Category: Journal

My knee is screwed. The left one. I hurt it back in December, wrenching it badly during a bail while I was skateboarding. I figured it would be one of those things that fixes itself if you just take it easy. Turns out that, as you get older, things don’t fix themselves the way they did when you were ten.

Come to think of it, the knee hasn’t been quite right in a long while. Maybe it was all the skateboarding I did back in my teens, maybe it was thinking I could go back to skateboarding again after a ten year gap. Somehow, though, there’s something wrong with my knee and it doesn’t look like it’s getting better any time soon.

I went back to skateboarding last Wednesday night, thinking I’d given it four months so it should be okay. But after an hour I felt it tighten a bit, so I called it quits and came home. Then, at the weekend there, in an ill advised attempt to show Andy and Rachel that I could touch my toes, my knee let out this cracking sound at the back and something has definately gone now. Feels like it’s just going to keep bending the other way when I straighten it.

Worse is that I don’t have a doctor at the moment. I called to get my knee (and my shoulder – I really am falling apart) checked out about a month or so ago, and they told me that I wasn’t registered any longer. Since I knew we were moving soon I didn’t bother re-registering, as I’ll have to go through it all again in the very near future.

Anyway, I’m fine with the fact that it wont fix itself, but I’m hoping that I might be able to have some kind of operation to fix it. Hopefully some time before I’m in my 40’s, if the NHS is anything to go by. Now I know why that medical plan at work seemed like such a good idea.

So, today was the day, after a couple of months of paperwork and crossing of fingers, I went and picked up the keys to the house we’ll be calling home for the next few years. They’re not cheap, are they?

The best part of ?100,000 doesn’t get you much in this day and age, but at least it’s our own place we’re throwing money at and not some landlord’s bank account. I’ve not even gotten too excited about it yet, as with all the moving and stuff over the next week it’s going to be frantic, and that’s the part I hate most.

We have gotten a removals firm involved for the first time in our chequered history of moving home over the last few years, so that’ll make a pleasant change to hauling boxes of crap around by ourselves. That and not getting some poor schmo to help out for little or no reward. (Sorry Kieran)

I’m too jaded from our weekend in York to get excited at the moment, although when we went to the new house tonight and I got to wander around my own garden it did feel kind of cool. Not that I was thinking of gardening, of course, more looking at the patio and realising the skateboarding potential right in my own back yard. And this whole house thing is meant to be one of the steps to finally growing up, yuk yuk!

Worst part is we cant just petrol bomb this place and ride off into the sunset. No, we have to leave the leaky shack in a respectable condition to get our deposit back. It’d be almost worth the ?500 and the jail time to pull up a chair across the road and watch the flames lick around the roof that has been the bane of our dwelling for the last couple of years, but onwards and upwards, as the phrase goes.

Normally I’ll read the sum total of one book per year. It’s not an average I work hard to maintain, you understand, it’s just that I’ll really throw myself into anything I’m reading, usually going cover to cover in a short span of time. At the end of a reading frenzy like that I usually cant face another one for some time, hence my one book per year average.

Since the turn of this year, though, I just cant get enough of reading books. I started off the year with The Bone Collector by Jeffrey Deaver, but it was so predictably… shit… that I was really force feeding it to myself, and wasn’t in a great deal of hurry to work my way through it. That’s an alarm bell right there and then, for me. If I’m just not enjoying it I’m quite happy to cut my losses and walk away. If something doesn’t have me gripped by the first chapter or two then I’m quite content with not knowing how it all turns out.

So, after calling it quits on The Bone Collector, and getting back on the horse by reading Frank Skinner by Frank Skinner on holiday, the floodgates have opened. I finished that, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, and Richard Asplin’s Gagged in little over a month. I’m up to 2008’s book quota already and it’s only March 2005.

I’ve hit a bit of a fork in the road, though. Crazy Uncle John asked me to find a book for him called The Facts of Life, which isn’t the sex education tome you’d expect from the title, oh no, it’s a fairly weighty book that deconstructs Darwinism and picks holes in the theory. Quoth Crazy Uncle John; “I have no problem with Darwins Theory of Evolution, other than the way it’s taught in classrooms as if it were fact rather than just a theory.”

I found myself agreeing with said uncle.

I tracked the book down on Amazon and I have it all lined up to follow Gagged, which I finished at the weekend. But then work bought me The Zen of CSS Design by Dave Shea and some chick I’ve never heard of. So now I have a bit of a problem.