Weddings? More trouble than they’re worth

This weekend (dramatisation)

Fire in the disco!

Well, not quite. More fire the other side of the wall this screen is against, in fact. But not right now. Imagine the scene outside my house last night when the blue light circus rolled into town. Two fire tenders, some of our workmates in a car and a van, and some cops bringing up the rear. Oh, and random drunk walking around patting everyone on the back.

Why? The mysterious beeping noise. Not the mysterious ticking noise, but the mysterious beeping noise that my housemate noticed when the TV show he was watching finished. A faint noise, three beeps in a row before pausing. He called upstairs to me because it was annoying him more than anything, asking if it was my music. I turned it off, and I could hear it too. We hunted around the house, but were no closer to finding it. If anything, it sounded loudest up against the wall to the semi next door in both our rooms… Uh oh, was that sound outside? Throw open the door, and there it was, very very loud. Over the top of a crackling noise. And a warm flickering glow the other side of the hedge…. Fuck. The other half of our semi was on fire.

Strange thing was how we reacted. Rather than stand around gawping like the guys who live the other side of the house, we sprung into action like a coiled spring that had just that moment decided to uncoil. And it was actual directed action, which to me kind of followed my first aid training:

• Danger? Yes, lots. Our house is essentially on fire. Best not go in either of the semis
• Response? Shout! No response from anyone, and the place was to the best of our knowledge empty.
• Shout for help? Housemate calls 999…
• Airway? Bleeding? Cyclizine? Not much use here.

So what else could we do? Well, the one fire we can see is in the doorway. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a fire extinguisher somewhere in this house, and I know I’d feel plenty more comfortable if that fire was out, so let’s add those two thoughts together. So I spray the fire liberally with powder. It reignites. I have another go, and it stays out. Good, because the extinguisher just ran out. Smoke alarm still going off though, and there’s still smoke pouring out of the chimney. So probably more fire somewhere else in the building. What else? Well, now the door is clear, we can shine a torch upstairs/in windows and keep shouting. Still no response, but that place had been “empty” for some time now so the idea of squatters etc needs to be entertained.  Have a wander round the back and have a shout there… Shit, there’s two more rooms upstairs on fire. Properly ablaze. And one of them backs onto mine. Lovely.

But we can hear the sirens, and Trumpton come flying down the road, our knights in breathing aparatus. I’m amazed at just how efficient they were. For all everyone mocks them, they were amazingly good – the first guys were inside the house within twenty seconds of arriving while one took a handover from us and the driver was unrolling hoses. Equipment was appearing from all over the place and water was already beeing splashed around by the time the second crew, including the station boss, turned up. They were just so well organised, so well drilled. Everyone knew exactly what to do with minimal command input. So totally unlike the ambulance service. As evidenced when they turned up a few minutes later, and stood around in a huddle gossiping and admiring the view.

The rest of the story is not so interesting – the water fairies had fun soaking and “mashing” the entire place (so said the guy weilding a crowbar and seemingly beating the shit out of chunks of house) before checking our house over too (including the smoke alarm which somehow failed to go off) then heading off back home for a kip and leaving the police to sit around waiting for the glaziers to turn up and board the broken door and windows.

And only then did what happened hit me. What was it the fire chief said? It’s a good job we caught it then, or it could have got “quite involved” given our shared loft space. Comforting thought. So what would have happened had we been out? Our stuff, and our house, would have fried. The spectators outside were a fat lot of good – the guys living the other side didn’t seem to know of the existence of the 999 phone system, and off all our neighbours only one approached when the entire road was blocked by blue light vehicles. Especially if that front door fire hadn’t been lit – the first that anyone would have known about it would be when the roof caught light!

Or worse. What if we’d been watching a longer TV show, and hadn’t heard the alarm? What if we’d been asleep? Would we be going off in the back of that ambulance that turned up? (And that’s not just bad because of the embarressment – though it have been worth it depending on which nurses were on shift in A&E )  Or in a black “private ambulance”?

So I guess we’re lucky that all we have to suffer from is some smoke stained walls and a room that still smells of burnt plastic, despite the windows all being open throughout the day (with massive thank yous to the donor of a bed last night so I could actually sleep without choking!). But now I’ve sat down and wrote this, more thought about it to write it, I’m a little freaked out as to just how bad it could have been.

Just drained

Whenever you think you’re just about getting on top of life, it all goes tits up again. Get university interviews out of the way, overdraft (almost) cleared, all those little jobs than need doing almost finished and then WHAM I probably don’t have a job come end of March SMASH due to the current financial state of this county I’m unlikely to find another well enough paying job to save any money for my return to uni KABLAMO the recession means I’ll have trouble getting any other source of funding (to add Batman sound effects to just one thing that is going wrong).

And if that wasn’t enough, along comes Tuesday, rearing its big ugly bastard head and spewing all over me.

I. Am. So. Fucking. Tired.

Not to say pissed off with myself.

Apologies for the incoherence of this post, I just need to vent the exhaustion and stress of the last nearly fourty two hours on my feet. I am going to watch Ghost in the Shell and whisky myself to sleep, I think. Some day soon, I shall try and make it all make sense.

It’s times like this I wish I was religious, with someone (or something) I could pray to. To take decisions and consequences out of my hands, so that through wishful thinking and good intentions things would get better. But as nice as that would be, the rest of it unfortunately doesn’t make sense, so I’ve only got me and my defective mental wiring to rely on. Prospects not so hot then?

Why I want a mood-reading credit card

It’s a curse that us crazies have to live with – we’re really, really rubbish with money. Because you see:

• When you’re down, although money can’t buy you happiness, it can at least for a few moments distract you from life (until you see the bank statement).
• When you’re manic, money is of course as freely available as air, and you have such grand plans that require a bit of this crazy money stuff now but will return millions/provide you with ever lasting pleasure/get you laid.

I used to be terrible at money management. Before I was diagnosed, or had friends who were capable of controlling me, I used to spend spend spend whenever things go tough. After my first allergic reaction away from home, at the Computer Science Dinner in my first year, I headed into a horrible spiral that resulted in my spending the entirety of my student overdraft in a couple of months, mostly on toy guns, computer games, beer (because drinking yourself into a stupor solves everything, expensive food (Rich people eat posh food. Rich people are happy), and other frivolities. This has left me with a pile of toy guns in the garage at home (I really need to get round to selling them on eBay), the ability to drink nine pints and a bottle of wine in an evening and just about make it home, and a huge debt that at the end of this year will need settling.

Things got better since I started treatment. Knowing what was wrong with me helped me control my symptoms, and my friends quickly understood what was going on and were able to stop me being too stupid. Then Ana came on the scene, and things got even better – not only was I happier, but she was able to see a more detailed picture of my life and so help me control my spendaholism even better. It’s never been perfect – I’ve always been hitting the end of my overdraft by the end of term, and any money I earn while working is quickly spent (“I actually have money? Weeeeeee!”). But I’ve never reverted to the bad old days.

The term, I’ve been really good. Ok, I haven’t quite managed to stick to the £20 a week thing we started with, but I’ve saved £250 of my intial ~£1k student loan. This is awesome in one way, but not in another. Awesome because I have money, and all is not lost, I can more-or-less control my finances. But non-awesome in that I’m now spending it.

I’m a bit down at the moment, due to a combination of factors. I’m stressed primarily at the amount of work I have to do. This year’s material seems so much tougher to understand than the last three, and I’m not sure I’m even going to have time to do it all with the rate I’m getting through it [Perhaps I should stop procrastinating and writing blog posts?]. I’m also stressed about getting Ana’s laptop repaired (I fell over on it and broke the screen, which she is understandably not happy about – and neither am I for that matter, because I liked using it to load movies onto my phone as it has an SD card slot…). I’m stressed about people who think they know what’s good for me when it really isn’t. I’m stressed about going to Spain on Wednesday, as I haven’t got anywhere near packing and the allergies thing is going to be special). I’m stressed that I haven’t done any assignments yet for my 7303 course. I’m stressed because I can’t remember all the things I’m supposed to be stressed about!

Put this level of stressedness on top of a natural down, and you’ve got one miserable Nick on your hands. And Ana is in Pakistan, so I don’t even have hugs to protect me. Though let me make it very clear that I do not resent her going, I wholeheartedly encouraged her to go and enjoy the place that she misses so much. Because I know she reads this blog

The thing is, it’s not like it sucks to be me in a huge way. I’m an ETA. My Train the Trainer thing went pretty well on Saturday, and I learnt some fun things from other people. I finally got round to fixing my desktop, so I now have a funky powerful dual screen machine that I can play with. It’s just that I’m naturally on a downer, and all those little naggling things that normally wouldn’t really bother me just add up and push me further down into miserableness.

I’m not in the clinically depressed, oh my god he’s going to top himself kind of mindset, don’t you worry. I’m still as productive as I’ve ever been, and I can still get out of bed at a sensible time in the morning. Unfortunately I am however in the “stuff makes it better. Buy more stuff” kind of mindset. So far today I have bought…

• A SAM splint (because it’ll be useful for fieldwork. Never mind the fact it won’t be here before I go away!)
• Two books. Because if I only got one, I wouldn’t get the free delivery from Amazon. So I spent over quarter of an hour looking around Amazon to find something else I wanted.
• A pair of poi. Because why should I settle for the cheap and functional ones – I want the pretty ones!
• Lunch. This cost £12 from Sainsbury’s, and I’ve eaten less than half of it.
• A cleaning kit for my Platypus. Probably the only useful thing on this list, because it is getting pretty manky. And I did shop around to get the best price.

But it’s not all bad. I managed to stop myself buying a few things:

• Any games for Ana’s Wii or my Nintendo DS. But I want Guitar Hero soooo bad.
• The Garmin Topo UK map. But it had £30 off. £30! (only making it £120…)
• Guitar Hero again. I really should stop looking in game shops.
• A handlebar mount for my GPS. Because combined with the above map, I could go anywhere!

Making it worse, I actually have things to spend the money on. Like cash to live off while in Spain. And my bike needs a service – it has a wonky axle that I can’t seem to fix, and the front brake lever literally sheared off in my hand last week. [And I've just discovered that the front tyre is flat]. But none of those would be as fun as the above (yes, I count water bottle cleaning equipment fun…)

Anywho, this all brings me to the point of this rant (aside to moan). Why don’t credit cards come with a built in mood reading function for people with spending issues? Ok, maybe not credit cards – I have staunchly resisted getting one, because I know that if I did within a few minutes I’d have bought a car or something, and then I’d really be in the shit. But debit cards sound much less sexy in the title.

So maybe the cards would be a bit more expensive to build. That is, assuming there’s a cheap and easy way to read you’re mood! You’ve been able to get a blood test to prove that you’re bipolar since 2005, but that wouldn’t really tell you anything about the mood, other than perhaps this person shouldn’t be let lose upon the town except with a carefully rationed £5 in change. Recently however, a blood test has been developed that may be able to tell you if you’re up, down, or inbetween. Firstly, I want to try it, just for poops and giggles. But secondarily, I would absolutely love it if this thing could be shrunk down and be triggered by a drop of blood, much like a glucose monitor. There would be so many applications. I could use it every day, and keep a little graph seeing how it compares to how I feel, just so I could play with a little machine that went beep (the novelty would probably wear off soon). But it would be absolutely amazing if it could be built into the credit card. Before you use the card, you’d have to pop a drop of blood on it, and it would reject you if you were miserable and buying say your fifth CD of the day. Or it would stop you withdrawing more than £40 if you were manic. It would be absolutely fantastic (but it would have to be like a glucose monitor – there’s no way in hell you’d get me taking a full blood test every time I wanted to go shopping. Although that might be the best preventative?)

I can see that there are several hurdles that need to be crossed first, like the technology being available for example. But also the cashiers handling other peoples’ blood covered cards. Or that not stopping me spending half a day on eBay. And you could always cheat your way around it, keeping a stock pile of “sane” blood for you to use later. But hell, it’s a nice dream, and one day when it comes on the market and GSK try to patent it, I can say “look at this blog post, I thought of it first”. And they’ll retort “well you should have patented it when you did then”. Dang.

“I didn’t see him”

Bollocks. In not-a-huge-shock, the bus driver who tried to drag me down the road escaped without charge. The police actually got as far as arresting the guy, but predictably his statement (paraphrased) was:

“I can’t remember being stuck behind some bikes. I can’t remembered driving up behind them aggressively, revving the engine and honking the horn.  I vaguely remember pulling in to a bus stop. I was looking at my mirror when closing the door so didn’t notice the man shouting at me to stop getting stuck in it. I didn’t notice the man stuck in the door as I was driving, despite the fact he was shouting at me and I was responding. I didn’t let him out because I thought he was going to attack me. I didn’t speak to him, not even to say the I didn’t care and that I would be late. I can’t remember what happened afterwards”

The police certainly sounded like they were treating this statement like the crock of shit it is, but their hands were tied as expected by the CPS’s desire to avoid spending any money whatsoever chasing dangerous people in Cambridge. At least the driver got a day in the cells and it’ll be noted on his intelligence record.

Update! (Let’s try again)

So I wrote a nice long update after being repeatedly poked about the fact I haven’t written anything for over a month, and haven’t written anything useful for, well, ever. And in the middle of doing so, the SRCF was taken down. Let’s hope they don’t do it again.

Anyways, update. What’s been going down in groove town since I last posted? I guess the main thing is I’m now a Part III student. Only one year left! This is a scary fact, as it means that I might have to enter the Real World pretty soon. Career options for a Cambridge earth science graduate are:

• The oil industry
• PhD at Oxford
• PhD at Cambridge

Now, I’m not sure I fancy any of those. I tried the oil industry over the summer with my internship at BP. They even offered me a job. But I don’t think I want to work for them. The place was excellent, and I loved the work ethic (and bonuses!), however the whole industry seems overwhelmed by Powerpointitis, and job security isn’t exactly there at the moment (the industry is in the middle of a big hiring boom, so pretty soon there’ll be too many geologists and not enough oil to find). A PhD doesn’t quite float my boat either – the majority of academics (well, the majority of the noisy ones who you hear about and end up having most contact with) are so stuffy and up themselves, I couldn’t imagine working with them or even worse turning in to one of them.

Which leaves the obvious(?) option – grad medicine. Medicine has always been in the back of my mind, right from sixth form where I opted to go down a physicsy route through to university. I considered switching at the end of first year, but my grades were nowhere near good enough (you need to get around 120% in your exams I believe). And hanging around medics/working in a pharmacy/joining St John has got me more and more interested in the whole medical lark.

My mind is pretty much made up. Now all I have to do is get a first this year, apply to do medicine, get accepted, then do four years of very intense study (no vacations!) :S But I might as well give it a go while I’m still young (and foolish?) – nothing much to lose, and I can always fall back on oil assuming there’s still jobs available!

What else? Oh yes, Part III. This is for the MSci, and takes the form of one term of project and one term of lectures shared with the Part IIs. My project is on water – more specifically, sitting up in the Bullard doing seismic imaging of the Southern Ocean around the Falklands. This involves processing lots of old oil data from 1993 to look at relfections caused by water of different density/salinity/temperature (much like these guys), then try and work out what these reflections show and why they show them. It’s much more interesting that it sounds, honest! When I get time I’ll post some pictures…

Outside of academic stuff, life is moving along. I’ve moved into a house out in Trumpington, which is awesome because there’s a fantastic pub nearby serving 28oz steaks, and it’s a reasonable cycle ride up to the Bullard/into town to burn off the stupid amount of fat and calories I must gain from one of those steaks. I’ve completed a PTA course, which means that it makes it easier for me to seriously damage someone if I screw up. And I’ve discoved the joys of Twitter and facebook schadenfreude (hunt out the twats from school and see if they really are “earning two million pounds a week” of if instead their life sucks – I haven’t found one of the former yet).

And that’s about it. I really should get back to work…