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Friday, January 18, 2002
13:39 
Normally I'm not interested in financial wheelings and dealings, but it's funny how the most apparently irrelevant things can affect things close to us. The scandal about the collapse of Enron is something I would normally gloss over without a second thought. However, Enron owns Wessex Water Services Ltd, and that is the water company I deal with for my job with the Environment Agency.
Having said all that, I'm still not interested really. I had a quick glance round the BBC stuff on the matter, but, well, yawn. Wessex Water is pretty safe - it was "ringfenced" by the Government back when the Water Authorities were privatised, because they have a duty to the public to provide water and deal with sewerage. It's just a question of who will buy the company and how much they will have to pay for it. And when. I can't imagine that it will have much of an effect on the delivery of the AMP programme because that is enforced by statutory requirements.
Anyway. My job is currently up for grabs, and if someone better than me (ha!) applies for it and gets it, I won't have to worry about that any more.
Goddamn it! Why is Drak still down?
I hate being ill. It makes me crabby and tetchy.
Thursday, January 17, 2002
13:10
Well, tai-chi last night was fab. I really, really enjoyed it (thank you Ailia for pointing me towards that one!) and will definitely be keeping it up. I knew how tight my joints. muscles etc are really, but last night really brought it home to me just how stiff I am and how much chronic tension there is in my body. I had no problems keeping up, despite having missed the first week of the class. Largely, I think, this was because I have done martial arts before and my penchant for the weird means I have fairly decent visualisation skills and some experience in energetic work. The bit I am finding difficult is the physical side - getting the stances right etc. My balance isn't terribly good, and I am very tight, and because I have one eye rather than two, my sense of self in my body is displaced across to the left, on the seeing side. This means I have a tendency to be unbalanced in the left-right direction. Closing my eyes doesn't help because I lost the eye at such an early age that displacement is very deeply ingrained. It's going to take "a lot of hard work" to get over that one. Frood, bless his little cotton socks, has offered to give me a hand. Lots of homework for me, I think!
Hmm. I espy movement on the Fairy Death page. Could the year-long silence possibly be broken? What news shall we hear from stealth assassination team (if, indeed, that's what they were)? Who is Big Cheese? Who is Mousetrap? What is Mousetrap peddling? And how much is it?
Wednesday, January 16, 2002
13:19
Oh my giant shaved hippy bum! I just found a place which lists places where you can buy Tank Girl stuff. Oh no! I'm in enough trouble because of the bike kit I buy! Curse ye, oh wasted lunch hour! And it mentions " Hewligan's Haircut" which I hadn't realised was a Jamie Hewlett effort. Suddenly Frood's fondness for it makes more sense. Must...not....look. Take...it....away. No. It has to be done. I have to know. Is there? Could there be? Can Google come up trumps for me again? No. Sigh. All those Deadline readers out there are only interested in Tank Girl. There are apparently no other fans of the girlie from Planet Swerve, or any of the other fine strips that appeared in that fine publication before it kicked up it's little legs like the infamous stroke goat and keeled over.
Once upon a time I had long hair. No, really I did. And every once in a while, because I love him so (awww), I would put my hair up in pigtails just for Frood, because he thought I looked like the girlie from Planet Swerve (for whom he had a bit of a thing, and probably still does). What was the name of that strip with the weird stream-of-consciousness rambling that went all round the edge of the page? You could always tell when someone was reading that one the bus because he would sit there, a deep crease of a puzzled frown on his face, turning the magazine round very slowly. Finally, having reached the end, he would sit back a bit, shake his head a little, do that eyebrow thing, and then carry on in a rather less distressed looking manner.
I really can't remember what that was called. I loved Deadline. I didn't love it just for Tank Girl (although I do love Tank Girl something rotten). I thought it was great. Such a shame it folded. Humph. I can't find any pages about that other favourite of mine, "Squalor", either, although I did find a lot of links to pages about dirty people.
Tuesday, January 15, 2002
19:50
Yay! I actually managed to get the links section updated!
13:31
I bought some books recently. I bought "The Norse Myths" by Kevin Crossley-Holland,  . I also bought "the Prose Edda" by Snorri Sturluson  and The Poetic Edda by Carolyne Larrington. I would really like a copy of The Kalevala, but that will have to wait, I think.
As you may be able to tell, I'm delving into Norse myths a bit right now. Some weird things are going on (like that's any news to anyone). I'm starting tai-chi tomorrow night, and I'm very excited. I was very lucky to find this class as it is a ten-week introductory course to see if you like the style before you can do anything more, and I just missed the first week. If I'd contacted the man any later than I would have had to wait until the next one. I'm back in the gym as well - only once a week at the moment, but I'm planning on increasing that. Unfortunately I seem to have developed a cold in the last 12 hours. I have a sore throat and I've gone all sniffly. That bloody rash has come back with a vengeance as well.
Still, I got the article done for White Dragon, and Rowan hasn't come back to me saying "What on Earth do you think you're doing sending me this crap?!" so presumably she is quite happy with it as filler material. I will put it up on this site somewhere, but it needs some more work, and rather more exploration of the memetic propagation idea. Of course, I'm currently working on several things for this site - the Site Damage Database needs updating (thanks to all those writing in - keep up the good work!), I am working on an entire new section to go under the bit about illness in Hippyshit, and there are some irons in the fire for ravenfamily as a whole, as well.
At some point I also want to redesign this page to include links to other blogs etc, because I don't like all my blogging links being stuck down in that article about weblogs. People can't be arsed to find them. Pluse, there are some additions to that list of links I'd like to make.
Not feeling too good with this cold. I shall probably go home early today, burn a bit of flexitime on the assumption that I shall make it up tomorrow because tai-chi doesn't start until 7 so I may as well work late. You never know, I might get some of those updates completed.
I have been having some very odd dreams of late. Last night I dreamt about a very large fish in a rather small fish tank and someone keeping a tank full of winkles and seaweed on a gravel bed. No, I don't really remember any more than that because I had to get up and get my head together to ride into work.
Did you read my rant yesterday about nasty car drivers? I have decided to get a copy of The Little Book of Calm, rather like Bill Bailey, and memorise some of it. Then, whenever some fractious moron has a go, I can beam beatifically at him and say stuff like "Remember. When you are in a tight spot, imagine that you are on a beautiful island with a wonderful sea, and wish yourself calm." That ought to confuse the buggers long enough for me to make a sharp exit, anyway. 
Life just feels odd right now. I sometimes get this very odd feeling, that no one, with very few exceptions really, actually gets it at all. I sometimes see people wandering through their lives with this sort of half-dead fish, glaekit, vacant expression on their faces and I get this weird sense of them as being empty, faceless and almost like automatons with no will or thoughts of their own. They are like ants, only worse, because ants do what they are supposed to and don't try to sue each other for what amounts to failing to prevent brain failure.
Oðin, Loki, Raven, this tai-chi lark, Chaos magic everywhere I look. I want to know what's going on. I also have this really strong sense of certain people coming together over the course of this year. My Solstice Divination was quite interesting, if expected, but it wasn't so much what the runes said as what they didn't say. It was the space around the cast that made me pay attention, not that which finally fell face up (so to speak).
Things are very odd. I wonder if there's supposed to be anything unusual about this year in particular.
Monday, January 14, 2002
10:47
I have done yet another piece of art.  "Defenestrated Crows" seems to be continuing my current spate of abstract images. I am delighted with this, for reasons I can't quite fathom. I mean, it's not exactly brilliant, but there's something about it... Having said that, when someone can win a prize for an empty room containing nothing more than a lighbulb going on and off, and can't even explain what it's about, then I think my art is at least worthy of a little web space. This picture sprang, fully-formed, into my head and came out more or less the way it looked in my mind. I'm not too sure how I feel about the increasing abstraction of my art. I used to do a lot of fantasy art, back when I had paints and crayons and, more to the point, large pads of A3 cartridge paper. This version here is quite small - click on the image to go look at the full size. Defenestrated Crows. That's not just artistic twaddle, but I don't feel like sharing the story behind the title. Not here. Not now, anyway.
Why does that piece please me so much? I think I may have to play with that later using filters.
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