Month: February 2013

Ok, so I didn’t finish work as early as I could have today (see below for grr …) but I still managed to make it into town for a long delayed phone shopping run.

Grr ? I’d finished what I needed to get done today but knew full well that a colleague would be looking for some stuff for a meeting on Tuesday. I’m not in the office on Monday, so that means it had to get done today. Trouble is, he hadn’t asked for anything to be done … until 5 minutes before I’m looking to head out the door today. Good thing I can do that particular task in about 15 minutes where it would take ages to teach someone else to do it and then half a day to do it.

There’s a few things wrong with what he’s asked there :
Prep stuff for a meeting should be done well ahead of time. It means the attendees get a chance to read the info.
Last minute requests is Bad. Fella was lucky that I hadn’t gone home at half time, as is tradition on a Friday (I work longer in the week to make a 4.5 day week). He caught me by literally 5 minutes.

But that’s enough anti-colleague muttering. Things got done and he got his stuff for Tuesday.

What did I buy ?

I have a shiny new iPhone 5. And it is quite shiny indeed. To be honest, the flashy features are window dressing. A phone needs to reliably take and give calls and my Android phone was a distinct Fail at that. It had its (more than) occasional garbled call and yesterday it sent two calls straight to voicemail even though it was in a good signal area with plenty of battery.

That said, I’m not one to say no to toys and the iPhone definitely seems to have lots of those. It’s a v5 with 16GB, I didn’t think it was worth spending another £160 to get the 64GB version. In fact, due to procrastination and the unwillingness of the Mall 3 shop to do business, I’ve gotten it on the day that a £50 price cut happened. Yey me, yey for procrastination.

If you’re in the market for a smartphone and live near Bristol, there’s a darn cute little lady called Hannah who works in the 3 shop in Cabot Circus who saw me to my new toy. She gave me her name & number in the shop in case I needed help*, so I can’t have scared her too much.

*(I was tempted to ask her help in deciding what we’d have for lunch but I don’t think she’d have been able to escape work …)

How’d the upgrade experience go ?

Itunes 11 is horrific. I’ll just put that right out there. I heavily use a feature called iTunes DJ to randomize what I listen to, that feature is totally gone in iTunes 11, to be replaced by “Up Next”, which is garbage. So off I go back to iTunes 10.7. You need iTunes to run an iPhone. Thankfully, my library was still present in a pre-trashing backup.

The changeover from Android to iPhone is fairly easy, although I think that’s helped by the various service providers making all your data visible over the internet. Things like Google for contacts. I still don’t trust cloud stuff though and I definitely won’t be enabling iTunes Match. Once your stuff is Out There, you lose all control over it. What’s to say Apple won’t forage in your iTunes Match/Cloud for stuff they don’t have and sell what’s in there ?

Pretty happy with the new phone – I’m hoping for :

Easier to read – check : it’s a massive screen compared to the postage stamp sized one I had before.
Reliability – the increasing tendency to miss or break calls was why I decided to change
Resilience – the Android phone was horrible for crashing
Speed – everything newer is quicker

Apart from that … how’s Sleepy ?

Still a little numb, being balanced by my skin feeling a little less on fire. You know, I think I may have cracked it by being suspicious of the vitamin tablets. I’m seeing slow but steady improvement now, although there’s still lots of rough and tender areas. Back of my left knee is still horrible and I have to be very careful of a few other remaining bad bits.

But it does seem to be improving and I’m getting better at the discipline of leaving it alone to heal. Having the occasional work at home day like yesterday definitely helps as instead of scratchy-scratchy, I can attack the irritated bits with moisturizer.

Yeah – hopeful that it’ll continue to improve. My bum hasn’t felt this smooth for months 🙂 I’m not in a fit state to consider cricket yet but if it continues to improve ? Maybe 🙂

By the way – fit state for cricket means being able to wear the kit. Which means helmet and knee supports. At the moment, my knees aren’t in a fit state to wear those knee supports and I need those because my legs have more power than my knees can handle. Plus I have a nasty habit of stopping cricket balls with the part of my body that gets there first. Ball + Knee = Pain.

I’ll leave it there 🙂

PS One novelty – I can send music from the phone to my hifi via the Airplay protocol. Neat 🙂

Experiencing a bereavement can be very strange.

My nan died earlier in the week. Before you go “Awww Pete”, remember that it’s not me who’s died, it’s my nan. I know I’ll feel the loss at some point (I am already) but I’ll remember :

The old lady who’d get stuff for the grandkids, even though she couldn’t really afford it
How she was a couple of months ago
That the decline was very sudden
And that she’d had a long full 94 years

Any of us will be lucky to see even 90 years. She was tough as old boots my nan. We knew it was coming though, at Xmas I realised that 2012 was probably the last Xmas my nan would see. There’s a couple of things I wouldn’t wish on anybody :

Sudden loss. I have a very dear colleague who lost her dad in January, suddenly. And that was complicated by the weather conditions. So – sudden loss combined with not being able to close.
Long painful decline. I live with a certain amount of pain but it’s controllable. I have my mind still. What I wouldn’t wish on anyone is a long slow lingering decline. Better to bow out quickly but quietly.

We saw my nan again last weekend and there wasn’t much left there. Recognition that was before instant, would take many seconds and then blink away halfway through the “oh – that’s Pete” motion. And that’s when she’d recognise us.

The loss is affecting me – not in tears (I don’t cry much) but in a feeling of numbness. I’m trying to remember the good and attempting to shut out the bad. I’m picturing the lady who lived rather than the one who died. It’s about what we do along the way, not so much what happens at the end.

That said though, I’ll be quieter than usual for a little bit.

How about me ?

Oh boy – struggling again. I have a couple of things ganging up on me right now :

Muscle/skeleton stiffness. I almost gave up driving duties on the weekend because my neck decided it hated me. Could barely turn my head to the left. And that’s spread into my upper body. Ouch but manageable.

Skin. I think it is improving since I ditched the vitamin pills but that’s very slight and very slow and very prone to me damaging it. I’ll try getting back in to see the doctor soon for it. There’s areas of my skin which are now very sensitive, quite sore but also rather thin. If I poke the soreness, then I damage weak top layers. It’s not as bad as 3 months ago though …

Things are fairly tough at the moment for us living. There’s me with my skin, my dad has some internal medical issues that they’re figuring out and then there’s my mum … My mum needs an operation soon plus she’s also badly broken her elbow. She’s getting on with things but it’s a handicap. Hopefully she’ll get full use of the arm back.

Hopefully I’ll get the hardiness of my skin back before the summer.

Yep. Things are tough right now but – life goes on. We’ll remember those we lose as how we knew them best. That’s what I intend to do 🙂