Mikro

I’ve wanted a Mikro for a while now and so when I saw one in town today I snapped it up. It’s basically a sheet of very thin metal cut out in such a way that you can fold it out and make a model, but without detaching any of the pieces, so the sheet becomes the floor. There are some really complex ones out there but they only had the little ones. As it’s the coolest and because I love space, I got no. 2 – Mars. It also seemed fitting as it was Mike Massimo’s last day on the ISS today. I decided to take pics of each stage as with the metal being so thin it’s something you can really only do once. here are the various stages:

In other news

I signed up for a .tel today. No idea if anything will come  of it, but it looks like one of those things I’ll see in 6 months’ time and wish I signed up for, after my name’s already gone.

Catfish

While turning the house upside down tonight for a wooden spoon (long story), I found this little gem. Won’t mean anything to most of you, but means a lot to me. Back in the day I was in a band called Catfish. It went through many line-ups, including 3 singers (all at the same time) , 2 guitarists (at the same time), 3 bass players (at different times), 1 drummer, 1 cellist, 2 keyboard players, a saxophonist, a violinist and a trumpet player. By the end it was a 6-piece funk outfit on the cusp of success, but then everyone left Uni and went their separate ways. We got a couple of recordings down by the end, along with some dodgy gig recordings, but what I found tonight took me right back to the very beginning. The first ever gig, in the Grovel, the bar in the Whitworth Park halls of residence in Manchester, with the original line-up of 3 people. One of them is still one of my best friends, and still my favourite person to jam with. I can’t believe it’s been more than a decade since the first gig. Since I’m blogging this, I may as well add some gig pics too.

The original setlist

The Boys

Battle of the bands Round two in the Hop & Grape (now academy 3)

Words of wisdom and comfort from Dr Boardman

And of course the sock. On the right is Guppy, desperately trying not to look at my arse.

And finally the sock itself. It’s original owner is now a well-respected San Francisco-based blogger, Married to a Biochemist who also happens to be an inspirational bass player that I had the great pleasure to be in a band with for too short a period. Catfish. Good Times.

The Value of Money

that last post got me thinking about school again so thought I’d impart another memory.

They say school is the happiest time of your life and while I didn’t think so at the time, I do remember most of my time at school fondly. One of the things that did always bother me though, was being one of the poor kids. My family wasn’t actually that poor. Both parents worked, there were three of us boys and our needs were quite simple, but the problem was I went to a public school. For any American readers, that’s the same as your private schools (I know that’s confusing, but that’s how it is). So the thing about a public school (or Grammar School as mine was) is that you have to pay fees to attend, unless you get a scholarship. If you’re under a certain income level (or rather your parents are) you can apply for an assisted place, provided your mark in the entrance exam is high enough. As my older brother had got in on an assisted place, and as my parents couldn’t afford full fees, there was quite a lot of pressure on me to get an assisted place. Suffice to say I managed it, but never did I imagine what a difference it would make.

More or less all of my peers were better off than I was. All of them had fancy calculators and watches, and new uniforms, bought for them, not handed down from an older brother (though mum was always careful to ensure it was my  name in everything, not my brother’s). If they played a musical instrument it was their own, not one borrowed from the school. So I was always conscious of being less well-off than pretty much everyone else.

Before too long I managed to get myself in Saturday morning detention (unsurprisingly, for failure to do homework) and on the day, found myself in an unheated portacabin on the edge of the school grounds, in the company of ruffians, bounders, cads and ne’er-do-wells, and sat next to a boy who was in my year but in a different form. He asked to borrow a pen. I had two, a fountain pen and a calligraphy marker. I was very particular about the fountain pen but knew I’d get into trouble if I lost the calligraphy marker as it had been expensive. Thinking I’d probably get in more trouble for handing in lines written in thick marker, I handed the calligraphy pen to my fellow detainee.

I never got it back, but over the years I came to be good friends with the boy in question and one year I was invited to his house, over Christmas. I didn’t really understand the trust that was being placed in me until I got there, and realised that here was someone who was actually less well off even than me, and realised that my friend was very slightly embarrassed by how sparse everything was, and how little they had. He was one of 5 or 6 kids, I forget exactly how many, but I remember being envious of how well they all got on (me and my brothers seldom saw eye to eye when we lived at home). My friend’s parents were divorced, but got on ok, and so at Christmas made a concession and Dad came round for the festivities. Very seldom have I been made more welcome than I was that day, and was fed to bursting point, though this weighed on my conscience, feeling that I was depriving them of a helping that would have made their own go that bit further.

If it all sounds a bit Dickensian that’s because that’s a bit how it felt. I’d known all my life we were poor, but didn’t realise how fortunate I was until then. I saw what it was like to just get by, to just make ends meet. And then the really surprising thing happened – they started giving out presents. It wasn’t actually Christmas day, just a meal in the Christmas holidays, so I hadn’t been expecting presents. I felt a bit awkward as though I was intruding on a private family moment – I hadn’t brought anything to give them, not even my friend, as I hadn’t know it was expected. And it didn’t seem logical for them to have got me something because it had been a bit of a last minute thing, so I was just kind of watching this private thing. Then my friend’s Dad said “and this one’s for Paul” and handed me an envelope. I was so surprised I didn’t know what to say. I made intrigued gratitude noises and carefully open the envelope. Inside was a puzzle. A hand-made puzzle. the instructions read:

1. This is another wall (without any half bricks)

2. It is 6 bricks high.

3. There are 48 bricks in the wall.

4. There are 16 pieces of three bricks.

5. No brick of the same colour is next to another of that colour either horizontally or vertically in the correctly built wall.

My friend’s Dad had made me a present. My friend was a bit embarrassed, but he needn’t have been. Of all the friends he could have made at school, I was one of the few who really understood what it meant to have less than everyone else. What it meant to have home-made and second hand stuff. To have to bring your P.E. kit in  a carrier bag instead of an adidas boot bag. To have a no-name blue blazer with the school badge sewn on the breast pocket because we couldn’t afford the proper blazer. I thought the present was ace. I love puzzles, but I also loved the fact that it had been hand made, and his Dad had given it to me so I’d feel included. And I did. A fool knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing. That puzzle is a few bits of cardboard in a brown envelope but it’s one of my most valuable things, because it changed the way I look at the world, and at other people.

I work best under pressure

That’s what I keep telling myself at least. I haven’t felt like this since Uni. In fact, realistically since A-Levels. In a week’s time I will just have run my first full training day. The current planned attendance is 70 delegates. the day will start off with an hour long presentation, by me with some help from my Parental Unit. It will then lead to an hour long practical demonstration of the technology in the presentation. After this I get lunch and then a break as Dad talks to the delegates about library stuff I don’t understand, like funding and boroughs and other counilly words. After that the delegates which each spend an hour or so doing practical excercises which I have written specifically for this course. They will involves things like setting up a blog, following an RSS feed. sending a message to @stephenfry. Finally there will be a summary of the day, again given by me, followed by a Q&A (if anyone has any questions I haven’t been able to answer during the day).

The presentation is nearly finished, which is the basis and foundation of the course, but the rest is still very much in the planning stages. I still have 6 days to put my shit together, and I know the last bits can be done in a couple of evenings, or one full day, but between now and then I am also doing the Manchester Run, with insufficient training (just as I did last year, so pretty sure I’ll be ok) and doubt I will be in the mood for powerpoint afterwards. I remember at school I always used to leave all my homework until the last minute, doing everything imaginable to avoid doing it (thankfully there was no such thing as a blog when I did A-Levels or I wouldn’t have passed anything and would probably have four gold stars and an attitude by now) and it’s a habit I’ve never been able to break. I know that it will make things a lot easier in the long run if I get things done early, then I can relax and not worry myself half to death thinking about what I haven’t done. I know that there is less chance I’ll miss anything if it’s finished earlier so I can add to it later if need be. But despite knowing all this, I just can’t do it. I do work well under pressure, but whether I work better is doubtful, whatever the little red dude on  my shoulder keeps telling me. It’s just how I’ve always done it. I should probably address it and get myself more organised, but I know that even if I do, there will always be a little voice inside my head saying “yeah, but it works, you know?” and I’ll always inevitably say “Yeah, *sigh*, I guess I could build that snowspeeder again after all. And might as well put the trilogy on while I do. That homework’s not due for nearly a week”.

Once a slacker, always a slacker.

Sleep is a precious commodity

Opinions vary on how much sleep you need, and how much is too much or too little. Different people need different amounts and we all have very different requirements. Sleep can be a blissful regenerative experience and so its lack can be frustrating and even traumatic – both during the hours when you try, in vain, to sleep and during the following day when you have to not only deal with the challenges of the day, but have to deal with them in a foggy and slightly trippy frame of mind due to the lack of sleep the previous night.

I am very particular about my sleep and all the factors that surround it. I can’t sleep if I'm to hot or too cold. I can’t wear anything when I'm sleeping because i move about too much and on more than one occasion have woken up apparently trying to asphyxiate myself with my bedclothes. If the surface is too soft, or too hard, i can’t sleep. If there is noise outside the normal ambient white noise of a northern suburb, i can’t sleep (people rolling out of pubs drunk rarely disturb me as that’s par for the course). If my pillow is too high or too low, i can’t sleep. I take my own pillows pretty much everywhere with me because they’re at the right height and one of them is memory foam and it takes me a good 3 or 4 nights to get used to a new pillow arrangement that it generally works out easier all round just to bring my own. Getting to sleep, when all the right conditions are met, is a sublime experience. Failing to sleep due to one of the criteria falling short, can be a stressful experience, often triggering a catch-22 cycle of thoughts as i get more and more frustrated with my inability to perform the most basic and fundamental function of being human. For this reason i like to go to bed late, thoroughly exhausted, on crisp, clean sheets with my memory foam pillow, where i read until i find myself reading the same line 5 times through the drowse, or sometimes until i wake up with the book on my face.

Once I’m out though, there’s no waking me up. I would sleep until doomsday if i was left to it, so i have to have quite a complex and logical wake up system. I work shifts, which can be anything from an 8-4 to a 12-8, so week-to-week my sleeping patterns can be quite different. As you probably noticed already, I’m quite particular about things being changed, so i have conditioned myself to an easy to understand regime. I have one alarm for each shit pattern, and another for days off. Each has a different song assigned to it, so that when i wake up half dazed and befuddled, i can tell, from what song is playing, what shift i am on. Each alarm is set to snooze after 7 minutes (except days off when i have a ten minute snooze (if i have an alarm (and yes, i did just double bracket – three including this one))). I get up when it goes off for the third time, or before – if by some miracle i am awake enough.

This all probably seems terribly OCD, but if it is, it’s an OCD brought about by too many sleepless nights leading to the point where the only way to possibly *get* any sleep is to devise a system. The system has built up over many years and gradually becomes more complex and elaborate, as though sleep is an adversary, ever trying to evade capture, so i have to constantly update and refine my strategies to track him down. I suspect that by the time i reach old age, I will need three mattresses (one memory foam), a real-time temperature adjuster, a pile of cushions and pillows, a specially blended mix of exactly the right proportions of oxygen and nitrogen, and several lines of valium, just to get vaguely drowsy.