Sandbagging

I woke up this morning with a harsh, gritty feeling behind my eyes, as if some interloper had snuck into our bedroom last night, and replaced my brain with two pounds of sharp sand. This was not an altogether pleasant sensation. I hauled myself out of bed, and waved my arms and legs in front of the Kinect for half an hour, without really achieving full consciousness, then pottered off to the office.

Cross eyed

Perhaps I should have not stopped drinking coffee. Ever since my relaxing interlude in Penang, I've been a broken man; it took me an hour to get out of bed today, and I was so tired I was going cross-eyed as I walked to the office. I didn't want to spend the day doing intellectually taxing things; I wanted to have a lie down and a back rub.

Instead, I got trapped in the labyrinth of conference calls, which spat me out about 5pm, dull and drained. I went for a run after work and that dragged on interminably too. Still, I'm in bed now and it's only 10pm, which leaves me a decent chance of getting a proper night's sleep, there being no restaurants assembled beneath me or religious festivals being celebrated.

I received a parcel from Amazon today, the first in a series of birthday presents. I'm quite excited by this big brown oblong, as I've no idea what's in it. Although given it's flat, solid and heavy, it's probably a book, and what could be better than that?

So that was the main positive thing for me today; otherwise, there was rain, and there was phone calls, and there was staring at computer screens for slightly too long. I need to get out more, I think. I'm spending my best years in an office when I could be at home in bed, staring at a computer screen. Something Must Be Done.

Some of my friends have done something already though: if you like bicycles, or are obsessed by websites that reference dogs, then bikehound.co.uk might be what makes your day. Or if you're a rubber fetishist with an appalling obsession about inner tubes, I guess.

Wobbling

Last night I had a great set at Comedy Masala, allaying the fears I had from not performing for more than a month. I was shaking a bit and I seem to have a wierd whistling lisp as I spoke, but I got my laughs, hit my time and got off. I even got recognised by somebody when I was walking home, which shows I was doing something right.

Lost in Nova Scotia

Today I went for a run in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Unlike my runs in Quebec, I'd remembered to remember what street I needed to get back to, and I didn't have to worry about nobody speaking my language. (I did have to worry that Canadians wouldn't be able to understand my accent, but that's a whole other story.)

Wet

I didn't run this morning; I slept, and slept, and slept some more, and although that meant I wasn't physically tired today, I was mentally in a low gear that I never shifted out of. When the office is half empty, it can be a struggle to break from somnambulism; I tidied, I trained team members, I ticked off invoices, but it wasn't as if I was revolutionising the world today.

Baffled, groggy

Today, baffled and groggy, I went for a 14-mile run. This would have been less unpleasant if I'd got up an hour earlier, before the sun came up, but you can't always pick the battles you want to fight. I ran as far as Tanglin Mall, the same sort of route I got lost in months ago when I went out for a five mile run, and made it back without stopping, although the later parts of my run were as miserable as sin. Getting home, exhausted to the point that I couldn't sleep, I fell into bed and only woke when a massive thunderstorm hit at midday.

Faster?

I don't know how I managed to get through the journey back without sleeping, but I seemed to manage. I think I dozed for a few hours on the Seattle-Narita leg, but I was resolute in staying awake all the way back to Singapore. That was made easier by the entertainment system working (it had burped, stuttered and hiccuped all the way from Seattle to Narita), but the downside was that I watched The Muppets (slightly overlong), Bridesmaids (a bunch of horrible, horrible women being horrible to one another) and The Hangover 2 (a bunch of horrible, horrible men being horrible to themselves and everyone in Thailand). The only thing that the last film taught me is that you can be a 'bro', popped collar and all, and also have sex with men, as long as they're Thai men with breasts and miniskirts. Ain't nothing wrong with ladyboys in foreign countries, apparently. Perhaps that's some subversive message the filmmakers were trying to sneak into the Hangover sequel. No, probably not.

I swear on my neck

Today was fairly uneventful, apart from my body beginning to complain more vociferously about the abuse I've been meting out to it; it turns out that running around at night, in the early morning and the late evening isn't wonderful for your neck. As one of my physios pointed out, if you put something the weight of a bowling ball on top of a weak column of flesh and bone, things are going to go wrong from time to time.

Lazy Tuesday

We stayed up much too late last night, which meant that today was an utter struggle from start to finish. I crawled out of bed at seven, bumped around the flat and then rushed off to work for a call at eight o'clock, but I'd forgotten to give the person I was having a call with the conference number, so that meant another ten minutes when I could have been in bed, asleep. Curse my disorganisation.

Out and about

It's the weekend, which means I have to get up at stupid o'clock and go for a very long run. I was lazy on Saturday and delayed running until the evening, which mean there were less than 11 hours between when I got back from my run, and when I went out this morning. As we spent several of those 11 hours drinking fantastically strong cocktails, I hadn't really built any recovery time in, and as I'd been wearing my less-cushioned shoes last night, I figured today would be hard.

It's an ill wind...

Two days ago, we were woken up by a huge thunderstorm. At four in the morning our bedroom turned bright white, like the onset of an alien invasion that could only be beaten back by an Scientologist ex-rapper and some cheesy speeches. The thunder crashed, and I wondered if we should regret taking a top floor apartment in the windy part of town.

Slight return

Tonight I got back my enormous loudspeakers, which a year and a half ago my wife made me give away, on the basis that nobody in Hong Kong has a right to have four-foot high loudspeakers in a cramped apartment block. You have to think of your neighbours' welfare, after all.

Sleepwalking to Nando's

My internal clock is still off: today I woke at six a.m., stumbled around in the dark for an hour or two, and by nine I'd had breakfast and wanted to go back to bed to sleep for the rest of the day.

However, since I had exactly the same experience every day in Seattle and in Hong Kong, I don't think this is jet lag. It's just inconvenient.

Snow again

After yesterday's frankly lacklustre effort, the Northwest made up for things with a big dump of the white stuff all over Seattle. I looked out the window and it was like Christmas morning all over again.

Dissolving

Today I was meant to run 8 miles, which should have been no trouble at all, but a combination of comedy last night (great, despite me having been drinking in the afternoon and thus both sunstruck and hungover by 9pm) and then being woken up by UFOs (Unidentified Feline Objects) half the night left me shattered, capable of nothing more than sprawling on the sofa or passing out on the bed.

I did put the laundry away, but as that was my greatest achievement of the day, you can tell that the bar was pretty low.

Knackered

Today I got up at 6am, struggling both to get out of bed and to believe I'd set the alarm so early. Still, I should have run 5 miles yesterday and running three miles today, so tired I was practically falling asleep as I went, was not really making up for this earlier lassitude.

Leaving Singapore

Another day, another plane. I was smart enough to check my seat before I got to the airport today, and picked the middle of row 30, where there's nobody in front of you and you can stretch your legs out a bit. The comfort of this was in marked contrast to the flight out, where I was only four rows further back, but because I'd chosen the D seat, had no room under my seat to stretch my legs, because that's where a lumpen box controlling the audio visual system for the row lives. I didn't know this at the time; it was just a large metal box that was in the way, but diligent study of the internet will reveal these things. I'm now very grateful to the aviation nerds of the world, who have catalogued information like this.

Rule 34 and The Fat Years

Today I've had phone calls all over the place, from eight o'clock in the morning through to half past nine at night. Discombobulated by this, I forgot to drink any water all day, and by about half-eight I developed a nervous tic under my right eye, the muscles of my face stuttering to themselves as if a punishment for me not being kind enough to them.

It's enough to make me wish I hadn't stayed up all Saturday night reading Rule 34.

Recovery Day

Today I prised myself out of bed about 9, and then realised that I was still utterly shattered, and as it was a Sunday, there wasn't any need to be up this early. Still, today was a momentous day - it was time for our beloved Lila to be returned to us.

Driven in Penang

The plane was delayed flying from Singapore by an hour, so I didn't get into Penang airport until 1:20 in the morning, and then I had to get out some money, and pay that to the taxi kiosk, and then get into a slightly shabby white taxi, so I had no hope of getting to bed before two o'clock this morning.