cut out the odd cream cake, weighed myself quite a bit, and over the course of a few weeks have got back down to 10, 7. That was this morning. Briefly. I had a cup of tea and was probably back up to 11 stone. But I’ve not seen 10, 7 for quite a while so I am cheered. The overall good thing is that I’ve stopped banging it on.

    Sah bum nim was banging on about her flab fighters when last I was able to attend. She was saying she went for a forty mile push-bike ride before class on Sunday, had been for runs before the other classes, then when she went to flab fighters, she had lost a pound! "A POUND!" she was going on. Apparently some of the other women there had been saying things like "I went for quite a long walk" "WALK?!" "WALK!" "A POUND!"

    It was quite funny, for us at least.

    My other news is irksome. I have been playing with all the add-on’s you can slap on the bog-standard Firefox browser. One of them is called Lazerus. It sits quietly in the background, supposedly securely storing all the forms you fill in, in case of data loss. Supposedly you just put in your password and it will retrieve the document on which you were working. I’ve had it for weeks now, snooping on me. Then when I was three quarters through typing out my blog I lost the bloody page. The only place it happens to me, and the only reason I installed Lazerus. After ten minutes of trying to remember what password I’d set I finally got into it, only to find it doesn’t do it for My-bleeding-space!

    Typical!

    Uninstall Lazerus? Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

    To finish on a positive note, I think I have a control system for my headaches. I take that nasal spray every day as a preventative and I think it decreases the frequency and severity of the headaches. As a first line of defence when I feel one coming I take ibuprofen, which helps. Then if it does kick in I take some decongestant with paracetamol pills, and, hey presto, the sick feeling goes off, the pain eases and eventually stops. Marvellous!

    Happiness is the illusion of control.

    Off to practise my poomse, class tonight, big lie-in tomorrow!

    Buck.

  • Same ol’, same ol’…

    Do I need to say that I failed again?

    Well, I did.

    This time it was two even more incredibly silly things than usual. I did all the hard stuff, the stupidly tight turns, the impossibly small gaps between parked and oncoming cars, etc.

    Then, when he asked me to pull over on the left (to test my ability to pull out into traffic safely) I blew it! Normally they say things like "don’t worry about parking over someone’s drive, we are not stopping for long", so I checked the road ahead, spotted a gap between parked cars on the opposite side (to allow traffic to pass) cleared the bus stop, got between two roads that were joining the one I was on, so as not to obstruct vision or block access, and pulled over. On a single yellow line. Fuck. Fail.

    I didn’t even notice it I was that busy looking for everything else, and I wasn’t looking for it, as I thought the same "we are not stopping" rule would apply. Nope.

    The other one was an aberration, I was crawling up hill, between cars, went to change from fourth to fifth (by flicking a switch up, which puts you into high range gears, making the first gear position your fifth gear) but in flicking, pausing while the box changes ranges, then putting it into fifth, I think I pushed it too far to the left (into the reverse area of the box) and couldn’t find a gear. I tried dropping it back down to fourth, then third, but was stuck in a false neutral. I had to stop for a second, put the handbrake on, release and depress the clutch then start again. Fail!

    Ho hum. Six minor faults. Failed again.

    Still those are things that have never happened to me on test before and should never happen again. If I can pass everything else it is just a matter of time. And money. And indomitable spirit.

    Bollocks.

    Buck.

  • Hot. Damn hot!

    Hi there.

    This beastly weather we are suffering is killing me. Work, though better than being in de-kit, is still a non-stop sweat-fest. I put in four hours overtime on Monday. The manager asked me if I could do any overtime quite early on in the shift. I’d just had the weekend off and was feeling fresh and lively, so I said I would. By 1pm I was done-in, soaked in sweat, had no food, and another five hours in front of me. That was fun.

    Sweatier yet is Taekwondo. Sah bum nimh reckons she’s joined flab-fighters, so were are all getting exercised to death (as misery loves company). The last two nights have been so humid, then on top of that having Sah bum nim cracking the whip. You could literally wring my dobok (gi, fighting suit) out. She had us all lined up doing one kick, step, one kick. Then one kick, foot down, straight into second kick. Then three kicks, then five, then ten. This wasn’t three kicks, rest. It was kick, kick, kick, again! Kick, kick, kick, faster! etc. Then doing mad kicks backwards across the hall. Then we were split into groups (I was with the black belts/ one below black belts, and me! Yeah, see my trumpet. Observe me blowing.) Doing turning kick, into 360 degree kick, into spinning back kick. Not easy, but I was 80% there. One chick who was the grade below black belt (red belt with black tag) and was obviously surprised at my attempts, said I shouldn’t worry about not getting it dead right as this was an advanced exercise for her grade and that I was excellent. Yeah, she wants me.

    In other news the Warrington coppers show an alarming alacrity in dealing with motoring offences. An indecent haste some might say, given their response time to real crimes. Anywho, Wendy posted that confirmation of details thingy back to them on Sunday, I had the reply on Tuesday! £60 fine and three points. Bastards.

    The Wendster is moaning about me typing so I’d better sign off while I dig a shallow grave in the garden.

    Later,

    Buck.