Colonnades

Hello. Never got round to doing that post at the weekend after all. There's no really exiting reason other than that I was actually doing stuff and didn't have the inclination to sit down and write about it for nobody in particular to not read. Which is what I'm doing now, weirdly. I put this down to the fact that there's fuck all on the tellybox and I've drunk all the alcohol in the flat so I've got very little else of import with which to fill my evening. So here I am. Writing on this blog again because if I don't, a little voice pops into my skull and nags at me to write inane shite, in a surprisingly similar fashion to what I'm laying down right here, right now, just incase someone actually stumbles across my blog and notices that it hasn't been updated for a while and mistakes it for one of those 'ghost blogs' that hasn't had a new post since November 2007.

On Saturday morning I took a fairly long stroll down to a local(ish) park called Heaton, erm...Park with my girlfriend. Here we took in the delights of the former Town Hall colonnade (which was removed from the City Centre many moons ago and is now hidden amongst some trees), an abandoned manor house that features some rather Doom-esque goat skulls as decorative motifs, and witnessed a duck try to drown another duck. Photographic evidence follows:

Colonnade

Heaton Hall

Demonic goat-face

Murderous duck (on top)

Once we arrived back home (after stopping off at a pub along the route for a jacket potato, of all things), I was driven out of the flat by the constant noise coming through the ceiling from the inconsiderate cunts who live above us. I've touched on this in a previous post, but the constant thudding and banging that echoes through our apartment due to the sheer ignorance of the two tenants directly above is driving me insane. I took the opportunity to go and view a new motorbike (on which I put down a deposit - it's a Suzuki GS500 incase anyone wondered), and then spent the rest of the evening/night at my cousin's house to escape the unholy cacophony of banging doors and stamping footsteps that have become the soundtrack to my short tenure in the current abode. We're already looking at alternative accomodation. Again. Grrr.

I'm going to collect the new motorcycle on Saturday morning hopefully and am currently in the process of buying some extremely expensive locks and chains - one of which I'm assured is 'unbreakable' by the manufacturer. I don't actually intend to put this to the test though, as after my recent experience with the Goose being pinched, I will be storing the new machine in a garage in a different postcode until the time comes that I can get the hell out of this noisy cave and move into a house with either a private garden or a garage of it's own. Sucks a little that I won't be able to just hop on to the new bike without a 45 minute commute to the aforementioned lock-up, but I'm determined not to have another bike stolen by dirty, stinking, worthless dole-scum dressed in grey sweat pants and Nike Shox trainers.

So that's what's happening in my life at present. I'm going to a chocolate festival at the weekend, which should be interesting, especially as there's promise of a fairly decent ale tent in situ. And what more could anyone need? Chocolate and ale. Splendid.

In the meantime, here are a few more photos from Heaton Park:

A Change is as good as a....

Thought it was about time I changed the layout here at Tomleecee towers. I was toying with the idea of migrating this festering barrel of putridity over to Blogger's more attractive cousin Wordpress, but the complexity of such an operation, while simple in theory, is far beyond my fairly basic grasp of internetting*.

Actually, it probably isn't - but I'm using that as an excuse because i simply (as ever) cannot be fucking bothered. If there was a button that said "change all this shit to Wordpress. Now," then I'd more than likely press it...but there isn't, so I can't. And ergo, this drivel will be staying where it currently resides...on Blogger. So there you go. Not a proper post by any stretch of the imagination (you'll probably have to wait until Sunday (or maybe tomorrow) to read about my exploits with the N64)**, ^but I'm sure you'll all survive. Hopefully. Forrest Gump is on in a bit and I need a beer, so see you Sunday. Or tomorrow.

*This may or may not be an actual word.
**Check out the brackets within brackets. I'm a regular Douglas Adams. Kind of.
^Not really sure what the grammatical conventions are when using asterisks after brackets but before commas.

Will Dance For Food

Well my birthday came and went. It was a fairly good weekend - had a really good night out on Saturday evening and did a pretty good impression of a tour guide on Saturday afternoon, showing my southern friends around Manchester. One of them remarked that she had no idea how big the place would be. That alone kinda brought home to me the sort of image most of these 'Southerns' must have of the North. Flat caps, whippets, gravy flowing through the sewers like that glowing pink sludge in Ghostbusters 2...how wrong they are.

My actual birthday on Monday was a little less exciting - I pretty much spent it doing the same shit I've been doing for the last few weeks: trawling the interwebs looking for jobs. Y'know, when you get offered a job, you'd think it would be a given that you'd actually get to start it within two fucking months of receiving the offer, right? As alluded to in a previous post, I was recently (well a few months ago) offered a job and gladly accepted it...but I still don't have a start date and any emails to the recruitment department are simply met with "we don't know yet." Doesn't exactly fill you with confidence. It'd fill you with even less if I actually revealed who this proposed employer is. But I'll continue to hold off for now. And even though I've resigned to the fact that I'll probably never start this job, I've still got a slight glimmer of hope...but this hasn't stopped me applying for maybe a hundred others.

And so that brings us right up to date: all I do, every day is search job sites and send off applications. It is beginning to get a little tiresome, I won't lie, but surely something's gotta give soon? I've had a few interviews and even a trial day delivering UPS parcels (seriously, I will never complain about having to wait all day for a delivery ever again after that!), but this whole job searching thing sucks on your soul like nothing else in modern life. I'm not one of those people who bases my opinion of someone on the job they do, but sadly not everyone is like me. This is a very fickle world and opinions and stereotypes rule everything we do as humans, so not having a job tends to sap your sense of self worth after a while - I know because i'm living proof of that theory. But I'm trying to stay positive, still running, cycling and keeping fit, still trying to be sociable and get involved with friends' events etc. The thing is, how much longer can I keep it up? I'm pretty sure I'm not eligible for any form of benefit because I left my last job of my own accord (even after working none stop since 2003), and I speak fluent English so there's no way I can blag any freebies off the government...so I suppose I'd better stop writing this and go and have another look at the Jobserve website - y'know, the one provided by the DWP that has broken 'apply' links at the bottom of nearly every page? What a goddamned clusterfuck.