It’s been a while since I attempted 750 words, but better late than never, right?
This morning was probably one to forget, truth be told. Scraped myself out of bed a little later than I should have, shower, shave, dressed, brushed the kids hair, waved goodbye to everybody as they went off to school, then set about feeding the animals.
While walking past the humungous pile of wellington boots by our back door, I heard a whooshing noise behind me, glanced back, saw nothing, so carried on - wondering what might have made a sound like that. A little later, while attempting to leave the house, I approached the back door and discovered the source of the sound. Somebody had balanced a bucket of meal worms for the chickens on top of the wellingtons, with the lid not fastened. The whoosh sound had been several thousand dead worms scattering across the kitchen floor tiles - inbetween all the boots
Five minutes later found me releasing the chickens from their nightly prison (the hen house), delivering their food for the day - an odd porridge of hot water and grain - and fishing my bike from the shed.
There was no way I was going to make in on time to work by now, so I gave up all efforts at doing so. I’m not sure why I try so hard to get in early anyway; I am invariably the first in, and nobody ever says anything about the rest of my colleagues who trickle in over the next half hour.
The cycle in was almost completely uneventful today. I say almost because a car did nearly kill me on the double roundabout by the bridge (we have the prototype of one of the Budapest bridges over the Blue Danube in our town). As I approached the roundabout I got that curious sixth sense that the approaching car wasn’t going to stop, even though I had the right of way - and I was right. You couldn’t even argue that the driver hadn’t seen me - he swerved around me without going anywhere near his brake pedal.
A few seconds later - approaching some parked cars - a van pulled alongside me and nearly left me nowhere to go. This is pretty normal too. I sometimes wonder - if they do tighten up on road use by cyclists - licenses, and insurance - they are going to be astronomical because of the risk from other road users. If you hit something in a SUV, you typically go through it. If you get hit on a bike by an SUV, you’re pretty much dead or badly mangled on impact. I wouldn’t call my style of riding “defensive” as much as plain wary of everything else out there.
The office is pretty quiet today - as usually happens when there are few salesmen around.
Oh crap I knew this would happen. I set out to do the 750 words thing, reach 500, and have nothing else to say. Bugger. If you get to 750, the website does a statistical analysis of the words you have written for emotions, and a hundred other things - it’s pretty cool. It also times you, so you get to see how smoothly the words pored fourth from your brain, to your fingers, and into the computer. It doesn’t help that I end up pressing backspace half the time because I decide halfway through a sentence that I have a better way of wording something.
See - I almost wrote another 100 words about nothing at all. I could write magazine filler articles, couldn’t I. Kind of an “internet grumpy old man”. How cool would that be though; a columnist for a magazine with an open remit. I’m guessing magazine editors give out subjects to the writers though - having a “true” open remit would be a disaster with me; the column would end up looking like this blog; about everything and nothing at the same time, and holding about as much interest for readers as a chocolate teapot.
What’s that you say? You’d like to know about a chocolate teapot? Now you’re just being silly.
In other news, I had planned to leave work early today - the original reason for it happening has now gone, but I’m wondering about leaving early anyway. Is that so wrong? I had planned to have the time off, so I see no real harm in taking the time off, even though it’s no longer strictly needed hmmm