Today has been SUCH a long day.
A whole second longer than yesterday.
No wonder I’m so tired.
The shortest day is done. Summer is on the way*.
* T&Cs apply.
Exhausting
Stranger Clock
The first thing you need to know is that I have been watching Stranger Things with my daughter over the last week or so. We’re getting through a couple of episodes each evening. She’s completely engaged, and I’m actually quite enjoying it too, which is probably the strangest thing about the whole situation.
The second thing you need to know is that I was given a clock for Father’s Day. One like this:
It’s chunky, about 40cm x 15cm, and it is the perfect clock for the little gym thing we’ve got going on in the granny flat down the garden.
However…
Having mounted it on the wall earlier in the week, and then watched a particularly gory episode of Stranger Things, when I sent the beagle out to do its thing before bedtime, it was somewhat disconcerting to see this sort of eerie, ethereal red glow emanating from the bottom of the garden.
It took a moment to understand what was going on, but then I quickly realised that it was just the light from the new clock.
Right?
Deadline
I am SOOOOO ready to get back to playing football again. Tuesday nights are a bit of a nightmare Chez 6000, so while I’m not playing, I’m doing my level best to help out with taking kids to various places. That way, when I can play once again, and I can’t take kids to places, we can at least look back over the year and note that I did take some of the kids to some places at least some of the time.
The only thing holding me back now is this bloody calf, which sadly, I do need to chat to a Physio about. Medical expenses can like to be absolutely ridiculous this year. Not quite one hour at the cardiologist cost over R4000, but as was pointed out, that’s a tiny fraction of what an actual cardio incident might cost, and that’s a reassuring way to look at it.
The calf is a weird one. I can do everything except run. I can walk up huge hills at 6kph. I can walk for 10km around the neighbourhood. I can use a stepping machine. I can do a cardio session. No issue.
But 20 seconds into a gentle jog (ok, it was a bit longer here, but…) and we’re back to square one. And downhills are worse than uphills, which makes me wonder if the calf actually knows what it’s doing.
I read this article which told me I was getting old, but did have an interesting link to L5/S1 lower back trouble (which I’ve had since I was 16) in elite athletes (which I’ve been all my life). Just weird that it’s never manifested itself in my calf until now, but I guess that’s where the age bit comes in. If “the science” is to be believed, that is. [rolleyes emoji]
But it needs to get sorted and it needs to get sorted before 19th July, which is the last Tuesday before the anniversary of my Covid infection. And I am determined not to let this keep me out for over a year. Whatever it takes to be on that pitch, I will be there.
Because like I say, everything else is ready to go: I haven’t been this fit since… well… just before I got Covid. Whether I can ever get back to that level, I don’t know, but there’s no harm in trying and hoping.
So I’m very ready to get this one little thing mended now and get going again.
I… I have no words.
Thanks to the work of the Ramsey Bay Over Saturation Society and their insistence on pumping up the Lightroom sliders to unbelievable levels, we’re now all painfully aware of the #RBOSS phenomenon.
Using software to make shots look better than they actually were is fine. Of course it is. It’s when you go WAAAYYY over the top that it gets silly and ugly and then when you have the audacity to suggest on social media that “it came out of the camera like that”, well, then we’re really heading way down the road of RBOSS wankerdom.
It’s just deceitful karma-harvesting and it pisses me (and a lot of other people) off.
Quite reasonably.
I’m talking about stuff like this, this and this. It even spread to Bergen, which really doesn’t need assistance in looking good in photos.
But all of that (literally) pales into insignificance with what I saw on a Sheffield Facebook group this morning. Because… I mean… even when a sunset is spectacular, you can’t claim that it looked… that it looked… like this:
What in the ever living fishcake has happened here?
This isn’t “Tonight’s sunset over the village” as the protagonist claims. This (I think) used to be Aston on the border of Sheffield. But this isn’t a sunset. This is the actual star crashing into our planet. This is thermonuclear detonation. Billions of megatons of raw explosive power blasting out streams of plasmatic energy across the rolling hills of South Yorkshire. Every atom right across the Western sky exploding in perfect synchronicity, creating an ultra-electromagnetic shockwave that instantly kills everything in its path.
And it’s not helped by comments such as “Absolutely gorgeous!!! [several heart emojis]” or “breathtaking!”. The only breath that’s being taken here is your final one as the blast of hyper-energy – having melted your eyeballs in a nanosecond – sucks the very last molecules of oxygen from your lungs, leaving merely a smouldering pile of desiccated remnants where you once stood.
What makes it impossibly worse is that this guy sells images from his drone. It’s his business. He wants you to pay for this kind of thing. Money. Real money.
To be honest, this is beyond RBOSS. No-one could have known that the technology to over-saturate to these sort of levels even existed. We simply didn’t think it would ever be possible, but this guy has unashamedly gone multi-Sharples.
End times are upon us.
Look at me
A lovely Father’s Day morning, followed by a trip to the drop-off area at the local airport to get Mrs 6000 onto her first of eight flights over the next week and a half as she jetted off to Joburg to catch a real plane. And suddenly, it’s just me and the kids. And therefore, by a process of elimination…
(If you don’t count the kids.) (And the beagle, of course.)
Already, I have been tapped up by my son who is now going out with his mates this evening.
Real life continues here, with Dodgeball training, guitar lessons and horse-riding continuing as normal, and so we will live vicariously through the photos and stories from overseas for the next 10 days.
Safe travels, sweetie!