Tag Archives: pensive

Dad. Nearly Two Years On.

Posted on by

0

It’s that time of year where everything feels a little bit sadder and less colourful. It’s nearly two years since my Dad has passed. I’m in Tenerife on the actual day, so I thought I’d write a bit on here before I go away, just to get it all out in the open and perhaps to make me feel a little bit better.

I can’t quite believe it’s been two years, but sometimes a ‘Bad Dad’ day is a lot heavier and you really can feel every second that it’s been two years.

What I have noticed, this year in particular, is my awareness of time and how it’s sped up around this time of year. January was his (and my brother’s) birthday. February flew like I don’t know what hit it because I was so engrossed in work. March has been much of the same. And we’re back to April again, with Mum’s birthday and my birthday quickly approaching.

I’ve noticed how my mood has changed in this past week leading up to it. I have cried and sobbed and wept at things I wouldn’t usually. I have been feeling down, I have been extremely quiet and I have been very thoughtful. I’ve felt guilty about enjoying myself recently and will fall into lulls of being sad and down again.

I think these are two massive things that you perhaps don’t realise on the first ‘anniversary’ of someone’s passing, but you are definitely more aware of on the second.

I am very lucky in that my support circle is still here (… the majority of it anyway) and I often talk about Dad with my Mum and Jay, as well as people in the pub. But it’s still those looming questions of ’what would he think of me now?’ and ‘would he be proud?’ and that’s not a cue for people to go, ‘hey, he would be proud of you, don’t think like that, you’re awesome‘, because no one knows that for sure, do they? I still worry about my brother, but he’s 21 and pretends he doesn’t have feelings. We don’t talk about Dad so much, which I don’t like.

I have donated my £50 to Cancer Research for this day of remembrance and in memory of my Dad and how much I miss him. And I will think of him when I’m away on holiday. Just like I think of him every other day when I’m at home.

Swimming the Channel #2

Posted on by

0

I feel like I haven’t written here for a while, so I suppose it’s best to do so. Not much has really been happening, but it’s good to offload some of the random thoughts in your head, right?

I got my new car on Friday! Hooray! It’s so girly and I love it! I will post some photos up when I get a chance to take some. I’ve been fairly busy these past few days… well, busy and hungover.

I have been drinking quite a lot in the pub recently. I wouldn’t say I was an alcoholic, but defo a glorified binge drinker! I don’t like how it makes me feel the next day and it even ruined my weekend this weekend – I was meant to go to Jay’s granddad’s 80th, but I was so poorly, I couldn’t even look at the television screen for hurting my eyes.

It will be a year since Dad died next week. I honestly feel like rubbish when I think about it. I think, because I’m very conscious of when the date is, my emotions are all the more heightened. I cried twice today: once when I couldn’t open my door and had to drive to Mum’s, the second when I’d finally got in my house. It may have something to do with me, feeling so tired. I’m not sleeping very well and I’m having the weirdest of dreams. I woke up in the middle of the night which is rare for me, as I sleep through anything. I don’t know. I think it’s going to be a difficult week.

I’m going training tonight for my swim and I’m going to swim the mile 5 minutes faster than what I did before. I trained once last week and my recovery period took two days. Two days. I must learn to recover faster, particularly as I won’t have the two days in between swims to recover. This week, my aim is to swim tonight and tomorrow night and I would like both miles to be under 45 minutes. If I’m feeling alright, I might even have time to do another on Wednesday, but I don’t want to push it. Even after my first swim, I’d aggravated an old swimming injury in my right shoulder, which seems to be fine now. I don’t think my brother is actually serious about doing it, which is fine. I came up with the idea, I don’t mind doing it on my own and I’ve already raised £380.00. Please donate if you haven’t already here. Seriously, every penny counts. And even more so, as more and more people become affected by cancer. If not directly, I’m sure you’ll have known someone who’s had cancer, survived cancer, had a cancer scare or died from it, so why not put something towards it to try and prevent it?

I’m at work and I’m taking bookings for our next course which starts in May. I’ve booked two people on so far. Hooray. We need, roughly, 200 people more to enrol onto our course to meet targets. Fingers crossed, eh? I figure I need to market some more. If you know of any new mums in Essex who might be interested in swimming, please forward them to me :)

Anyways, that’s all for now! I’ll write again soon.

This week.

Posted on by

0

This week has been a complete write off. I wish it wasn’t. Stupid illness. The doctor said it was probably a virus, so she hasn’t given me a big ass pill that I wanted to make me better. She has advised me to drink lots of fluids and rest a lot. The slow and boring way to get better.

I hate being home all day when I know I’m meant to be at work. I slept in til about 11 (see, doctor? Plenty of rest!) but I had a productive day yesterday, pottering about the house. I mounted my CD wall tiles (see picture), I had a go at nPower, I did some washing… I even unloaded the dishwasher in the hope that we’d load the dishwasher last night with our dirty plates. We didn’t.

And I just remembered I didn’t put the rubbish out for the rubbish men this morning. Rubbish.

I ordered new bed sheets as well. I’m becoming very housewifey. I’m trying to get our house in order in my own little way, kinda making it homely-er. Honestly, I could spend a fortune in Next home furnishings and I’m dying to go to Ikea. It’s terrible.

I’ve ordered pictures of me and Jay to be printed for the photo frame that I’ve bought. We have no photos in the house at the moment. We have a canvas of my old dogs as puppies, which was another of my projects – that will also be finished.

I’m going on a mission! I’m going to ask my cousin to come and finish of some of the (patchy) painting around my house. Jay and I weren’t really cut out to be painters. I need an electrician to sort out some of our light fixings. I need to get someone else to install a Sky eye thing onto the TV in our bedroom. Things that have just been hanging for too long really. Especially because we’ve been there for about a year and a half now.

I don’t really know what’s brought this all on. I think if Dad was still here, he’d be going mad that we hadn’t sorted more of it out than what we have done.

Alfred was surprisingly good yesterday. He must’ve known I was ill. He’s in his own little violin trio thing now, as the music band version of the Tamagotchi goes… I don’t know what it means, but he’s never hungry or unhappy, so I’m a good Tamagotchi player!

I’ve been at work today and I’ve had a really productive day here too. I’ve laminated all these NOPs and EAPs (lifeguards, you know what I’m talking about!) for all of our pools that we use. That’s the huge disadvantage about working with pools. Everything has to be laminated. I suppose it beats all the bloody shredding I had to do as a receptionist. And I see instant results, which is fairly rewarding. The rest of the time, it’s just waiting for emails to come in. There haven’t been any emails for about an hour now.

Oh, I took on an enrolment today as well. It’s probably the last of the term, because we’re on week three next week, so they’ve missed the vital bits in weeks one and two. So the next term is in May and it’s nearly time to start marketing out of my ears for that. I can’t believe how quickly this year seems to be going. Mind you, we are only just on the third month of the year, so it’s not going all that quickly. It’s not as if it’s August already or anything.

Speaking of August. Really ecstatically happy with the V Festival line up this year. We always get our tickets as Early Bird tickets, so I’ve not been on hold all day to try and get some. Down side? Not camping. But I think it’ll be okay. The weekend is kind of what you make of it. And we’ll probably just go back to our’s, have a shower and a good night’s sleep (and a few drinks!) and it’ll be really good. A grown up version of V Festival, perhaps.

Gutted that Rihanna is headlining as I have already bought tickets to see her in October. But I will be taking my Mum and it’ll be better than the hour set that she’ll have at V Festival. Concerts are better than festivals. I think so, anyways. But I will never give up my V Festival weekend!

Well, it’s not August. It’s March. So this weekend, what am I doing? I’m lifeguarding some baby swimming lessons on Saturday. I don’t know what I’m doing Saturday night now. My almighty plan for Sunday has now been ruined, due to being ill and not being prepared for what I was doing. I’m a bit gutted about that, but what can you do?

I know I won’t be going swimming. Stupid swimming pool, giving me a virus.

That’s all, folks!

Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind

Posted on by

0

Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind is one of my fav films. If you haven’t seen it, you should.  I won’t spoil it, but the basic plot is as follows. Skip it if you like.

SPOILER: It’s about a guy called Joel (Jim Carrey) who falls in love with a girl called Clementine (Kate Winslet), but they have a really messy break up and she decides to get the memory of him erased. When he finds out she did this, he does it too, but realises half way through that he doesn’t want to erase the memory of her. END SPOILER.

The following is a quote by Alexander Pope, which was recited by Kirsten Dunst’s character during the film:

“How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each prayer accepted, and each wish resigned.”

And another by Friedrich Nietzche:

“Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better even of their blunders.”

I like this one better. I like quotes that make you think.

"And tonight, Matthew, I’m going to be…"

Posted on by

0

I’ve been planning this post all morning on the train, over my breakfast at Starbucks, reading Stylist magazine (who’s headline was “Are you being paid enough?”) and on my walk over the bridge. Have you ever wanted to be someone else? It’s not like I imagine it all the time, just sometimes I wonder what it’s like being Lady Ga Ga for an hour (because I think that’s all I’d be able to take of her crazy lifestyle and outfits!) or someone in the office for a day, or even someone on the other side of the world for a week!

What got me to thinking about all of this is (funnily enough) work. At the moment, it’s all a bit crazy in the office. But surely, there’s some sort of perspective to be thought about. I’m very lucky to have a job and I appreciate that, because if I didn’t have a job, I’d be going to the Job Centre every day to look for one, and that wouldn’t be much of a life. That is my perspective, however I’ve not really lived a day like that, because I was lucky enough to fall into jobs straight from uni.

If I was to be someone else in the office today, I might be more or less stressed than I am already. Probably even more stressed though.

I have a perspective that I’m lucky to be in this job than to be an operations manager of my old pool, and I empathise with the current operations managers who are struggling there and looking for a way out.

There are some cases that I don’t need perspective. For example, I wouldn’t jump out of a plane for a living because I prefer my feet safely on the ground! But there’s just some more things that I need to clarify.

But then again, perspective comes from experience. And I suppose, at 23 and most of my life in education, I haven’t had a lot of that. When speaking to boyfriend’s dad about this, it’s completely crazy that our society has changed so much, in that his generation would go straight to work at 15 or 16, but most of my generation come out to work in their early 20s! And I suppose that brings the whole “education vs. experience” debate full circle. I would prefer more experience, but would that be because I had the education? Inevitably, I imagine someone who has the experience, would eventually need the education. And it may be a case of wanting what you didn’t have.

But I suppose in this ‘current economic climate’, it’s not doing anyone the world of good, because the experiencers want to get the experience first, but the educationers are graduating (maybe even trying to take a short cut to the inevitable) and not getting jobs.

It’s a tough situation. But then you have to look at this year’s A level results as well. Some people who got A*s throughout their A levels weren’t offered a place at university, so have been forced to experience first – which is maybe something they didn’t want to do. And it makes me question what will happen next year with those, perhaps re-applying, and those others who have just done their A levels? It will continue to be a knock on effect!

When planning this blog, I didn’t think it’d go this way.. Perspective is a crazy thing.