2009

This is the day.
So, 2009 has been quite good to me. Nothing really bad has happened, a few wins, a few losses, some frights and some hopes. Nothing really good has happened neither. I have been focused on my job, and even though I have encountered some worrying issues, all went well.

• Family

My brother has a second daughter I haven't seen yet.

My goddaughter walks and swims, starts to speak but no one knows which language. She plays ball and pesters cats. I have seen her once. Time to foster her musical talent ;-)

My father has been diagnosed with cancer, has been adequately treated, or so it seems. His neurological status is clear, as far as Parkinson and other niceties are concerned.
I guess that now that he is "fully" retired, with nothing more than the family business and "cultural" councils to attend, he must find life a tad boring. Of course, spending his days at home with my mother does not help ;-)

My mother is being herself: fastidious and anxious, the winning combo.

• Friends

The Archi is engaged, sort of, plans to move on a town house "with a garden for the cat". I guess that keeping a country house for the afore-mentioned cat wasn't that practical after all ;-)
He has also decided not to eat out with me any longer. Given our track record, this is a wise decision too ;-)

Mr N is busy busy these days. Everything is going well for him. Hard work do pay ;-)
We no longer go to watch films together. My "no pay for parking" policy combined with his culinary tastes and our busy schedules have brought these escapades to an end. Now we eat out to talk and trade gossips. It is going fine.

Mr G is busy busy busy, as if he could live his life in any other way ;-) We meet occasionally, and it is always a pleasure. We do not jump any more. But we should.

The Pickle has a lot on her plate. She gave me much, too much perhaps. I like her a lot, and she is the closest to my ideal woman. I still haven't figured out what I should be doing about her, besides the obvious. One day, we will be running in synch ;-)

Miss S is now living in Canada, engaged, and provided me with some valuable insight before leaving. We are back to our annual email exchange ;-)

Miss Q is in London, having fun before her next jump. Cat woman ahoy ;-)

Mrs A, well, I guess that we are still friends. So everyone seems to believe anyway. I have heard about her here and there. She seems to be doing fine. Were it not the case I would have heard of her.

• Jobs

No new clients, three employees went away, two came in, and I am looking for a third one.

Most people took the economical crisis badly, and started to behave like headless chickens. More than usual I mean ;-) I am at my best in chaos anyway, so let's enjoy the mess they are making ;-) But I guess that I will not last long, so I should really prepare for the end of it. I am getting tired of what I am doing anyway, so I guess that I will have to reinvent myself one more time. I'll tackle that in my 2010 post.

I have been short-listed for promotion. I still have some exams to pass though.

A big client haven't paid me since August. I have noticed that a few days ago, so I guess that I am doing OK ;-)

• Home

My living space is still more an office than a home. It is still ideally situated, and is the place I want to live in.
I wanted to buy it, then I had a long talk with my mother. As usual, she made me aware of a few things. Like the worrying fact that I am more at ease in hotel rooms than in a place I can call mine. That I should work less from home. There is a link there ;-) So, I didn't buy it after all. And I won't till I am clear with myself on these points.

As to my other home by the sea, well, I didn't went there as much as I would have liked.

• Me

I am growing, even though I haven't learned much this year.
I have taken the habit of doing some exercise while watching DVDs. I am not reading as much as I once did. And I am no longer writing.
I try to go for a walk in the woods as often as I can, I find it relaxing. I should really make an habit of it, take the time to do it more regularly.
I have quitted smoking for a few months. Then I have quitted quitting. Now I am aiming for less casual smoking habits. So I am smoking cigars.
My meetings with the Pickle are probably the best things that have happened to me ;-)

Christmas...

... the time of the year when you are supposed to feel guilty when you acknowledge that you are living mostly for yourself ;-)
As if you could live for someone else...

To avoid this, you usually bring gifts and presents, as to atone for our greed. Greed is good ;-)
In more than one way actually :-)

Blow me not!

Well, let me assume my own contradictions.

The first good thing is that I finally know when my turbo kicks in.

The second good thing is that I had completely forgotten how nice and peaceful the woods are when it is snowing.

Blow me!

Yeah!
Snow!
Traffic jams!
Car accidents!
Dumb pedestrians crossing the street with you honking like a mad monkey because you just cannot stop!
Even dumber cyclists taking one way streets the other way while you are trying to stay on it, veering from port to starboard like a drunk yachtsman looking for a buoy!
Total loss Beemers drivers blocking streets!
Drunk postmen and failed courier deliveries!

TEH JOYZ!!!

Well, it is home working for me.
Time to enjoy life's simple pleasures, like staying in my office cum library cum storage hall cum dump cum lab cum apartment, in my boxer shorts, on my couch, optimizing queries on my TV, the occasional balls scratching, cigar, Oreo and hot milk.

This is the life :-)

Or so it should have been.
All was fine and dandy until I started being involved in twenty or so different email threads about business matters with other home workers in four languages, one of them I do not understand ; phone calls about operational matters with people I had no idea which tongue they were speaking in, or what they were speaking of ; and, of course, the usual end of year paper work everyone takes for granted you will take care of while you are slouching at home.

Snow: better when blown.

Guess who...

Yesterday I spent yet another evening with the Pickle. She definitely gets even better each time we meet. Hours without odd blanks, it is quite a performance ;-)

Meeting Miss LD

I have a new neighbour since July or so. She rapidly gained a reputation as a big time psycho bitch. I met her briefly once or twice, and never really had the opportunity to make my own opinion. I grant everyone the benefit of the doubt and I do not usually believe the rumour mill, so I was not appalled but very amused when I was told of her antics. To be completely honest I should also say that I also tend to like queer fish. Let's just say that my purely subjective opinion on the girl based on just hearsay was warily positive.

Last Tuesday, I was happily working from home when someone knocked at my door.
Knocked. Not ringed the conspicuous door bell.
My door. Like just close to where I am sitting, not the lobby.
I was on the phone at that time, so I just shouted that I was not available.
A call, then a another one, then some urgent work, and an hour later I had completely forgotten the incident. I went out to find a note on my door. The writing was chaotic, the meaning absent, it looked like something written by a neurotic parkinsonian high on drugs. From what I had been told, I guessed who it came from. So I returned the favour and went to her door.
She let me in. She was in the process of painting doors, before her birthday party scheduled a few hours later. After having apologised for the mess, she immediately complained about noises. Strange noises coming from "the outside". At first, I didn't heard a thing. Then I did.
Is psychosis contagious? No.
Not usually.
So I looked. It took me the better part of an hour to make her understand that it came from her toilet, a few more time to get her to open the thing, a second for me to nudge the floater. And then... the silence.

My own curiosity made me loose two hours, ruin a coat on paint, "fix" a toilet, listen to some mad ramblings that were not that mad, and meet the psycho.
Not a bad encounter: she is quite nice, in her own strange way ;-)

An afternoon with Miss D.

I met Miss D yesterday for the first time. We exchanged a few emails last week, and scheduled a meeting at a train station. From her emails, I thought that she had been around for a few months at most. I was wrong. And so was most of what I had planned. But we went on revisiting places we both knew, and it gave us the opportunity to acquaint ourselves with our respective tastes. She is definitely into classical-kitsch. She is also a go-getter, which is nice. She lives a full life, which is also nice. And she can talk about it for hours, which is good but a tad tiring. It also turns out that we have quite a few things in common. In fact, the strange thing being that we hadn't met elsewhere before.
The big turn on for me is that we laugh of the same things and share the same kind of humour, which is infrequent.

Big hint: "I never win but professionally.".

Let's try some of my own medicine, and "evaluate on an external scale".
- She looks like the Pickle would, were she blond.
- She has a lot in common with Miss Q in the way she leads her life, with less uncertainties and a bit more stability.
- She reminds me a lot of Mrs. NV: a very similar face and the same gaudy sense of style.
Let's keep it at that: it is starting to look like a comparative cars review.

All in all she seems to be a nice person, but she is not someone I feel attracted too. It is not a physical thing, just her horrible taste. It is funny, for few hours. And unbearable for a few days. I am getting picky in my old age I guess ;-)
Anyway, now that we know of each other we will meet again for sure.
As acquaintances, friends maybe.

Un remède à la mélancolie

Well, two of them actually.







And this gem (my everlasting thanks to Mr. N whose musical taste shines proudly among my own private constellation of odd luminaries ;-).

Strangelove

The people fighting against abortion once had a stroke of genius: they labelled their action "pro life".
How universal.
How noble
Who could be against life itself?
Abortion rights supporters became the de facto PRO DEATH faction. Bad PR ;-)
Well, they decided to fight back, found something more palatable, and named their faction "pro choice". It put a nice spin to it, and it kind of became my litmus test for imbecility. Life and death are pretty simple, on/off, binary concepts, while choice is a question far greater and more complex.
One is an irresponsible oversimplification designed to polarize public opinion, the other is a hard fundamental question that may lead us to inconvenient imperatives.
Guess which is which ;-)

So, when my friends the econazis came up with nice polished marketing slogans like carbon neutral and pro environment, they kind of reminded me of the disturbed retards brandishing foetuses in jars over their head while howling inane slogans you can see demonstrating in front of clinics, right before they decided to bomb the place and kill the staff, all in the name of life, of course.
Nobody is against the environment. To be honest, I suspect that most people do not care and that there are not that many people who are truly concerned about it. But who can say he is against it? Someone with a little bit of honesty may very well say that humanity has made an habit of modifying its environment, that these very modifications made our world and our lives what they currently are. So we literally built our own world to make it agreeable to us, and this is progress. It gave us sapience, science, culture and all of their side effects, good ans bad. Now the same science that we have cherished for so long is telling us that we may have been over indulgent and overlooked some dire consequences. You can doubt science. Hell, you must. This is what it is for.
Correlation is not causation (a lesson the current economic crisis should have made clear to all), most of the effects of the current global warming have been measured for a very short time, and most people do not understand the science anyway. I mean, the chances are good that you, like most people, do not intimately understand why your feet are on the ground. You can answer "gravity", but you cannot explain it, still another empty word covering a very concrete fact. And we are talking about a theory exposed at least three centuries ago. So better not start talking about how some strange gases are behaving in the upper atmosphere and take a leap of faith: the earth is warming, and humanity is doing it.

Or not.
To be honest, I couldn't care less, because it is utterly irrelevant.
What is relevant is that, for the first time since we have won the Third World War, we have a new enemy. Global warming, true or false, is a waking call for us to rediscover a commonality of purpose, a goal and a drive toward progress. So, even if we do not understand it, even if we do not believe in it, let's at least pretend. Better still, take the worst case scenario for granted: there is nothing we can do, the seas will rise, the raging sun will bath all life in lethal radiations, we will start glowing and soon after we will all die (in atrocious pain, of course). We are utterly doomed.
So what?
We were all doomed before. It is not the first time this is happening to us. We have lived for fifty years under threat of nuclear Armageddon, and we are still here to talk about it, brag about it, even regret the time.
So we do as we already did. We find a way out. A way to reverse thing, or adapt ourselves, or adapt our environment or a combination of all that. And we do it fast.
Our present economy is based upon fossil fuel. There is no quick and easy way out of it. Then we better use our dwindling resources carefully and efficiently. We collaborate, communicate, share; organize ourselves.
Find solutions. Fight the circumstances. Haul our methane farting asses out of the stinking pit.

There is nothing like a common enemy to get things moving in the right direction, so let's all be PRO DOOM and enjoy it while we still can :-)

The great unwashed 2

"Women...
Twenty years later, they are all old, tired, petty and dumb.
(waits a few secs, lost in thought)
No, not dumb, not my wife.
Shrewd is the word."

Obsessing

Still another Pickle post.

I have been busy obsessing about the Pickle these last few days. While she isn't usually far out of my mind, it is getting a tad worrying recently. Eventually, it got me thinking. And, as it is natural for an obsession, I went back to old trains of thought and found out that I hadn't followed some of them to the end. I do not assume that I have broken the circle, but I have found some answers.

There was the why questions. Why her, and why am I am not following up. Well, it seems that the answers are linked.
The Pickle is quite different from the persons I am usually attracted to and who are attracted by me. It is quite difficult to say which is which in this case.
When I look at the three women I have been able to live with, they are as far as the Pickle as it can be.
- Mrs A and I had a great competition going on. She rides and shoots better than me, has a nonsensical and rational approach to everything. The friendly emulation was a turn on.
- Miss S is nerdier than me. She even used to keep cue cards about what she wanted to do in bed and documented them afterwards. Even I do not do that.
- Miss Q is a mechanical engineer working as an IT expert in a legal firm. Enough said...
They all have a background in engineering. They are all public tomboys and closet girls, so to speak.
The Pickle is the woman who gets the closest to my ideal notion of what a woman should be that I have found. Of course, I used the word "ideal", which means that it is a very subjective notion and not immune to some self deception. But, anyway, not only does she looks, feel, smells and taste right, she also behaves, moves and talks as she should without it being an act.

So, I am stuck with my own self reinforcing idealisation. I guess that, being my very own construct, I am somehow reluctant to put it to the test and risk breaking it.
Which is exactly what I should be doing.

The great unwashed

The Horde is back, I am besieged.

- "I got sinusoid. It is a pain."
- "Right, you think it gets better then it gets worse."

- "I had to go to the bathroom to laugh."
- "Most peculiar, anatomically speaking."

Rinse and repeat

My father was out of the hospital on Wednesday the 2nd, and back again on Friday. Nothing serious, but still, one wonders why he was allowed to get out when everyone agrees that he should have stayed...

Anyway, if grumpy mood is a symptom of good health, he is ready for a marathon ;-)