Sleepypete's Pillow

‘You posses many spiritual gifts, including the ability to heal.’

Get your starry ass over here and HEAL ME!!

cq

🙂

Saw this on CQ’s blog and couldn’t resist …

You Are The Star

You represent the ultimate in truth and purity. Insightful and illuminating, you provide guidance for others. You also demonstrate unselfish, unconditional love. You posses many spiritual gifts, including the ability to heal. Your fortune: Your future is looking brighter by the day. The near future will be a time of both hope and healing. Luck is about to come your way, perhaps the best luck you have ever seen. Life is about to get a lot easier and much better!

That’s with just “Pete” though. With “Sleepypete” I come out as the High Priestess – mystery and secrets yet to be revealed. I think I prefer the Star :-), although that’s partly because of the luck bit. Thing about luck though, if you tempt Fate, she’ll bite you on the bum. So I’ll keep my head down there.

Gotta admit, I’m a bit of a strategy buff.

I like to win. And winning can be done either by being bigger, faster or stronger than the other guy or having a better technique. Because I’ll only get bigger if I’m fat and strength is out because of how injury prone I am, I either have to go for speed or the better technique. I have the speed, or I will do when I get down to nearer 12 stone. I got recorded at 11.5 seconds for 100 metres once, when I was 16. Which isn’t too bad. I’ve learned better running technique as well as an appreciation for spiked shoes since then.

Nope. If I’m to win, it has to be through better technique or a smarter strategy. I like devising strategy, I seem to be rather good at it. Although I’ve not wanted to run a team for a while, I’ve had decent results when I have been a team captain, including some wins when we had no business winning … I’ve also punched above my weight with sports like karting, where you have to be light to go fast. I couldn’t quite put up the times to match our regular karter, but I did get his respect. And our team of 4 got a trophy too 🙂

So what’s the twist ? I suppose you could say that one twist is that I’d like to be the best I can be at whatever I want to do. I firmly believe anyone can do that, although the physical stuff may be a little beyond me.

Another twist comes from what I’ve just been watching – highlights of the Volvo Ocean Race. Yacht racing doesn’t just involve strategy against the other people in the race, it involves getting the best out of the weather. And that really does interest me … Knowing what you can get out of the boat and knowing how far you can or should push it. Several of the Volvo competitors (most of ’em!) have fallen foul of pushing things too far, breaking their boat. But if you don’t push it … you come second because the other guy is pushing harder. And I like to win.

I’ve never been sailing … And would love to. I’ve never had the opportunity but I’ve got a lot of respect for what I see on programmes like the Volvo Ocean Race highlights, as well as getting an appreciation for it from accounts in several fiction books I’ve read. Plus there’s Philip, who joined the place I work at the same time I did. Philip took part in the Sydney Hobart yacht race a few years ago. He’s gone through another few jobs since though … Will have to try and find some proper fact type books about sailing.

What I’ve always said though, is that you never know a thing unless you’ve tried it … and sailing is something I’d dearly like to try.

Game tonight 🙂

Was having a bit of trepidation about this one because we’ve got some history between us. The Drifters are a good side who are very interested in winning … And they have the side to win the league too. I’d originally dropped out of tonight’s game due to a bad back picked up in the cold in Glasgow last week but got back in due to several people dropping out.

We bowled first and didn’t do quite as spectacularly in the field as in the last game. I got two wickets from behind the stumps, a caught and a stumping but should have had at least one more stumping. Ho hum. My bowling was dangerous in the wrong way too. I have good days and bad days with my bowling. My shoulder feels mechanically sound but it tightens up in just the wrong place for accurate bowling. I probably need an hour or two of net bowling every week for a couple of months to get my action back in the groove. My back survived the game though 🙂 Not so sure if I’ll be saying that tomorrow though.

Anyway – before I digressed, The Drifters batted first and put 132 on the board, which is a good score. Not unbeatable but challenging to most teams. Too challenging for us ! They had good bowling, which we couldn’t really get on top of (literally!) and we got restricted to just 44, with our last pairing putting up a negative score.

We did play well though and enjoyed the game. If you can’t win, that’s what you have to do. We didn’t disgrace ourselves, despite the one sided scoreline. Play hard but recognise that sometimes you come up against a team that’s simply better than yours.

Had me dinner, currently watching Sky Captain. Great film 🙂 Well worth watching again.

Superbowl’s about to kick off – how long will I last …

Unknown but I’ll definitely try to make it to half time :-). Highly surprised by Scotland beating the French earlier, big turn up for the bookies. Only saw about half of it because I was watching the cricket highlights on Sky. I didn’t want to watch the Scots get a drubbing.

It’s been a good weekend for my main World of Warcraft character – she got new boots and a new belt … Darn good stuff too. The second best gear in the game. Needed to earn it though, which we definitely did by having a record breaking run through the Molten Core. We did it the quickest we’ve ever done it, with only 2 bosses causing problems for the group. The rest went down easy.

We’re definitely getting better at this. We’re not totally there yet as we still have people dying when they don’t need to and people not pulling their weight as much as others. But getting through the whole of the massive Molten Core instance in 2 sessions means that enough people are pulling their weight for our group to be incredibly effective.

Doh ! Superbowl just kicked off and I’m missing it … More tomorrow 🙂 I might have a match report – if someone drops out. I put myself to first reserve because my back didn’t appreciate the Scotland trip last week.

Just come back from the Mall …

I wasn’t really looking to spend any money, I was just trying to figure out how to stay awake !!! The launch day on Wednesday took a little more out of me than I’d like to admit I think. Plus, my back definitely didn’t appreciate the cold. If I’d come home, I’d have most likely plopped my head down on the pillow and slept ’till morning …. Which would have been a bad idea, seeing as I’m supposed to be inside a dragon’s lair in an hour.

Lots of pictures got exchanged at work today, which was fun. I wonder why they all tend to congregate at my desk when they’re looking at the pictures though … It’s not as bad as it could be, as my boss and his boss were two of the main people looking at pictures and keeping me away from the work I was supposed to be doing :-).

I may get published as well … My blog entry from Wednesday, with a few minor alterations, is going to get passed on to the Works’ newspaper. We’ll see if they put it in. Just remember – you saw it here first …

I’ve been a bit let down by my previous credit card company.

The first thing they did was to break their original promises by reducing the 0.5% (potentially 1%) cashback rate down to 0.25%. Bit irritated by that but shrugged and didn’t think it was worth changing just for that.

The reason they have let me down is Chip & Pin. Without a Chip & Pin card, I won’t be able to use the card in shops come 14th Feb. Which makes having a credit card pretty pointless. I prodded them about a month ago on this but have still not got the card. Makes me wonder whether they do actually want my business … My bank on the other hand, have given me a Chip & Pin card.

Ah well – byebye one credit card, hello to the new one :-). I’ll be hanging on to the old one until it’s time for the last year’s cashback to appear, then it’s gone. Now it’s time to tell off the bank for making it awkward to change a mortgage.

Up at 5am, up to Scotland for the launching of a ship. Currently writing this entry at 7.20 pm waiting in the airport for the flight back.

There’s been two very significant ladies in my life for the past few years and it was the turn of the faithful one to have her moment today.

It’s strange how an object you called ‘it’ suddenly takes on her own life as soon as you see her move on her own. (kinda) It was a very proud moment for me earlier, seeing Lady Daring go down the ramp. In fact I’m still rather emotional about it now, several hours later.

For this particular lady, I’ve invested 6 years of my life so far and she’s worth every second. I’ve put in heart and soul and, although I’ve only set foot on parts of her twice, I feel as if I know every inch of her from bow to stern. Seeing her there today, made her into something rather more real. Being able to see the sheer scale of Lady Daring was quite frankly, awe inspiring. There is a definite sense of strength there, she looks ‘the business’. And she hasn’t even reached her full height yet … I’m rather looking forward to the near future when she’s completed.

There were a heap of friends from the team there today, with the shared excitement making the moment even more special. The best thing about my project team is the people and how we come together and pull for each other. It’s one reason why I’ve stayed with the team for so long. I even managed to catch a fleeting glance at Miss L as she made her way to Lady Daring to take her launch station. I hope to have a few decent long range pictures too.

In fact, lots of pictures :-). What an amazing day !

Yep, my baby will soon be hitting the water.

Not sure if I’ll be able to post a picture though, as it will give information that would let people guess the occupation of my blogmates who wouldn’t want that ! I will be taking pictures though, will have to see if I can get a postable one.

Ok. What am I going to be getting up to. Gotta go to bed early tonight to let me get out of the house at as close to 5am tomorrow as I can manage. Then it’s a 7.10am flight up to Glasgow, followed by figuring out things to do between landing and the launch. They want us at the yard around 12pm, with launch happening at 2.25pm. We’re hoping that an event labelled “hitting the other side” won’t be scheduled for 2.26pm. Then we hit the pub and head back to the airport at around 6ish.

Should be a fun day out but going to bed at 10pm (ish) will be highly weird.

Addon – think the laptop needs a better name than Minibox. Will have to peek in Godzilla lore for something that could resemble a faithful, but slow partner.

Cos the laptop works extremely well, it just can’t do graphics and the cpu isn’t as quick.