Pete Cooper

In the cold light of day, I’m not as badly off as I thought I was yesterday evening. Yes, I’m behind, but I suspect it’s a knock-on effect of having to do everything a little bit slower than I’d like to. As my body adjusts to knocks and extra work, it’ll get stronger and more resilient. No guts, no glory.

It’s still true that I’m not the man I used to be, but then I didn’t really like that person, overall, so there’s no great loss. I’m building a better me with my new ways and habits, and there will inevitably be some rough days and wobbles as the new things settle in.

So, yeah, today is another day. It’s shiny and brand new, and if I have to be up ‘til past bedtime getting things done, so be it. Things is gettin’ done, and that’s how I roll.

I’ve had a distinctly mixed day today. I figured it was time to call it a night at 9pm on the basis that any longer and I’d‘ve likely broken something, be it physical or lines of code. I woke up from a state of dream sleep in a matter of minutes, having just had a very odd dream which included over-sized condoms and a conversation with someone I know that involved them wanting to do stuff and me bemoaning the bagginess of my prophylactic. Considering I slept in the same room as a broken laptop table with failed superglue repair residue, I blame the fumes. Either that or I should see a therapist, one of the two. As a result of this rather rapid awakening, the first half an hour of the day was spent wondering where I was and what was going on, which gave the outward appearance of me being Mr Cranky Pants. This was not the case. I am many things, and some days I’ll admit I am about as fun to be with as a persistent armpit rash, but my morning demeanour was misinterpreted by Emma as, well, I don’t know, but it wasn’t nice. There are some mornings where I think the best course of action would be to avoid my tired and emotionally fragile wife for a few hours and go straight to the part where we have lunch, nicely side-stepping the touchy subjects of each other’s current mental state. Today, instead, we went out to buy potting compost for Emma and what turned out to be a lunch that I really shouldn’t have eaten. I keep saying to myself I won’t shop at Millett’s Farm Shop again, but something always brings me back to it.

That was shopping trip number one, which took us to lunchtime. Following my astonishingly bland lunch I had an email that a local home wares store was closing down and remaining stock was half price. An hour later, and £115 poorer, we were home again with a load of things that we’ll actually use, which negates the brief pangs of spending guilt I had. As mid-afternoon approached, I went for my daily walk and racked up another 3 or so miles. This only happened after I persuaded myself that it was worth doing and I’m doing this for a reason, and that it’ll all be worth it in the end. That took half an hour. The persuasion part, I mean – the walk itself was another hour and a quarter, and then some rest time, and then a bath to de-stink, and then delicious fish soup for dinner, and then three hours of fighting with website code to try and integrate jPlayer with Textpattern which ended in spectacular failure and no actual progress. There’s a backlog of stuff waiting to go online when I’ve got this integration nailed, and if I don’t get it sorted by close of play tomorrow I’ll need an alternate plan. I blame myself and my walk – I still haven’t managed to figure out how to operate when I get back from my walk and my body is physically tired.

I’m behind on my projects, I’m behind on my work, I’m behind on my training courses, I’m behind on my to-do lists and I’m behind on housework. This needs to change, and the rest of the week is all about getting stuff done on my terms. Despite having my day dictated by lists and plans, it feels shorter and I’m not achieving what I want to, which just compounds the issue the next day. It may be down to seasonal variations, but I can’t help thinking that I’m not the man I used to be.

About two or three days ago I mentioned this blog on a recording of the Emma and Pete Show along with a brief mention of how I’m finding the action of writing a few blocks of words every couple of days quite a cathartic experience. Things have gone a bit nuts since, page views have gone up four-fold and people are asking me about things I’ve written. I suppose not having an immediate outlet like Twitter has meant I’m channelling what I really think into larger chunks of text – even my paragraphs are long compared to web text these days – and I don’t have to sanitise what I’m saying into a 140 character blip. There may also be a backlog of rumination from last year when I went inward and barely came out to play, and no-one knows how big that pile is, not even me. It almost feels a bit like the olden days of the web where personal blogs were rife and people had stuff to say that wasn’t written purely for the amusement or gratification of others. I’ve seen a few people saying in recent months that they’re going to start blogging again in 2012 – the operative word being ‘again’. Perhaps it’s just a blast from the past or a hankering for the times when comment wasn’t quite so ephemeral. Regardless of the reason, I’m going to continue this blogging habit for as long as it’s sustainable. Frankly, I’m surprised I’ve got this far, so this is new territory for everyone.

Shortly after my startling page views discovery this morning I had a bit of a moment, and not in a good way. I opened the bedroom window before I wrote this morning’s post, thinking it was a mild day with a fresh breeze. I was half right; the breeze was fresh, but also tending toward freezing, so my morning blogging session was a little rushed. After I’d published the post I got up to close the window, seeing as the temperature inside was getting closer to the outside temperature. I stood up, forgot I’ve got a sore ankle, stepped awkwardly on it and leant out to steady myself. On my laptop table that I’ve had for less than a fortnight. Which smashed into bits. For reasons that I’m not totally clear on, this upset me enough to burst into tears. I really have no solid clue why, but clearly there’s something else at play, here. My best guess at this stage, having given it some thought after the event, is that I broke my new table because I have a sore ankle, and I have a sore ankle because I walked too fast on Saturday morning. And why did I do that? Because I wanted to get back for midday so I could stick my schedule. Stupid, really. One of these days I’ll learn.

It’s a cheap table that cost me less than £5 from IKEA. I can get a new table next time we’re out there, but it’s a 2 hour round trip and it’s barmy to just go for a table. I tried the made-do-and-mend route but the superglue I used was cheap and ineffective, so once again it’s in bits, but this time I have the faint whiff of glue solvent in my bedroom, something that’ll probably give me some interesting nightmares. Rightly or not, I spend the first part of my day on a laptop in bed, and I tend to wrap up the day on the same laptop in bed. I sleep fairly well, all things considered, but I don’t want to get into the routine where every day is a duvet day, it’s dangerous territory for me but I’m acutely aware that I can do just about all of my day job from a laptop. There’s a thin line between having a regular lie-in with a laptop and atrophy brought on by being sat in bed all day. Chances are, however, that I won’t hurt my ankle by being in bed, so it’s significantly safer than the mean streets of Abingdon.

Speaking of which, I’ve set myself a target of walking 100 miles in January, and I’m almost there. The last week or so of January is going to be a struggle with aches and pains, but I’m on track to hit my mark with a daily walk. At my current rate, I’ll also hit my year target by the end of March, so I’m thinking of upgrading my 2012 target to 1,000 miles over the year. I think I must be ill, I don’t know me anymore.

It’s Monday morning and our guests left yesterday evening without any major incident. I took on the role of punchbag in order to deflect some of the attention from Emma and everything seemed to go as expected. Highlights of the conversation included being told that Cornwall isn’t to their tastes and that on those grounds we should move to Devon instead. I also made the decision not to shave off my hobo beard for their arrival which, as of this morning is 1 month old. It’s going to be gone by the end of the day, or at least carved into some amusing face fuzz that will delight some adults and horrify others. Perhaps a Spurlock horseshoe or Selleck, I don’t know. I fear it will ultimately just be buzzed down to stubble as I don’t have the will or spirit to maintain anything fancy. On the plus side, if I’m as slack on shaving as I have been it won’t be too long before I have enough to start playing around with it again. See you in a month, Mr Beardie.

My ankle pain is still niggling, and was a factor in yesterday’s preparation for our guests’ arrival. I couldn’t walk very far or very fast, and even having a day off from walking (at least during the daytime) it was still somewhat painful. It eased off over the day as I used it a bit more, but the speed at which I was able to do stuff (tidying, hiding, the usual things before folks come round) was far slower than I’d‘ve liked. I still don’t have full movement this morning, so I’ve provisionally moved my daily walk to late afternoon and reduced the distance/duration to get around my aches and pains. The weather also makes using power tools in the garden more risky with the high chance of rain, so garden thuggery has been postponed for a while. I can, however, tootle around the house at a slow speed and get work done on my computer, so I’m not at a complete loss. There’s no impending work from toxic clients today, and this has a positive effect on me in a number of ways: chiefly that I’m still in bed at gone 9am and not wondering how I’m going to squeeze all the things into the day with the element of unpredictability. There’s a definite calm after the storm feeling in the house today. We were both pretty beaten up after yesterday’s visitation, so there’s an inevitable recovery time that’s already started. A little retail therapy – the functional sort rather than the fancy sort – is on the cards. The pound shop in town is where it’s at, we know how to party in this household.

In other news, I found some archives of this website from a while ago as I was skimming the access log files. I was getting hits to pages that didn’t exist on the site and I’d completely forgotten that I’d bought this domain some years ago and had a bash at running a website for a short time before getting cross with it and canning it. Anyone paying more attention than me will likely already know this, or at least have a recollection of it existing, but I’d genuinely forgotten about it. Anyway, I present the Wayback Machine archive of petecooper.org – everything seems to be safe for work, but I can’t make any guarantees. I can guarantee that it’s not very interesting or comprehensive, however, so you really shouldn’t spend any time looking. One interesting aspect is most of the blogs I mentioned in my blogroll list are dead. Indicative of the power of social networking sites, I guess, but it was also a bit sad to see all the people I once knew and followed with interest not being part of my life any longer. Perhaps sad is the wrong word, it’s inevitable with the situation I’m in that this sort of thing will happen. People come and go, friends change over time and those people who are so deeply entrenched in your life will be around for what seems like an eternity. I found it hard to explain to our guests about the idea of moving to a new place because of the mentality of the people living there, so I gave up after a few sentences and switched to something that they could wax lyrical on, which filled over 20 minutes of yammering. It’s a subtle thing, but even with the knowledge we have a few good friends in Cornwall is better than not knowing no-one and starting afresh, even if we end up at opposite ends of the county for whatever reason. On a related note, I’ve been invited to a stag night of someone I used to know and haven’t seen for a number of years. I have absolutely nothing against the guy, and to be frank he’s pulled a real hottie so I’m really pleased for him, but I do wonder what the day’s going to be like. There are certain people I know that I can pretty much instantly reconnect with, even after a year or so of not seeing them in Real Life; in that instance there’s not much a hug and lunch can’t fix. I’m not so sure about this guy – it’s been 4 years since I saw him, and probably another 3 years before that the time before, so I’m not sure how it’s going to pan out.

Some things change and some stay the same, as they say. I’ve got a bit of both going on. From the stuff stashed in the Wayback Machine link above it looks like I’ve made some progress from the Pete Cooper of 4 years ago, but I’ve got a whole slew of other stuff to work through as I continue my journey through life. Assuming my ankle doesn’t hurt too much, of course.

Had a night at the pub yesterday, something I haven’t done for a long time. I’m not normally one for raucous shouting with beer flowing everywhere, but I had a good time. I won’t go as far as to imply that I needed to unwind after all the virtual corporate monkey poop slung my way over the past few weeks, but it did give me some time with people I know in the real world well away from computer screens – smart phone Wikipedia checking notwithstanding. The lack day-to-day contact with real people I can live with, I’m coming to the conclusion that during the times I need to work it’s far more effective for me to block distractions out and just crack on with things, rather than face the interruptions of people asking for stuff. It’s not an anti-social personality trait that I have, at least I don’t think so, it’s something I need to do to keep myself going. I haven’t spoken to many other people about this, but I regard my brain as a completely separate entity to the rest of me. I’ve talked in the past about having brain issues and wonky wiring that means I have to try extra hard at some stuff, and less hard at things other folks might find tricky. My brain dictates what I do. The rest of me is the visible effect of this, be it in my actions, speech, or whatever. In this case, there’s a wire between my body and my brain. Something tells my brain what it wants to do and my brain in turn makes that happen. Occasionally, my brain wants to do something different (invariably destructive in some fashion) and the something that normally just tells my brain what it wants to do has to work three times as hard to remove the destructive element. This ‘something’ is an unknown thing to me. I know it’s there, and I know it does its job better each day, generally, but I also now that when times get bumpy it stops working. Last night was one of those nights where I could happily switch off that part of me and just let things happen, not worry about stuff and let the good times roll. And they did.

I’ve got my first walking injury of recent times to contend with today. I rather overdid the walking yesterday morning and I’ve got a sore ankle, not really helped by walking another two miles yesterday evening: one mile to the pub, another back home from the pub in a booze-fuelled fug. One of the nice side-effects of blasting through a 1,000 calorie lard-busting walk is that I don’t have to pay too much attention to how many calories I was snarfing down at the pub. And there were a lot, more food than I’ve eaten in a long time. I’m OK with it, I gave myself a treat night out, had some fun and came home safe. I’m having the rest of the day off walking as I technically completed my requirements earlier this morning: the return journey from the pub back home was after midnight and more than a mile, so that’s my tick box ticked for the day. My thinking is that if I rest my ankle today and tomorrow, do a short, easy walk tomorrow afternoon if all is well then I can get back into the swing of things later in the week. I set myself a target for walking 365 miles by the end of the year, this is going to be an easy target at this rate, so I’ve set myself a shorter-term target of 100 miles in a month. If that turns out OK then I’m anticipating having that as a regular thing. Three and a bit miles each day should cover that nicely, and the healthy side-effects of the walking will continue all year round. It also means that I can go to the pub now and again, which is nice.

Today is another oddly sunny Sunday in January. Emma’s folks are coming over late afternoon so we’re going to be cleaning the remainder of the house for their arrival. The laundry is reaching a critical tipping point as we’ve held back on that over the last few days. It’s mostly a floorspace thing, we’re not well off for drying space inside the house, and when people come round we try and avoid having novelty underwear on display. The upshot of this is that we’ll likely spend the rest of the week catching up and running the washing machine twice a day. The timescales involved with this make drying it outside on the line less effective if we don’t start early enough. For example, it’s nearly 11am as I’m writing this, it’ll take 2+ hours for the cycle to complete, and then we’ve got about 2 or so hours of daylight, but the sun has disappeared behind the houses at this stage so it’s largely irrelevant. Then it has to be brought in to avoid it getting wet if it rains overnight, but we need to find space for it inside, and we’re short of space (as previously mentioned), so we’re…you get the picture.

We had a good Emma and Pete Show recording session yesterday afternoon. I’ve invested some money in new recording gear to get us set up in a new environment, and it worked out really well for a first run. The microphones will need pop filters so the end result is more normal, but I’m confident that this is the beginning of a new era of shows. We’re doing OK on the more regular show schedule, and recording downstairs at a proper table is far more invigorating than under a duvet. I don’t know how viable the plans are to do live broadcasting when we record in future, but now I know we get good sound from the new gear, I can fine-tune that and think about live video and audio. Fun times.