Saturday 16th August!
Now that exclamation mark above makes me feel I'm presenting myself here as being bright and alert, all that sort of thing, when frankly the exact opposite is true - yep, another night shift takes it's evil toll of me!
Still, that's the last of them until next week - tomorrow I'm off over for a little Sunday lunch with the family, which will get me out of bed pretty well bright and early, so that might get me back onto a normal sleeping track. That'll be just about in time for my next night shift I reckon!
Still one positive thing about doing night shifts at the moment is the grand opportunity it's given me for watching the Olympics streaming on the Beebs website. Flicks off at the touch of a button if a call comes in, yet it keeps you bright and awake when they don't. I think I've seen just about every swimming heat that you could possibly want to see - enough to suggest that swimming is having difficulties attracting people from the ethnic minorities anyhow. And dear God, at about what, 4.30, 5 am this morning I was watching what I think was a 100m heat for women, which had a British entrant in it, and the poor girl was wearing one of those bikini style running get ups. She's running in the full harsh sunlight of the Birds Nest Stadium, and for an appallingly long period of time the camera seemed to focus on this poor kids stomach muscles. Nothing wrong there, she had the requisite musculature and all that, but the white pastiness of her skin..! You'd think she'd have 10 minutes to slather on some of this self tanning moisturiser or something. It was not unlike seeing the unroasted flesh of a ready to cook chicken out there on the track rippling in protest at being prepared for the oven. I couldn't tell you who this unfortunate woman was, because not 2 minutes later she was replaced by another British athlete, similarly affected. So it could well have been some unfortunate camera aspect, but if it was, frankly I'd sue. If not, the British Olympic Association should be rushing an emergency flight of self tan spray out there, because a more unhealthy look you've never seen in your whole life. It looked like the BOA had been locking its athletes away in a cupboard for the last 12 months and not letting them out in to daylight. And given the results, I regret to say that a pact with the devil is clearly not the cause. Not in the athletics anyhow. And somehow I don't see Bradley Wiggins or any of that ilk cosying up to the parchment and blood inked quill either!
Anyhow, on a totally different subject, I've started this new set of photo's on Flickr - 365 days of the next year. The point of this is to take a photo every day of the next year, and to have a visual record from one birthday to the next - so I have a weeks worth of photo's to produce a little diary of the last week! I won't bore you by reproducing them here, but zip on over to Flickr and check them out. But I do want everyone who reads this to have a bit of a look at this:
This thing lives on the table we have out in the car park at work. It was dug up by our building manager when he was making the little garden that we have there, and it's clearly some kind of root or tuber. It's incredibly light, but tough as hardened steel - you can't force your finger nail into it, although clearly some sort of root has been broken off one end of it. It's dead, we think, because it's not shown any signs of growth. Have you ever seen anything like this before? It's got the most incredible whorling on it, almost like the whorls on fingerprints. I don't think my camera's very good at picking them up, but you can sort of see the indications of them on the photos.
If you know what this thing is, I'd love it if you could email me. There's a whole building full of workers who want to know what it is!
