It's oh so quiet - shhhhhh

It appears that I've been a bit lax recently in updating this blog. To be honest I'd forgotten about it recently - life seems to have been quite busy. Went up to York to visit some friends, been playing plenty of Ultimate and just found out a week ago that I've been accepted for the London Marathon.

Anyway - I've not really got anything to add, I just wanted to say that you've not been forgotten completely. Will write when I've got something more interesting to say.

One down, two to go

Yesterday was the day of the corporate Ultimate tournament. It's been a bit of a nightmare over the last few days, so I'm pretty glad it's over. We came second over all, which was the same as last time and what we expected. The top team are a long way ahead of us with a hard core of brilliant players, where we have only a couple of players who play seriously.

In spite of only playing four 30 minute games, I'm feeling surprisingly stiff. Probably something to do with the cold out there - from start to finish I was out for five hours or so I guess.

I'm glad it's over. That's not to say that I wish I hadn't organised it (in spite of what I might have said on Friday), but it's such a relief when it's finally finished and everyone goes away happy.

The next couple of weeks I'll be going along to trial sessions for a London team to see whether I can get a place. I fancy playing for a team that's properly committed, because the one I play for just now don't seem to really want to win and training is patchy. If I'm perfectly honest I don't think I'll get in (so much so that I'm paying £42 to play Ultimate somewhere else, that I probably won't be able to make if I get on the team), but I felt I had to try - otherwise I would just wonder.

Ultimate Pain

Sometimes I wonder why I get myself into things. A few months ago I organised an Ultimate (you'll find out soon enough!) tournament for companies. No one had ever run one before, so we weren't sure how it would turn out. I wsa the person who really pushed for it to happen and did a lot of the convincing to pull it off. It proved to bea reasonable success - six teams and a pretty good time. Only one injury and it was to me (a very badly bruised knee, a month out and not being able to sleep properly for a week were my rewards).

A few weeks ago, someone suggested we should run another tournament. Since I'd run the first one, it seemed a logical choice to run this one. I'd managed to put away from my mind what a pain it was to put on, and just think about the good things.

The first couple of weeks went well - lots of interest. In fact at one point we had a potential eight teams. One week later and suddenly we were down to 4.5 teams. Not good. The tournament's on Saturday (two days from now) so I spent a good part of today sending out emails, trying to sort out people to play. One particularly promising lead was from one of the usual corporate teams who couldn't field a team. A few hours later they came back to me. "We can't enter a half team, but we'll enter a whole team....". Aaaaaaaaaaaaah, no!!!!!! So now I have 4.5 teams. In fact, I only need a couple more players and I could make up the sixth and final team.

So I've contacted the only two people who I could think might be able to field a vaguely corporate team at such short notice, but to no avail...

Tomorrow I'll get down on my knees and beg some of my Ultimate colleagues to help out. I'm sure we'll find someone!

So why do I bother? Well the truth of the matter is I'm a born organiser. I don't really think I'm a leader, but I make a good administrator. Sad eh? I've got a series of mini-tournaments coming up over the winter - the London Indoor Winter League. Should be interesting - I've never really organised anything where people are paying genuine money to enter - £25 a team this time.

Oh, and I still haven't sorted out a trophy for Saturday!

Home

I'm sitting here listening to "Home" by Deep Blue Something, definitely one of my favourite songs. It contains the lyric "Home, where my friends are". It got me thinking about where I think Home really is. I gre up in Scotland, moved to England when I was 8, went off to Cambridge when I was 18, then down to London when I was 21. Six years later I'm still here, but none of them really feel like home. There was a time during and just after I left Cambridge that it really felt like home, but as friends slowly drifted away from that wonderful city, it now feels a little hollow.

That's not to say that the flat where we live doesn't feel like home - it does - but I don't feel integrated into the local community. For example there are about 50,000 people in my part of London. How many of them do I know? Not sure exactly, but it would be about five people outside of my work colleagues and their partners. Two of them are people from a local computer course I use to teach at for old people, and the other three are people who live in our block of flats. Yes, that's right even though there are six flats in our block, and a total of eight other people, I know just three, from two of the flats, and by know I mean know their names and could hold a conversation that consists of more than "Hi"....

I think that's London for you - as more and more people like Hazel and me arrive here it becomes less and less sociable. That's a strange thing to say because in some ways it's incredibly sociable - with many people meeting up with friends every night. However most people don't know their neighbours. I don't think it's that we're unfriendly (either us or the community), but people don't want to put their noses into others' business. A friend highlighted the situation perfectly - he held a street party at his house, and put invitations through the entire street's letterboxes. They waited and waited, but no one arrived. After a while somebody decided to go along, then suddenly everyone started turning up - his theory is that they'd all wanted to go but didn't want to be the first person who went along, or more importantly the only person. Once one person was there, everyone else took the chance to meet their neighbours. Apparently the person who knew most of them was a young boy who cycled around the area!

We went to see "Bewitched" yesterday - the new film with Nicole Kidman. It was pretty good, although I didn't like the male character in it (actor or the person he played). We were thinking of going to see "Pride and Prejudice" but Hazel decided she didn't fancy it! What sort of woman declines the opportunity to see P&P... surely such a famous romantic story is always worth seeing again?

Before that I'd gone out for a run to try to loosen up my back (27 and my back hurts!). I did one of my half hour runs, up and down some fairly nasty hills - certainly some of the nastier ones around here. I set out a little too fast and paid the price before long. It was one of the more painful runs I've done recently - my knees are still painful from the holiday last week and in particular the tendons were struggling to pull me up the hills. That coupled with being on the verge of getting a stitch several times meant it hurt quite a bit. Definitely one of the slower runs that I've done and particularly disappointing after my 22"30' 5k run that I did a couple of weeks ago at about 8% slower. However the main objectives were achieved - I loosened up my back and more importantly managed to finish the run. Also, it must be said that running through pain is a useful experience. If I'm ever to run the marathon (and I have a vague aim to do that at some point) then I'm going to have to learn to run through pain much worse than that - the kind of toenails falling off, nipples bleeding, legs seizing up kind of pain.

Later today I'll be playing Ultimate I hope - depending on whether my back (which is currently stiff again) feels OK. The evenings are closing in on us, so I think we're due to start at 4pm this time - it won't be long before the onset of Winter and the clock change result in us having to start at 1pm. The good thing there is that I can still do stuff later in the day. In the dark...

Starting Out...

Hmmm... so I've finally joined the blogging revolution, after several years of wondering why people do it. To be honest I'm still wondering why people do it, but what better way of finding out. I suspect it won't be more than a couple of weeks before I decide to give up and try out a new project, but in the meantime maybe I'll work out why so many people think it's such a good idea.

Currently I'm waiting for my wife to awaken - my habitual weekend morning pursuit - passing the time checking email, surfing the web and (in a few seconds at least) listening to some music. In her defence (and that's defence with a c because I'm British) she's much better than she used to be, and generally by around 9 or 10 she's up.

I'm feeling a bit at a loose end because I was going to go running this morning, but I hurt my back playing Ultimate (more about what that is later) on Tuesday and while I'm able to go about life pretty much as normal, sport seems like a bad idea. Worse still, I've completed all the urgent tasks on my to do list, so I'm really just treading water.

That's better - I've now got "Try Not to Breathe" by R.E.M. playing. I really should remember to play music while surfing the web. Since I pretty much stopped running (over a year ago to concentrate on Ultimate - don't worry you'll find out what that is soon enough) I don't get to listen to music very often. I find listening to music distracts me when doing something that requires almost any level of concentration, so I don't listen at work, and most of the rest of the time my wife (Hazel) is around, so I tend to talk to her instead. I do own an mp3 player, but I can never remember to take it with me, or change the songs (so difficult...).

This morning I've been looking at software for my phone (a Nokia 6600 - my first decent phone, although it's now almost a year old) with a little success. I try to do that every month or two to see what new stuff has arrived. I've also got a background task to look at Python (a programming language) in order to see whether I can do more with my phone - it's basically a small computer, so I really do some more programmy stuff on it. Nokia released Python a few months ago, much to my disappointment because there was also talk of support for Perl (which I already know from work and home CGI programming) but that's still in Beta. Ah well - an excuse to learn something new.

I think that's enough for now, expect future posts to tell you what Ultimate is, brush on programming (don't worry that's just my job, I'm unlikely to cover it much), talk about travel (the way I spend all the money I earn) and maybe contain a little Spanish (which I've now been learning for 18 months).

Hasta luego