Medium-term Malaise?

Is there a condition that is somewhere between covid and Long Covid? I only ask because my brain is still completely fogged and frazzled, even though my body feels better and my breathing is back to normal. I know it sounds like I'm making excuses for not posting more often (and maybe I am) but this really is a little concerning. I keep forgetting what I'm doing, every task seems to take longer and be harder to complete and any question I'm asked seems to baffle me.
I mean, it could be a touch of depression, as that would fit the symptoms too. Or early onset dementia, but I'm trying not to think about that one too much.

I suppose I should give myself a little credit at this point and remind myself that I am continuing to function and continuing to get work done. It's not like I'm just sitting at my desk with my head in my hands, complaining about the state of my body and asking everyone to leave me alone.

I'm just finding everything very, very difficult and very, very tiring.

RC 27-9-23

Poem from a Place of Insomnia

My life can be a roadblock

a cul-de-sac of woe

I may not find the movement

when I know the way to go

 

I sit too long and ponder

I overthink my life

I cut my way through trouble

like an oversharpened knife

 

I gather broken people

and I wear them like a crown

I blame myself for all their pain

and let them drag me down

 

I fail at work and love affairs

I squander every chance

I barrel through the wilderness

and trip in every dance

 

But at least my life is being lived

with stories I can tell

I may misstep along the way

But Sod It.. What the Hell....

RC 24-9-23

Brief. Strange. To the point.

Life is weird.
That's all I have to say right now.

RC 23-9-23

Here before you know it

I'm tired because I'm spending all my time at work trying to put together this year's half-term Hallowe'en Haunting Extravaganza (or whatever we'll end up calling it). It was partly my idea in the first place to try and put on events for external visitors all year round, so I can't complain about the extra workload, but after the Summer we just had and the trip to the South-East and the coronavirus I do feel like I would like a calm couple of weeks to just recharge and reset myself. But no, the busy world of Gavin-led Holiday Centre family fun and games is a nonstop one, and I have acts to book, decorations to locate and unpack, and various Autumnal sugary treats to get ordered.
Speaking of sugary treats, I tried something today called 'blonde chocolate'. I can't give you too much information because I just sampled a couple of squares, and I didn't see the packaging, so I don't know if the 'blonde' comes from a particular manufacturing process, or whether it is targeted at a certain hair colour, but all I can tell you is it tasted bloody odd. Like badly made white chocolate with a hint of coffee and a half-arsed futile attempt to make it taste like a Biscoff biscuit. Slightly caramelly, slightly marmitey and altogether rather unpleasant. I won't be ordering any in to coat our 'apples on strings' stand, I'll be sticking with good old Dairy Milk, thank you very much.
And if you're not familiar with what I mean by 'apples on strings' - you make a hole through a tasty apple and pass a length of string through it, and then hang them from a suspended clothes line. You coat the apples with melted chocolate and then the idea is kids come along and have to try to eat the coated apple off the string without using their hands.
Pretty tricky, and all very silly, but what is a Hallowe'en party for if not trickiness and silliness?

RC 21-9-23

Four months today is my birthday

I seem to have forgotten how to write properly. Several times over the past week or so I have sat down to try and post something interesting, long and exciting and failed miserably. I've deleted more words than I've saved, I've lost my train of thought more often than the Uruguayans lose rugby matches, and I seem to be unable to, well... you know....
This is why I need a monthly challenge - to give me something to centre my focus on and be thinking about on a daily basis. Or maybe this is why I need to avoid daily challenges - by spending July and August concentrating on achieving certain goals I have got myself out of the habit of writing normally. But then, the early part of September seemed to be going ok, it's just the last week or so that has really tripped me up.
Maybe I have Long Covid.
Or maybe I'm just lazy.

RC 20-9-23

Beyond my understanding

Wednesday's formatting went to shit because I typed it up at work and posted it from there (and because I am terrible at this stuff, even though I've been blogging on the same site for 16 years. You would have thought I'd have learnt more by now, but no...).
I've tried to look into it since, but didn't get very far, and then suddenly realised I couldn't be arsed to try any harder. It really doesn't matter what things look like as long as you can read my words. So from now on I'll just keep on posting, and if blogger changes their look and that changes the way my blogs appear, so be it. I'm not going to let it bother me. (Until the next time that I do...)

RC 18-9-23

Hissing tyres and Listing films, etc

 

The Marvellous Mazda - 'The New Beast' as I believe we christened it back in the Spring -

picked up a slow puncture today, which I can't complain about too much as it's the first problem I've had with it since we bought it months ago, and it's not really a problem with the car itself, it's a problem with the state of the roads in Suffolk.
Anyway... I digress... I decided to fight against my usual apathy/procrastinationism/despair and get it sorted straight away, so I popped into a tyre place on my lunch break and they very kindly got it sorted while I was waiting.

And while I was waiting, I decided to write a couple of 'Lists' (as I have been quite neglectful of them in recent times).

So...

 

OSCAR WINNING FILMS OF THE 70S RANKED IN ORDER OF MY PERSONAL PREFERENCE (TODAY):

 1 - The Sting

 2 - The Godfather

 3 - Annie Hall

 4 - The Godfather, Part 2

 5 - One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest

 6 - Rocky

 7 - The Deer Hunter

 8 - The French Connection

 9 - Kramer vs Kramer

10 - Patton

 

THINGS I AM LOOKING FORWARD TO THIS WINTER:

 1 - The fact that we won't have Winter weather until March, as our seasons are totally f**ked, so it should be nice for the next few months.

 2 - Rian's first Christmas!

 3 - Mathew's birthday. He gets more understanding of what they mean every year, and therefore more excited.

 4 - Work being quieter.

 5 - Bonfire Night!

 6 - The Winter holiday (probably in February) that I am damn well going to insist we have early in 2024.

 

FOODS AND DRINKS THAT I WAS REALLY CRAVING WHILE WAITING 20 MINUTES FOR MY CAR:

 1 - A large grilled mushroom with blue cheese melted on it.

 2 - Tizer.

 3 - A full Sunday roast, preferably with gammon and cauliflower cheese.

 4 - Malibu and pineapple.

 5 - A Bounty ice cream.

RC 13-9-23

O about O

You know I occasionally get a little bit obsessed about something and spend a lot of time researching it and learning about it and writing about it, before slowly losing interest and moving on to something else? (see Drumming, Magic, Harmonicas, Bible lore, etc etc)
That's been more under control since having this job, I think, because I'm so busy and just don't have the time to indulge my little idiosyncrasies so much. Especially when you factor in parenthood too!
But I may be about to disappear down a new rabbit hole of information and fact-finding...
I finally got to see the film "Oppenheimer" yesterday, on one of its last showings at our nearest (which isn't that near, really) cinemas. I really, really enjoyed it. I had my reservations because I do find Christopher Nolan's style of filmmaking a bit annoying. I'm sure I must have bored you with this before, but since 'Inception' - which was one of my favourite films of the early part of the 21st Century - I think he's just retread the same road with his visuals and soundtracks and I was finding it a bit tedious. So I was really pleasantly surprised by this! Yes, he did a lot of his usual directing trickery and same-old shots, but they really seemed to work. And yes, the film is far too long, and the constant jumping between timelines and viewpoints (another Nolan trope) gets a bit confusing and unnecessarily intrusive, but I still think it may be my favourite new film I've watched this year! (And don't get too carried away - I have seen a disappointingly low number of movies so far in '23).
Anyway, the point I was TRYING to get to, is that I had forgotten just how much I know about the Manhattan Project, and how fascinating the whole thing is. I remember seeing a TV movie - from the 80s I think - that basically told the same story. It was called "Shadow Makers" in the UK and starred Dwight Schultz from The A-Team as Oppenheimer, and Paul Newman as General Groves. I recorded it and watched it dozens of times. A young John Cusack was in there somewhere, too, I recall. I just loved it. But I was at school at the time and studying for exams and didn't really look into it as much as I would have liked to.
But now...
Oh, man, has my interest been stirred again! I've already found dozens of documentaries online, dating from the 1960s right up until this year. There are countless books, biographies and articles; there are audio dramas and playscripts; BBC Sounds has hours of old Radio 4 interviews and investigations; and it's hard to turn on the TV now without finding some old programme being played somewhere as a way for the channel to cash in on the current wave of interest from the movie. And I am right in there, surfing that wave with a smile on my face and an excited heartbeat.
I may not surface again until January!

RC 12-9-23

The Heat Hasn't Helped

I'm still feeling pretty knackered post-Covid. People keep saying this is a really nasty strain that makes you feel awful and keeps you in bed for days. I wouldn't say that was true with me, but I certainly don't remember feeling this tired when I had it before. Everything just seems to take forever and seems to exhaust me. I had to drive between sites yesterday and I had such an urge to stop the car in a layby and have a kip.

Gavin is not happy with my decision to stay in Suffolk rather than relocate to Devon (or Dorset; I'm still not entirely sure which it is) and keeps trying to persuade me to have a rethink. I assured him I had given it a lot of thought, and explained my reasoning, but he just seems to have it locked in his head that this would be the best solution for everyone concerned, and seems convinced that all he has to do is convince me of that and then all will be well. I keep telling him to move on from me and start advertising the position locally down there, but he seems determined to keep pushing me, as if there is some magic phrase he can come up with that will change my mind and push me Southwards.
Maybe it's a control thing.

And no suitable blog-related challenge seems to have materialised yet, so I'm thinking that maybe I just keep writing 'normally' for the rest of September, and then try and come up with something to test myself with next month...

RC 10-9-23

Quick change of mind

Yeah, I very rapidly talked myself out of even considering a move to Devon.
The whole point of taking on this house was because we got fed up constantly moving around when we were house-sitting. I've got a very good job that I enjoy immensely, that I have got better at over the past couple of years, (with confident expectations that I'll get even better at it), and that I am comfortable at, which is the first time in my life I've really been able to say that. Philippa has a good job at a good surgery, and is now doing a course to become a sports massage therapist, with people in this area already lining up to use her once she's qualified. My sisters are both in the adjoining county, so we get to see them fairly often, and the bottom line is that we love the area here and feel very, very blessed to live in the house we do, in the village that we do. So why entertain the thought of moving about as far West from here as it's possible to go?
I haven't had the discussion with Gavin yet, because I'd like him to think I've given it more consideration than I actually have, but yeah - I'll be politely declining his offer.

RC 6-9-23

Unexpected, Unnecessary, Unsure

Gavin decided this afternoon was a good time for he and I to have a sit-down meeting and 'catch up with a few things'. Mostly, those 'things' seemed to be him trying to convince me to move to Devon to permanently take on the running of his place down there. I felt my heart sink a little as soon as he started talking about it. You might remember that he tried to get me to relocate that way when he first took it on, and I'm sure you remember that I was down there a few weeks ago, after the general manager had to be 'let go'.
I get the impression that he got very excited about buying it and having the opportunity to turn it around, but now the reality of having to put the work in for a couple of years has come home to him, he is regretting the purchase and hoping to fob it off on someone else. He really is a strange character at times. Brilliant, in his own way, and you can't question how successful he has made things with his empire here in Suffolk, but he occasionally gets a bee in his bonnet that won't stop buzzing, and no matter how many people tell him to calm down and think things through again, he'll just plough on like a bull in a china shop and try to force his own will on the world through sheer effort. And then he has to deal with the consequences. Or - more regularly - those around him do; myself included.
So, anyway, he hit me with the full 'everyone down there thinks you're wonderful' spiel about my five-day stay last month, and he wants me to seriously consider taking up the reins to run it all full-time. I said it would be a hell of a decision to take, with two young children, and a wife with her own career, and he just said he'd do everything he could to make it an easy transition, and that 'obviously' the financial package would take the upheaval into account.
I politely said I would think about it, even though I had no real inclination to do so. But the weird thing is - maybe the timing would be pretty good for this kind of thing right now. We could find Mathew a good school to start at, before he gets settled at another one. Rian is easy enough to transport and wouldn't even remember the move. And Philippa is looking to change her career, and maybe a move would provoke that to happen sooner? I mean, I know she is literally about to start her course that involves a three-month commitment, but maybe Gavin could make do without me until January? Philippa will hopefully then be fully qualified... We'll have had another nice family Christmas here... It would give us the rest of 2023 to sort out schooling and accommodation... It's fun to think about, right?

RC 5-9-23

A jumbled mix from a jumbled mind

 There is already a different atmosphere onsite at work. Most schools reopen this week so we're not full of families who have travelled to the coast to enjoy their last chance of a Summer break. There's more middle-aged couples and retired people and less screaming infants and overfed youngsters.
It seems amazing to me that this has happened so quickly. I swear it's only a week ago we were recruiting extra staff for the holiday season and upping our orders of slushie mix. Now suddenly we're watching things get quieter and starting to think about Autumn maintenance programmes.
I do love this time of year though. We tend to get people who are here because they like the area and they tend to look after themselves and find themselves things to do, so we're not having to go mad every day trying to keep people occupied with fun activities and family-friendly events. We'll still be close to full capacity right through til the October half-term, but it somehow feels quieter and slower. And that is very, very nice indeed. I do enjoy this job immensely, but the six-week spell of mid-July to early-September is completely different and so, so tiring. But it's okay to have to deal with that if it means I get 46 weeks of more manageable enjoyment for the rest of the year. And I'm learning, year by year, how to mentally prepare myself for the Summer bit so that it doesn't exhaust me and affect my overall contentment with my position. I'm starting to see that spell as a separate, different job that I take on as part of my other duties, and for this year, that job is very nearly over.

RC 4-9-23

Uncertain, but thankfully un-covid-ed

Feels weird to not be embarking on a blog posting that has to be exactly 200 words in length. It also feels weird to be embarking on a new month of entries without having set myself a challenge to try and achieve. I'm hoping that, in the course of spewing my thoughts onto the virtual page today, an idea may surface that I can latch onto and accept as my goal for the next 30 days or so. But I can't say for sure that will happen.
Limericks, maybe?
I suppose I could try and post them at a different time each day, and try to cover every hour in the day? So - I post this one at midnight, then the next one at 1am the next day, and so on and so forth and see if I can throw down 24 posts that stick to that over the course of September?
No, sorry - that seems like far too much work. Not being lazy or uncommitted, but that would involve alarms and reminders and dedication and insomnia risks and could easily be scuppered by outside influences. I just don't know what Rian's sleep patterns will be, or how my own occasional nocturnal unsettledness will behave, so it feels like taking a chance. It also feels a bit boring, if I'm honest. I've enjoyed challenges that dictate the content and structure of the postings themselves, and that's what I'd like to continue with.
I shall keep thinking.....

RC 3-8-23