Fast Forward Button

I remember being told when I was younger that time moves faster the older you get. I ridiculed this in a typically naive and childlike manner. How could time move any quicker or slower? Time was time. It was the same at all times. Except at school, of course. At school it could d-r-a-g. But looking back, it didn't really, did it?

It's been nearly 80 days since I last wrote on here. I thought it had been no more than half that. That's how fast time is moving. It feels like someone has accidentally pressed the fast forward button on the remote and everyone is speaking and moving 2x the normal speed. Somehow, it's nearly May already, the football stickers for the summer tournament are out and I even saw the muppets who will be 'singing' for the UK at bloody Eurovision on TV the other day. 

The beauty of Project 9626 was that the targets I set out for the year were very easy to break down and gradually tick off individual milestones. I wouldn't say I've struggled for motivation this year, but the things I am looking to do are far more open ended which can make progress feel much slower. 

But perhaps it isn't.

On Tuesday this week I will have had my braces on for TWO MONTHS. 

This is big news in the world of BQ. Due to the mashed up nature of my teeth, I had to have one removed to allow space for the others to move in to. This was not pleasant and meant I had a gap about 5mm which is obviously nothing, but when it is in your mouth it is EVERYTHING. The gap is getting smaller and my teeth are definitely moving, so that's good news. On Friday I am having the wire changed which my dentist has booked an hour appointment in for. Yay.

It's not the greatest image at all (and I'm pretty sure the image has been flipped...) but things are moving. Four months more worth of movement until I have a Hollywood smile.

As an aside, turns out the tooth fairy doesn't come to 26 year olds. 

Fuming.

Something that wasn't planned for this year was to get another new job. But sometimes opportunities come up that are impossible to turn down. So in the words of John Lennon in one of the more tolerable songs of the season... 'So this is Christmas... (but-on-a-permanent-contract-not-just-for-six-months)'.

My new job is sort of my old job but I'm really looking forward to starting again. In an ideal world I wouldn't have left the Christmas team back in January but I've had a good four months in the Opticians team where I've been lucky enough to work on a few really big, exciting campaigns (Zookeeper Zoe is amazing by the way) and it was great to get an opportunity to work in a different part of the business.

And who wouldn't want to be planning Christmas in the summer?

(Honestly, it's exciting really).

The merry road to Berlin is going pretty well, a solid run at the Reading half a few weeks ago and a quick 10k in Derby over the weekend. I've got one more half in June and then it is all eyes towards the 26.2 miles that I've somehow got to drag myself through in September. In March I ran a 15 miler in two hours which lessened the panic somewhat, and watching Eddie Izzard's utterly ridiculous Sport Relief challenge on TV the other day has helped to put it all in to perspective.

Also, I'm eating a shit load of jaffa cakes and chocolate at the moment to balance off the amount I'm running so that is a-ok with me.

I have admittedly sucked at the whole moving out research thing so far. I am saving money but working out what I want to do has fallen to the side a wee bit. Before the next entry I will find out what all this help to buy spiel actually means, as well as how much an iron, ironing board and other super cool stuff is going to set me back. Yes sir.

One thing I have surprised myself with is churning out 3577 words of the pipe dream that is #BookBQ! I'll give it to Paula Hawkins, writing is a little harder than I thought. But I'm pretty certain the first 3577 words of my story are better than the first 3577 words of The Girl on the Train.

I've got until the end of May to get up to 10,000 words and then I will enter this competition if it is good enough.

So that's that, a bit of an update. 

Oh, and if anyone stumbles upon a Thomas Müller football sticker I'll give you a quid. 

Cheers!

Volume Two

Not quite sure how it's happened, but it's February.

Since the should-have-been-award-winning Project 9626 drew to a close on 27th December, lots has happened. I spent five days watching the cricket in the shadow of Table Mountain in 35'c sunshine (essentially paradise), I witnessed the greatest, most spellbinding individual innings from an Englishman in decades (if not ever), I met a seven foot lion and I bagged an empty seat next to me on the flight home.

It's been good.

January has flown by since I landed back at Heathrow on Friday the 8th... the new job started which is full of new-job-challenges but going ok, I've eaten a ton of Top Deck Cadburys chocolate (for the life of me, why don't they sell this in the UK?), read a few books and made a huge decision that effects how 2016 is going to shape up.

The original plan for the year was to move out and get a place of my own in Nottingham. I looked on the usual Rightmove, Zoopla worlds and didn't get very far. I think I suffered from having too set expectations with what I wanted. Annnnnyway, after a check up visit to the dentist last week, I decided to put on hold the whole moving out thing and instead fix my teeth. Long time fans of Project 9626 will remember the disagreement my teeth had with a cricket ball 18 months ago.

Whilst I was essentially the luckiest guy in the world not to not lose all my teeth/an eye, my teeth took a hell of a whack, knocking one out and several out of place. On the face of things, you probably wouldn't notice. But I'm very aware. So I've decided to get them sorted out! Thankfully this can be done in six months without making me look like I've got mouth full of metal. Which is nice.

The flip side of staying at home and getting nice teeth before moving out is that I have a bit more time on my hands to do it right. At this point, I know nothing about moving. I had assumed renting a flat was the best plan, but perhaps I should look at buying somewhere relatively cheap and go about improving it with a view to getting on to the ladder? Who knows! I'm going to do some readin' and some learnin' and find out what is possible. Despite knowing absolutely nothing about it, I *think* I will find it interesting.

I'm definitely going to start watching Location, Location, Location, Location at the very least.

This will be one of the things I plan to write about on Working Title 14... the fear inducing, yet quite exciting prospect of moving out.

(FYI - Working Title 14 might be a holding title, it might turn in to something else. It's all in the early stages again. I didn't want to just rinse and repeat Project 9626 with four more targets for 2016, I wanted to do something a bit more long term. I was always quite very surprised by how well Project 9626 went down, and it's a medium by which I can actually get shit done - which in the procrastination central that is my life generally, that is good.)

So things will come and go.

One thing that I wish would come and go very quickly is the terrifying prospect of 26.2 miles in Berlin.

This is going to be a massive challenge. I ran 7 miles on Saturday and it was t-o-u-g-h. Only a further 19 miles on top of that. At this point, I don't know how I'm going to be able to do it, other than wearing rollerblades and strapping myself to the back of the pace car. 

I must remember though, that I am lucky enough to be part of the British Heart Foundation's 'Heart Runners' team. A healthy dose of perspective is always welcome, and that is exactly how I am positioning this. Hopefully it'll motivate me to somehow run for 4 hours on the day, and countless more in the build up to it. I plan to raise £1,000 for the charity which will make it all very worth while indeed. 

I'm also going to eat and drink like a KING in the weeks following it, so roll bloody on September the 26th!

Another thing I'd really like to do (and writing it down means I pretty much have to do it) is the super clichéd dream of writing a book! I've been thinking about it for a while now, I've even written down some actual thoughts... and when you read books like 'The Girl on the Train' and see it hailed as the best-psychological-thriller-story-book-best-ever-ever*... well, it's difficult to think I could produce something worse.

(*the biggest crock of shit I've ever read)

So we'll see how that goes. 

And we'll see how the whole Working Title 14 shebang goes on the whole. Read it, don't read it, I don't mind. Although if you've got this far, thank you. Hopefully it'll flow in a similar vein to Project 9626 and prove to be a half decent read and I'll get some stuff done.

Adios.