Down Amongst The Yla

New Words: 1152
Total Words: 54075
Pages: 173

54,075 / 100,000 (54.1%)

Now that surprised me. I knew I'd done a fair bit, but almost double my usual amount was quite a surprise.

And, even better, I'm now further ahead than trinapink who is currently going backwards but for a legitimate reason...

Of course, when she gets back to actually writing she'll streak ahead of me, but I can gloat for the moment.

I'm off work tomorrow - I've got my second MCSE exam in the morning. I am planning on doing some writing in the afternoon, though, so we'll see how it goes.

I don't have much to write about today, I'm just vacillating before getting on with the MCSE - I'm just about to start the final third of the second module. Which should hopefully be complete by the middle to end of next week which can then mean that I can spend a couple of weeks revising and do the exam by the end of March. Which is about a month longer than I wanted to take on this one, but a hell of a lot better than the six months it took to do the first module.

Of course, if I spend all my time LJ'ing, I'll never get there, will I?

One of the things that I really like about writing here is the comments and replies that I get from people. So, thanks to SheWhoMust and Lowla Valentine for taking the time to show me that I'm not just writing for no reason here. Although writing is pretty much a reason in itself, like reading.

The last few weeks there has been one television programme that has made me switch on. I haven't been watching anything else - Candy was away last week and when she's away I tend to ignore the television. In fact, it seemed like every time I turned the Olympics on in the last fortnight it's been either bloody Curling or bloody Speed Skating. I managed to miss all of the ice skating, all of the skiing and all the bobsleigh/skeleton/luge stuff (I could have watched it, because my telly provider now has this marvellous Watch Again malarkey for the BBC, but I didn't). No. The only thing I have been watching religiously is Life On Mars. If you haven't seen it, or have the bad luck to live somewhere other than the UK (Well, I say bad luck but...) then you have really missed a treat. The basic premise is that a policeman from 2006 gets knocked over and wakes up in 1973. He doesn't know if he's hallucinating, dreaming or travelled in time. And it gets weirder from there - hearing voices of what's going on in hospital, visitations from the BBC Test Card girl and so on. It's been utterly brilliant and totally unmissable. The last episode of this series was last night (although I haven't seen it yet - I was watching last weeks episode) and I am not expecting any real expectations yet. There is, apparently, a three series storyline (which will be a total of 24 episodes - ironically, the same as an American series) and I intend seeing everyone of them. And maybe buying the DVD's as well.

Anyway, I suppose I'd better get on with my work.

My last entry on my LJ - which I guess kind of makes this an 'existing on life support Journal' if not quite a Dead Journal - was on July 20th. And it was a pretty piss poor one to go quiet on as well. Oh well, that's life.

I've been doing lots of work - not good work or interesting work or well paid work - but work, and work that didn't allow me any internet access at all - for the last few months. I'm not going to talk about it because it was just horrendously dull and absolutely bloody awful. On the plus side, it's finished now. On the minus side, this means that I am once again unemployed. This has not been a great year for the ol' finances. What with getting married, being forced to move and neither Candy nor I having particularly brilliantly paid jobs it's been kind of hard. But, it'll get better. And, when I finally finish my MCSE (which is going well now, thanks for asking. There was a hard point in September just after the move when I lost my motivation for about a month or so, but it's back now and I'm just about to do my first exam. If things go well the rest of the course should get done more quickly.)

SO, what are the good things that have happened? Well, Max just gets better and better every single day. He constantly comes up with new stuff that neither one of us know where it came from and he's really articulate and imaginative and inquisitive. (The latter can make it hard occasionally. When he's meant to be going to sleep he is an expert at delaying it by asking 'whassat?'at every little sound. Which made it interesting around November the Fifth, I can tell you...) Candy and I celebrated our 15th year of being together this last month, which was very nice. We had lots of friends around who all brought gorgeous food and bottles of stuff and we just had a great afternoon, going into a really pleasant evening just sitting around talking to shewhomust, durham_rambler and Chaz. Something I haven't done for far too long and really need to do again soon. (Which, considering I'll be going to see them this weekend, is going to happen soon! Yay!)

Oh, and I've discovered the BBC Radio Listen Again malarkey. It's great stuff, that allows you to listen again (as the title implies) to radio programmes for a week after they've been broadcast. And, considering Radio 7 does the Goons and I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue very week and there's a new series of Clue on Radio 4 and Radio 7 (again) have been broadcasting Doctor Who audios, things have been really pretty good on that front. Combining that with my MP3 player has been pretty much the only thing that's kept my sane(ish) whilst doing working. (I'm actually recording 'Galileo's Daughter' from Radio 7 as I type.)

So, there we go. I'm back on LJ. Dunno how often I'll update this thing. I'll try and be more regular whilst I'm unemployed but I don't know how long that will go on for - not too long, hopefully - and who knows what'll happen when I'm once again a non-dole scrounger.

I've just found out that I have got on the MCSE course. Which is a big hoorah type thing!