It's Great When It's 2008, Yeah?

I always considered new year resolutions fairly pointless. Maybe it’s because I rarely ever achieved any of them, and even though it’s not unusual to reflect on your life when you reach the start of a new year I wasn’t really one for pretending to myself that I was going to change anything dramatic about the way I live. I know Glenn better than that and I know he’s a lazy shit who finds it hard to deny himself anything.
But I did manage to give up fruit machines for a whole year in 2003 or 2004, so maybe I’m being hard on ol’ Glenn.
I have some things I’d like to do in 2008 and even though they aren’t anything as dramatic as resolutions - as they aren’t really gonna turn my life upside down – they are ‘aims’ for this year.
I’m going to share some of them here so I can check back from my wireless enabled bunker on January 1st 2009, whilst the zombie war wages outside. See how well I did.

House

I’ve virtually finished decorating the house. I find this a bizarre state of affairs to find myself in, as the one constant in my life since April 2000 has been the urgent need to decorate my abode. Okay, it hasn’t been that urgent as it’s taken me virtually 8 years to complete, but I finally have the house looking how I want it. There are a couple of small tasks remaining, mainly sorting out what to put in the smaller bedroom and finding a stair rail, but every room is decorated and the whole thing will just require maintenance for the next couple of years until I get the crackpot idea of doing the living room up again. Or maybe building myself a conservatory out of Lego bricks.
There is one thing though which now finds itself at top priority…

The Garden

I spent most of summer 2000 sat in a reclining deckchair in my garden reading books. It remains one of the happiest times of my life. The steady neglect of my garden over intervening years has meant that I haven’t really wanted to spend any time in it since. I looked out across it the other day and felt a pang of shame that I’d like it get as bad as it has. But, 2008 will see a new shiny Crofters Green garden. I want to be able to plant flowers to attract bees, plant my new monkey puzzle tree, maybe grow some veg (or chillies) of my own, have a shed, and – most of all – to be able to host a barbecue. Woo!
I have an ace new side gate to the house which means that the back garden is now secure and secluded. I can make it a nice place to be again. I could get some garden furniture and we could play poker on a balmy summer evening. That’d be bazzin’!

Creative Fings

Back in June I had lots of things on the go. It felt like I’d taken on too much, but since then I’ve maybe taken a step too far the other way. I loved doing the radio show, but with uncertain future funding then that sadly may come to an end. I could look at doing it elsewhere but I’m not going to kid myself that I offered anything that anyone would particularly want. The show I did often seemed a bit ‘odd’ when compared to a lot of the other things on Preston FM, and I don’t think there is a market for a man with a West Lancastrian accent slagging off Jools Holland. Still, if they do get a permanent licence and I get a chance of doing another show then I’ll bite their hands off. It’s like a childhood dream come true and I really, really enjoyed it.
Do I still enjoy the Indietron nights? I’m not sure. However much I like Fraser and the Ferret (that sounds like a dodgy film), over the last 6 months or so it has often felt like a chore rather than something fun to do. I don’t think this is necessarily to do with the numbers, as even though there are times when the pub seems rather empty, it does get really busy at other times. Maybe it’s because with friends scattered all over the country (and for other reasons) there has been a lot less people there who I want to spend the night with. Anyway, I’m doing one on February the 1st, and I’ll see then if I really want to keep at it. It takes a lot of my time creating a setlist I like, time that maybe I could better spend on something I find fun. 100% fun! We’ll see.
With the future of the Indietron night and related radio show up in the air, does this mean the end of all Indietron branded activities? Well I hope not as I want to get the website up and running again. Frustrated at the lack of activity on it at the start of 2007, and concentrating more on doing the actual DJ nights, I let the website grind to a halt. Which was a vaguely retarded thing to do as my own review of the last Herman Dune album got a mental number of hits in the first few days and I was starting to get – largely shit – merchandise sent to me. Freebies!
But, I’m gonna start doing reviews again, will finally revamp the look of the thing (some of it is still the 5 second placeholder graphics I used on initial design) and hope to attract reviewers and forum users to make it look loved once again. I can’t let Rubidoo steal my ‘look’ unchallenged. Heh.
There are other things I have in the pipeline, some of it linked to Indietron, some not - I can’t think of a way to get my new soapmaking hobby linked to a music website/club night/radio show. But it is fun and I hope to be sending some lucky people soapy packages in the post within the next month (it takes longer to set than I thought).
As well as writing more reviews, I want to scribble more in here as well. Both as an exercise to wake my mind up, but also to record what I get up to. I often find that I can go back to this blog to reuse the stupider things for the radio show, website, etc.
I’ll obviously do other creative things as well, though I’m not going to pretend that I’ll finally get round to learning how to play an instrument. I’ve been trying for 18 years and am still hopelessly shit at any and all of them.

Work and Cash

The garden is going to cost quite a bit. I could do it on the cheap by doing most of the work myself but this has two major drawbacks. The first one is that anything I do in the garden is likely to be done really badly (conversely, everything in the house surprisingly looks rather spiffing). The major drawback though to a Glenn designed garden is of course that I’m an utterly lazy cuntrag. That’s why it got into such a mess in the first place.
I’d also like to go on holiday somewhere nice this year, plus I need to start saving up for a new car. I’d like a nice one next, it may be my last chance to get something sporty and impractical (I’d feel like I was having a midlife crisis if I bought one in my forties).
So, yeah, I need some cash to splash. This could be achieved if I tempered my spending habits, but I’ve been working 11 years now and it shows no sign of abating. I have a ludicrous amount of things, some of it unused, but will that stop me buying more new stuff? No, of course it won’t. But I’m going to try and rein that in a bit, stop wasting money on food/booze/bills.
I would say that I’d knock the gambling on the head for a bit but I’ve been recently considering getting back into online poker. It didn’t actually cost me any money, in fact I made quite a bit. I may also dabble a bit on the horsies again. I won’t go mad with it, it’ll all be done to a budget.
So, I may need some extra cash to pay for these things, which I intend to get by looking for a new job. I can’t stand my current job for many reasons (moral ones, petty office politics, the complete lack of any intellectual stimulus), so there will be very little loss in getting a better paid job elsewhere. I’m not going to rush into anything, but there must be something out there which would get me more cash and that would give me some sort of job satisfaction. Fuck, I’d settle for settle for something that stops my brain rotting.

The Use Of Computers

I don’t think I’m alone in my peer group in that computer usage can be the biggest timewaster of spare time. I spent way too long in 2007 reading websites that I have either no interest in, or which leave me in a faintly bad mood. I’m not going to do that any more. I’m hopefully going to use the computer less, and with the time saved from trawling bollocks websites, I’m going to revamp the Indietron website (as mentioned above), and concentrate on surfing things which are fun or useful, not time-wasting and saddening. Lol, I keep umming and aahing about going back on nexus. I can’t shake the feeling though that it would be a bad idea overall. We’ll see.
However, I am planning on playing a lot more computer games. I love wasting time dossing about on the Wii, PS3 or PC. Yeah, it’s not the most productive use of time but it is fun, clears my head of bollocks and can be quite sociable. For instance, I also can’t shake the desire to find out if World of Warcraft might be fun. Oh dear. Warning!
In conclusion: Less time surfing websites that are infuriating, more time on Indietron and playing games.

Social Glenn

I’ve given up booze for January. I think I’ll do it easily, unless I forget and just wander into t’Ferret and order a pint. It’s partly a health experiment and also to see how much money I can save, but I’d quite like to cut down on binge drinking. When I do get drunk, I drink way too much. It ends up ruining the next day (not through hangovers but because I don’t sleep very well).
I’d also like to do some other social things: I want to visit more friends, make food for people round chez Crofters, take walks in the lakes more often, try to get fit, etc etc…
There are some friends who I’ve been promising to visit for ages, so I’m going to do that ASAP. I’m not going to squander my holidays this year (yeah right) so hopefully will have some spare for trips around the place.


Christ, that was a lot of bollocks to write. How self-indulgent. Anyway, let’s see how I do.