in the lead up to Christmas a few people have asked me what I want and while I’ve made a list the truth is I have most of the things I want in life and if I really chose to I could have the others. sure there’s gadgets I’d like and I’d love a nice car but for everything else I’m sorted.

what percentage of people have a great job they find challenging and live, a nice house, a family they love, live surrounded by things they enjoy and are as hearty as oxen.

someone we know through the geek community died recently. he was my age. I never knew him that well but we interacted a fair few times and I knew his name instantly. his death affected me more than I realised, reminding me how lucky I am in so many ways.

Lots of planning on my part, trying to find a strategy to attack 2010 and turn things around. Not sure what I’ll be sharing here, a lot of personal stuff in there obviously.

There’s nothing substantially wrong, first off. That’s part of the thing…externalising what’s bugging me sounds so trivial to other people or just like I’m whining which in turn has a negative effect. So what I’ve probably been doing for 6 months or more is talking to no-one about anything and internally just counting down the days. I don’t mean that suicidally, I mean I am just plugging through life taking little joy out of most of it.

Work is very busy. More than very busy, I could work 12 hr days 6 days a week and still not get done everything that needs to be done. I’m a hard worker and I am pretty good at what I do, I remain firmly convinced that what is asked of me in my role is more than any single human could effectively deliver. For obvious reasons I’m not going to go into the specifics here but a lot of it is stuff that is challenging, the sort of things that as a manager you deal with only a few times in a whole career and I happen to have a whole bunch of it happening at once.

Home is home. Again it’s generally good but there’s things which aren’t, some major and some minor…but the sum total being that it’s not exactly what I want and I can’t see the path from where I am to where I need to be.

Friends…well let’s not even go there.

I’m trying to put a brave face on it as they say…and I wouldn’t say I’m depressed, in that I’m not actually allowing myself time to think about any of this stuff.so I’m not sat in my room being emo and listening to sad music. But I would say my life is worse than it was 3 yrs ago…in fact Lucas is a bloody godsend. If like was as it is today but without the happiness he brings then I really wouldn’t be coping with life full-stop. And in my heart of hearts I don’t think that’s how life should be. I think as the years go by you should achieve more and more and be happy to look back at the good and bad and forward to all the good you know is coming.

2009 hasn’t had the lows of 2006/7 but it’s not had the good stuff either.

I’m not 2 months from 2010 now, which somehow feels significant and somehow I need to turn this around. If I don’t think I will either live out the rest of my life in this sub-par state or I’ll do something radical and ultimately fruitless.

So what’s the plan? I don’t know…watch this space.

Anyway today was the day and so at noon I strolled out past security and into the loving err car of Ang (who looked quite fab) and Lucas (who looked quite surprised to see me).

We went to the pub with the butcher’s counter and I bottled having a “choose your cut” steak as they looked mucho expensive and my wallet is still trying to recover from London. But the steak that I did have was very good indeed.

After lunch we went to a little park near work in the glorious sunshine and picked conkers…just the most idyllic way to spend a lunch hour. Can’t begin to say how much it meant to me. I was beaming for the rest of the afternoon even through tough meetings and the fact that I didn’t get out till 7pm again.

Normall I like to plan things to the nth degree but for whatever reason this just didn’t want to come together and at the start of the week we had absolutely nothing set in stone. But I managed to start piecing together some social stuff and made a list of things I thought Lucas and Ang might enjoy.

We ended up staying in Hammersmith. Whilst it’s not glamourous i had the distinct advantage of being somewhere I know well and cost about half what a hotel in ventral London would have cost me and has pretty good transport links. Plus it meant I could drive up and even with a £50 parking bill the travel was cheaper than the train!

Thursday we went to the natural hisotry and science museums. Lucas loved seeing dinosaurs and all of the stuffed animals in the NHM and then we found all the cool kids stuff in the science museum where he had an absolute whale of a time. I got such a massive kick out of sharing and encouraging his enthusiasm for things like engineering and dinos. Actually speaking of his enthusiasm he had his first train journey on the tube which could have been a disaster as he doesn’t like loud noises but he was absolutely fine, in fact he had a great big smile on his face for most of he journey. He grasped the idea o stations and having to stay to the right on escalators really quickly.

He got a little freaked by the animatronic t-Rex in the nhm but then that shows he has good survival instincts. He still managed to talk to all sorts o dead animals as he went

That evening we met ang’s mate Kate in piccadilly circus and went to the rainforest cafe for dinner. This is a kid themed restaurant chain thing…the food was ok, bit it was huffing expensive and while they made a nice fuss of Lucas I don’t think it was really worth it. The company was good though and Lucas opened up to Kate and had a lot of furn.

By the time we got back to the hotel it was about 10pm which in Lucas terms is very very late indeed but he stayed in pretty good mood and settled down into tr sofa bed and went straight to sleep and slept all the way through till 8 the next morning when I woke him up…this was good as Ang was panicking he’d have the door open and be wandering the halls of the novotel. Plus he didn’t empty the mini bar, which is good.

The next morning was intended to be a real treat for Lucas. We headed to Covent garden and after a breakfast in patisserie valerie we hit the transport museum. Lucas’s eyes popped out of his head when he saw a poster of a bus…imagine his surprise when here were half a dozen real buses waiting for him to play on. He absolutely loved this place, he ran about like a madman playing on the buses and just beside himself with happiness. Between this and the museums the day before this should be a time he will remember for a long while…and hearing him recount his adventures to his granny to goth I reckon I’m right.

We met Babs for lunch. I haven’t seen her since my aol leaving do and she’s only seen Lucas once so it was a real treat. We shared lunch and then she came with us to the London eye before leaving us to continue our transport adventures as we boarded a Thames clipper boat to the o2, this is a great way to travel the thames it’s cheap and you get to see all the sights, Ang hadn’t been on them before and it was Lucas’s first boat trip…lots of firsts.

The o2 wasn’t a destination as such, it jut gave us. Chance to hop offhe boat and look around the “big tent”. Then it was back on the boat to embankment and then off to find a lebanese restaurant I had been to whilst away at work.

Ang absolutely loved the place, so kudos to me. We had a mezze platter and after ordering the larger one for two people (intending to share between the three of us) the waitress talked us into the smaller one. After it arrived I was glad she did, we finishehd what I thought was the meal she then informed us that was just the starters!

A quick taxi ride got us back for an early night during which Lucas disappeared from his bed only to be found happily asleep on the floor next to it.

Saturday we checked out and wen to borough Market, neither of us had been there before and as has become our tradition we had travel issues in London at he weekend, but we got there in the end and it was foodie heaven for Ang.

We met Jim and Amanda who again we’ve not seen for ages. Amanda has lost a huge amount of weight and looks amazing.

We had lunch and Lucas whilst a little shy eventually made friends with their daughter Becky.

And then just about soon enough the weekend was over.

Don’t get me wrong, Lucas was a little shit at times bit all in all it was even better than I had hoped for.

I think I mentioned a while ago that I was trying to follow a rule of not posting whiny nonsense…I’ve also not posted for a while. I don’t think it takes a Poirotesque level of deductive reasoning to work out where I’m coming from.

I’ve got a couple of weeks off work and I’m hoping that the chance to recharge my batteries will help things in that respect.

Tomorrow is Lucas’s first day at pre-school. He’ll be going two afternoons a week until January when hopefully he’ll be going two days a week. I won’t bang on about how time is flying by, but it is.

Work, work, work, work, work, work, work…repeat ad infinitum. I’ve worked harder than this in the past but not very often and not for such sustained periods. The last three days I’d been in meetings from before 9am till 6pm with no time for breaks of even lunch. Not trying to play the world’s smallest violin it just helps explain why my life has such singular focus at the moment.

Situation wasn’t helped by finding my own job advertised on jobserve, whilst I assumed someone was testing something (which was proven correct) there was a momentary flash of WTF and all of my department have decided that my days are numbered…which is an interesting little dynamic to manage.

I cannot stress how much I need my holiday in September, it may take me most of the two weeks to decompress and get my brain to relax. Unfortunately I have the feeling that I’ll be getting lots of calls and may get called back in.

Umm not much else to report. I’m selling a bunch of trades, oh and my old wedding ring from my beta-test marriage. The latter is more cause I’m just curious about what it’s worth than any expectation that I’ll make my fortune )

Stubbornness got me to the gym this evening, so I’ve not missed a session even though it meant I didn’t leave the site till gone 7pm. Cause of my mood (if the world had balls then I’d kick it in them) I gave it the full whack and topped things off with some visualisation on the punchbag…my left hand is none too happy but I can report that my spinning backfist is still a thing of beauty.

Lucas starts pre-school in about 10 days…that’s just insane.

Having attacked the garden a little yesterday we nipped to B&Q to check out the shed selection (which was poor), then we went for a drive and I took Ang to a place called Saltford Locks…which funnily enough is a lock on the Kennet & Avon canal in Saltford, which is between Brizzle and Bath.

As it happened there was a canal boat coming through the Lock at the time and we all watched it progress, and even helped open the lock gates to let it out…which Ang was absolutely smitten by. Pictures over at my Flickr.

This avo we pootled around the house a little, tackled the laundry pile…it’s almost down to nothing (which is unheard of) and I picked a bunch of plums from the tree in the garden and some blackberries.

Managed to pick out about 50 trade paperbacks to sell, the money from which will go to the car/driveway fund. Speaking of which I spent a fun 30 mins finding out the wheelbase of a variety of cars to try and work them into the plan.

Also bullied my parents into having a meal to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary…it’s the same day as our BBQ and they were being very self-effacing and saying that we shouldn’t trouble ourselves, but trouble is my middle name!