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Daisy and Trev scrabbling about on the floor
I appear to be moving
Tomorrow, I am moving house.
I’ve spent the last few years living in North London, and I loved it to bits, but from tomorrow I shall be living in South London, with my girlfriend Tori, and I couldn’t be more excited!
OK, so the rent is going to be substantially less, and the time and cost to get to work roughly the same, and those are lovely things, but moving in with Tori is what has my heart racing. Well this is a major step for the two of us. We’ve been seeing each other now for 10 months, a time which seems to have flown by. I mean seriously, it’s not long till we have our first anniversary and I feel like no time has passed at all. I also feel like I’ve known her all my life, which I guess is why I feel so good about moving in with her. It just feels right.
For the last few weeks we’ve been picking furniture from the Ikea website, and it was all ordered yesterday morning. We’re going to have to go again in the car some time so we can pick out decorative things, but I’m really happy with what we’re chosen.
We’re going to have our own separate living room in the house, though the kitchen is shared. I’m really looking forward to having a bedroom and living room that are *ours*, decorated our way, and a place that only we use. I love the guys I live with and have lived with, but coming home and being able to plonk myself in a room that only Tori and I occupy will be absolutely lovely.
Of course I’m stressed about the moving. Tomorrow I’m focussing on moving the big things. I have a van hired, which I’m stressed about driving, I know the directions, which I’m going to print out, and I’m happily skirting around the congestion zone. I’ve got most of my junk packed up, but I’ve actually run out of boxes. Fortunately, it’s going to be about 2 weeks before the person taking my room moves in, so I can leave a few things there and come back for them later, I just need to get shelves, computers, sofas and other massive things to the new place.
What is most important though is that we move Tori’s stuff. She needs to be out of her place tomorrow. Her parents are coming to help with their van, and I’ll have mine, so we should be able to clear her stuff out by midday. If that happens, I should have my stuff out by late afternoon. Fingers crossed.
Gastroscopy
Warning, this is a very graphic post regarding my gastroscopy yesterday. Please don’t read it unless you have a bucket beside you.
Archway Road
Holy Crapoli! I did it! This morning I took on Archway Road and I won. I made it all the way home from the Sainsbury’s on Holloway road.
My journey was actually made of a lot of stops and starts. First thing this morning I cycled down to Rolls and Rems on Seven Sisters road to pick up some tread for a sewing project. Then I cycled back up Holloway Road to the pet shop to get little Trev some food (I must remember to buy him some new perches soon). Next was a cycle up the road a bit to Sainsbury’s for milk, followed by the fabled journey up the steepest hill in the world ever.
It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. I just put the bike into the lowest gear and took it at my own pace. Fortunately, as it’s a Saturday, I didn’t have to worry too much about buses getting stuck behind me so I just went for it.
I guess I’m proud of myself, but I don’t think I can call it a complete victory yet. I need to see how it goes when I do the full journey back from work. I wonder if I can simulate the journey by doing some kind of loop tomorrow morning. Of course, this isn’t fair because I haven’t spent an entire tiring day at work.
Wish I had recorded this success on Endomondo. Never mind, eh?
Heading home again
Well going back the direct route was difficult, to say the least. Although it wasn’t as bad as I thought traffic wise, in fact I think Holloway Road is much easier than I was expecting it to be, the real difficulty was the fact that it was a gradual up hill followed by EVEN STEEPER up hill. By about mile 3 I had to stop to give my legs a rest. Then I tried going up hill again and it was a fuck! I don’t think it was helped by having the gyro thing powering my lights. I may get battery powered lights instead.
So I walked some of the way and it was a bit cheating, but guess what. Tori was on the tube, pulled in to old street station at 6.06. I believe I set off at 6.07. I actually made it to home before Tori did. Fucking win!
http://www.endomondo.com/workouts/uH3OFkLYIwY
Books galore
I love my girlfriend to bits because she does awesome things, like make me some *really* pretty books. Look at them. Look at how awesome they are. I haven’t decided what I’m going to do with them yet. Do I write in them? Do I just keep them for show?
She also made me a little bag of stuff to keep in my locker at work for when I cycle in. It’s got shower gel and deodorant, which I think are most important, and some painkillers and some gel stuff to rub in to my aching muscles. So thoughtful, so lovely.
Cycled to work, forgot the GPS
Oh oops!
I remembered, of course, to tell Endomondo to track my journey to work, but when you forget to turn on GPS, it doesn’t do a very good job of it. According to my workout stats, it says I did 0 miles in 29 minutes at 16 seconds. So I’ve shaved maybe a few minutes off my time by doing a direct route to work, rather than round the side, not a massive change. Cycling down Holloway road wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be, though there is quite a bit of pressure on the junction with Seven Sisters Road. It’s not difficult, but you are VERY aware that there is traffic moving in every direction.
Interestingly, I found myself over-taking buses instead of having them behind me, dying to get past, which means it’s a quicker way to get to work *and* it’s healthier for me. Fucking win!
Checking myself out in the mirror, I think I’ve lost inches from my spare type, but I’m still retaining my weight, so I guess I might be adding muscle, though I wouldn’t care to speculate really.
Pens and my relationship with them
My god, I have a weird relationship with my pens. Every single pen I’ve ever owned has ended in disaster.
In primary school I would chew pencils, just like every child, but this is has been a life-long habit I’ve never been able to grow out of, leading to all the inevitable problems.
While those cheap, plastic roller-ball pens are nice and come in their thousands in the office environment, they have always been a source of hate in my life. Why can’t someone make them out of stronger plastic? They just can’t cope with the full force of my teeth, chewing on them, day in, day out. About once a month I have to pick tiny shards of plastic from between my teeth, and discard what was quite a full pen in the bin because the structural integrity has now gone.
Pencils are more of the same. While I do enjoy using them more than cheap pens, again I end up with bits of wood stuck in my teeth. Then I have the age old problem of keeping it sharp. I don’t have the lightest touch in the world so they blunt extremely easily, but when it comes to sharpening, I can never get it right. I never get that nice shape that you get when it comes out of the box. Instead I get that stupidly sharp point that breaks off instead of wearing down, leading to bits of pencil pinged across my desk and the need to sharpen the pencil again. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Now we come to the slightly more expensive pen. You know, the clicky kind with 1000 moving parts inside them. I exaggerate, but as a geek, that’s exactly what it seems to me. They’re just too irresistible to take apart and see how they work. Then inevitable then happens. I wonder about how springy the spring is and it’s role in the pen. PING! It’s now on the other side of the room and we all know I’m not going to look for it.
Finally, the fountain pen. The SCOURGE of my school life. My teachers hated my handwriting, and I can’t blame them. It was scruffy and rushed, and more often than not it was smudged because I wouldn’t wait for the ink to dry before rubbing my hands all over the page. Then there was the fact that I waved my pens around as a child and found more ink floating around in the lid than in the pen itself. No, the fountain pen was a disaster for me.
But now I’m all grown up, I find myself holding on to this Batman fountain pen, given to me as a Christmas gift from Tori, not just for its sentimental value, but because it’s a writing implement I can finally get on with.
My handwriting improved so much since my time at school, I’m slightly less fidgety, and coupled with the fact that the fountain pen only has one part to unscrew, I don’t think I’ll ever need another pen again. In fact, I take this pen to and from work with me every day.
Now I just need to make sure I have some ink at home and at work all the time. And maybe a pocket protector.
Keeping it up
I guess one of the most important things you can do with any lifestyle change, no matter how big or small, is to keep it up.
I’m sure you’re already aware, as I’ve discussed here, that I’ve started doing some running and some cycling. Well, while I’m doing at least two runs a week, the cycling hasn’t quite taken off yet. This isn’t because I don’t want to do it, it’s just a by-product of visiting Tori very regularly, and also having to go away for work last week.
Needless to say, I will be cycling to work tomorrow, and maybe again the day after that, while I have access to my bike.
There is another slight change, which I am extremely proud to announce, I have been eating sea food. Tori, ever vigilant when it comes to trying to make me slimmer/healthier/more awesome/less annoying/less scruffy, decided that we should have salmon for dinner a couple of weekends back. Knowing that I would probably have some problem with it, I agreed on the grounds that I would be cooking the fish myself.
To my surprise, as I lifted the fillet out of the packaging and on to the already spitting frying pan, I wasn’t as freaked out about touching it as I thought I would be. I then proceeded to casually push the salmon around the pan to ensure it didn’t stick/burn/etc.
We cut it up and put it on a bed of rice and it was absolutely delicious. The taste certainly wasn’t anything I expected, so I wolfed it all down. Later in the week when I went to Birmingham for work, I decided to have a trout starter with my dinner, thinking to myself that if I kept eating fish, I couldn’t slip back in to my fish-phobic ways. Once again the food was amazing, especially sitting on risotto rice. Nom.
Fast forward now to last night and I was eating chilli squid in Wagamamas! Holy hell! I never in my life thought I would be doing that. Next stage will be going out for some sushi somewhere. Any one want to join me?