Another weekend...

Doesn't seem like 7 days since the start of the last one, but yep, here it comes again.

And it's back to the football, toodling off to watch Hampton & Richmond in the Conference South. I enjoy last week's match so much, I'm becoming a bit of a fan. Of course, that's not to say I'm giving up on the mighty Tigers, I just can't get to their games, whereas I can for H&R. It's worth the £10 admittance fee against 3 or 4 times that for their professional cousins...

Today has seen another in the series of bus drivers strikes . Thankfully it's not all of the buses, just a couple of companies, so I could still get to work, although I had to take the train for the last part. I still managed to observe poor uninformed souls wondering where their regular bus had got to! I mean, it's been all over the local tv, radio, some sections of the newspapers and on the news websites as well. How do people go around not taking any notice of what's happening around them??

Next weekend, I'm off on a jaunt by myself, as I'm going to see my sister before she's disappears off elsewhere for about 18 months, work you know. As well as spending much of the weekend with her, I shall be revisiting a few old haunts, so if you're reading this in Hull, be careful! The weekend after that will see me travelling to Newcastle on the Sunday, to spend the Monday observing one of the company's more established branches, what they do and so on. I think I'm enjoying all this...

Me... final part.

Moving on, and moving away...

Moving to live in Bridlington was not my most enlightened of ideas. The cost of the rent on the room I rented etc., quickly ate into my finances. and my student overdraft expanded alarmingly. So after one term, I moved back home as it worked out cheaper to commute in on the 3 or 4 days a week I needed to be in college. If I needed to contact my fellow students - 6 of them by this time, and all of maturer years - then I could email or phone them. Problem solved.

Business & IT turned out to be right up my street and this time I wasn't going to mess it up and I didn't. 2 years of hard work got me a very good pass and thus I was awarded my diploma (one step down from a degree). I had to then consider if I was going to do a 3rd year for the degree, but having weighed up the options, I chose not to. So back out I went looking for work.

I decided to call in a few long term favours and spent 3 weeks in London during the October of 2001. Although I didn't find any work, it was one of the most important times in my life.

One weekend while in London, I was bored out of my tiny mind so I texted, on the off-chance, an old college friend of my sister's, Alicia, to see if she fancied showing me around the city. She agreed, and so I first spent time with my now-fiancee... I'll spare you the details of that day, but we agreed to keep in touch after I moved back home.

But I couldn't go back home, the rest of the family decided it was best if I moved out, and so I settled in Hull, in a rented room found for me by my sister. Reasonable enough, and I had a better chance of finding work. Registering with employment agencies found me sporadic work, but I didn't mind. I had my own space to do what I liked with. However I was getting back into the comfortable rut though, and that wasn't good. It's funny for all the government crackdowns, the Jobcentre staff still believed everything you told them, providing it was plausible, and that what I did for a number of years, happy to have the rent paid for me and enough to survive on.

In my copious spare time, I was busy with the Hull Astronomy Society, really busy. In fact after just a short period of time co-opted onto the committee, in charge of the website, the members decided to have a complete change and thus elected me as Society President for a 3 year term. This shocked and amazed me, I had no experience, and neither had my secretary, whom I liked as a person and I was pleased to have as part of the team. So we had to make it all up as we went along, and I think we did a good job. the membership rose steadily throughout that 3 year term and the finances improved as we settled into a new venue, the University of Hull. After I completed my term, the secretary took over for 2 years and now its in the capable hand of Paul, my long time observing buddy, mentioned earlier in the blog.

By 2005, A was coming to Hull on a semi regular basis, 5 or 6 times a year, and I was starting to think about the future. Or should I say, I was being forced to think about the future. Here was I, in my mid 30's with nothing to show for that time. Troubling stuff, and I used to get quite anxious about that.

One night, I'd had A on the phone, after she'd broken up with the man she was seeing, I decided to make my feelings known, and we decided we should think about being a bit more serious. In October 2005 (I can never remember the exact date) we became engaged, in front of my parents. My sister, who'd had a disagreement with A some years previously, found it hard to take at first but slowly she's come to accept it.

At this point we made plans to move me to London, as it wasn't possible for A to go to Hull, with the girls (see pic at the bottom left) meaning she had to stay close to home. The plans were to move us into a house in Ealing (I'm not going to be any more specific, my choice), that was owned by A's parents and at that time was let out. All that began in 2006, and that's after the blog started, if I remember correctly... So there you have it, the rest you can check in the Archive.

That's my life up to now, and for the first time in a long while, its all on the way up. I've got the chance of a good life, with a decently paid job, living a good house - which I'm thankful for - and with someone who loves me for who I am. I'm a very lucky person now and and I going to jeopardise all this?? Not for your life!

One thing I do miss is all my old friends in the Societies, my old footballing mates and the people in Sammy's cafe, my regular Sunday morning haunt. But life moves on.

I realise that I have missed things out that are not directly relevant to the story, but the main bits are there! So now you know who I am and what I'm like and so on...