Still lots to do and a couple I’ll pass on, thank you…

1. Started your own blog - Duh!
2. Slept under the stars - All the time when I can.
3. Played in a band. – Does working the mixer, providing sound effects and being a roadie count?
4. Visited Hawaii
5. Watched a meteor shower - My last one was the Persiedes on my second night with Ginger. August 2007.
6. Given more than you can afford to charity – No to my shame.
7. Been to Disneyland/world – Not one I want to do either. Sorry.
8. Climbed a mountain – A few big hills though.
9. Held a praying mantis
10. Sang a solo
11. Bungee jumped – Think I might pass on this one.
12. Visited Paris
13. Watched a lightning storm at sea.  - long time ago when I had a yacht.
14. Taught yourself an art from scratch - Drawing
15. Adopted a child
16. Had food poisoning. - After a British Airways flight from Mumbia (India)
17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty
18. Grown your own vegetables
19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France
20. Slept on an overnight train - Hyderabad to Bangalore (India)
21. Had a pillow fight
22. Hitch hiked
23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill - Only once in my working career.
24. Built a snow fort
25. Held a lamb
26. Gone skinny dipping - Just try and stop me.
27. Run a Marathon – I’d like to try maybe a tenth of one?
28. Ridden in a gondola in Venice
29. Seen a total eclipse - France 2000. I want to see more.
30. Watched a sunrise or sunset
31. Hit a home run
32. Been on a cruise
33. Seen Niagara Falls in person
34. Visited the birthplace of your ancestors
35. Seen an Amish community
36. Taught yourself a new language - Does pidgeon Italian count?
37. Had enough money to be truly satisfied
38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person
39. Gone rock climbing
40. Seen Michelangelo’s David
41. Sung karaoke - On about the second or third day of a new job. Surprised I made it to the fourth day.
42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt
43. Bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant
44. Visited Africa
45. Walked on a beach by moonlight - Often, but almost always on my own.
46. Been transported in an ambulance
47. Had your portrait painted. – My recent nude.
48. Gone deep sea fishing
49. Seen the Sistine Chapel in person
50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris
51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling
52. Kissed in the rain - With Ginger on June 22.
53. Played in the mud - What kid hasn’t.
54. Gone to a drive-in theater
55. Been in a movie - Tommy, along with most of the students in Portsmouth.
56. Visited the Great Wall of China
57. Started a business. - Four so far.
58. Taken a martial arts class
59. Visited Russia
60. Served at a soup kitchen
61. Sold Girl Scout Cookies
62. Gone whale watching – This is a must.
63. Got flowers for no reason 
64. Donated blood, platelets or plasma
65. Gone sky diving
66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp
67. Bounced a check
68. Flown in a helicopter
69. Saved a favorite childhood toy - Being shipped to the US right now.
70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial
71. Eaten Caviar
72. Pieced a quilt
73. Stood in Times Square
74. Toured the Everglades
75. Been fired from a job
76. Seen the Changing of the Guards in London
77. Broken a bone
78. Been on a speeding motorcycle
79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person
80. Published a book
81. Visited the Vatican
82. Bought a brand new car
83. Walked in Jerusalem
84. Had your picture in the newspaper – I’m sure this has happened but I can’t remember. Been in quite a few trade mags.  
85. Read the entire Bible
86. Visited the White House
87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating
88. Had chickenpox - Yes and I was thirty something at the time.
89. Saved someone’s life. - Twice. I pulled someone from a building that was on fire; restarted a girl’s breathing.
90. Sat on a jury
91. Met someone famous
92. Joined a book club
93. Lost a loved one - Parents, Grand parents, aunts and uncles.
94. Had a baby - I contributed towards two. Does that count?
95. Seen the Alamo in person
96. Swam in the Great Salt Lake
97. Been involved in a law suit
98. Owned a cell phone
99. Been stung by a bee. Bastard crawled up the leg of my shorts.

My Last day at work

Today was my last day at work. This is what I said to my friends and colleagues.

We are here because of a dream, my family would say a mid-life crisis, and they are not far wrong, I just consider it more a mid-life review and re-planning exercise.

 

Dreams are strange things, when we are young we have such wonderful dreams for how our lives will play out, everything is black and white, and everything is possible. Then the reality checks set in, and we find that rather than being black and white, life tends to be a grey blur. Our dreams get buried under responsibilities and day-to-day trivia. Then over time they get forgotten and lost.

 

I forgot my dream. Then in 2006 I took up photography again, and in January 2007 took on a project to take a picture of myself every day for a year. I was shocked and appalled at what I saw – a miserable old sod, and I remembered my dream, realised I’d lost it, and vowed to do something about it.

 

Wow!!

 

Six months later I was getting divorced.  While taking my pictures, I made lots of friends around the world, and I started exchanging e-mails with one person in particular, discussing our pictures, and then our lives. Within 15 days of ever increasing e-mails we realised that we were twins and meant to be together. We fell deeply in love via mail and phone, and decided to get married even before we met.  Within seconds of meeting for the first time we knew we were incredibly lucky to have found each other. We are two sides of the same coin.

 

So this move is not new to me, it’s been planned for the last eighteen months, ever since Ginger asked ‘how are we going to do this?’ and my answer was –  ’don’t worry honey, I’m a project manager… and sorting out problems is what I do.’

 

The schedule slipped a bit from the original plan. But we reviewed it in March and we have been spot on or ahead of schedule ever since. We have had huge hurdles to overcome, visas, children, families. Most of them are now sorted. but there are loads more still to come, but the good news is that we will get to face them together now.

The message I’d like to leave? Don’t forget your dreams.

 

That’s the end of the serious bit.  

 

Over the last few days I’ve been musing on how you will all cope when I’ve gone.

• Who is going to run interference with the senior management and attend mind numbingly boring meetings so that you can concentrate on your day jobs?
• Who will tell Susanne & Linda to go home?
• Who is Leo going to be able shout at, who won’t (normally) take offence and turn round and slap him one?
• Who is going to try and steal resources from Beccy?
• Who is going to address Susanne by her proper, given name? And,
• Who is going to continue teaching her, by example, how to swear properly?
• Who is going to drive people nuts with pedantic critiques of the layout and grammar of reports and documents?
• Who is going to disrupt the office by sitting in the corner muttering and making distracting comments?
• Who is going to keep the Student Union shop going by buying flapjacks everyday?

And most importantly,

• Who will turn the meeting room lights off?

Of course there are several advantages of my leaving:

 

For the next six months I can be blamed for every lost e-mail and file, every project that starts to over-run, update that goes wrong and all the  undocumented or mis-documented process. I will have mysteriously placed an order for 10 flat bed scanners delivered without document feeders, and I have probably unwittingly renewed Peter Sandholm’s contract for another 12 months.

 

after that however, you are on your own.

 

Over the last eighteen months I’ve come to realise just how little we really know about each other, and in my case in particular, how little I knew about myself. I like to think of us as being like icebergs. There is only ever a very small proportion of our true selves showing. For example I’m sure that only a very few of you know that a substantial number of my self portraits are nudes. One of which was used for a drawing, which last night some friends presented a copy to me as a going away present….

 

This is a time of rapid change, anxiety, and frustration, where tempers sometimes fray, it is good to remember how little we know about each other, and stop and remind ourselves that behind our colleagues’ work facing exteriors is a person just like us, with hopes, aspirations, fears and of course dreams.

 

So, be kind to each other and I’d like to say ‘thank you’ for how kind and helpful you have all been to me. It’s been a pleasure working with you all.

 

When I wrote my speech I didn’t know who my successor would be, but we do now, so I’d like to break with tradition and finish by giving her a gift…

Robert’s new flat

After a weeks’ delay, Friday night saw Robert borrowing my car to finally move out of the family home and into his own flat. Today Ian Marcelle and I got an invitation to visit.

It is a super little place, completely refurbished, nicely finished and with everything he needs. For me the first thing to get wired in is the stereo. For Robert it is the games console.

Time Machines

Robert borrowed my car tonight to move his stuff into his new flat. Before he took the car I had to empty out a box full of old (1990’s) work diaries that I had left in the back of the car after I did a last scout around the house for anything I’d left behind.

I thought it would be fun to show them to Ginger, and it was, until I was stopped dead in my tracks as I discovered a personal diary I had written off as lost forever. I knew that in it was my first rambling attempts to describe what was wrong with my marriage. Something I’d told Ginger, and others about but had never been able to find until now.

It was a very emotional read, and I’ve not yet re-read the whole thing. What it did do, was bring home to me how even in 1990 I wanted to finish my marriage, but didn’t have the courage to do so. It also showed how I wished for a partner to share my life with, and not just someone to raise kids with.

And there on the eighth of October 1990, was a frightening precursor to the financial mess I now find myself in.

Gary by Nathan

Back in August I was asked if I would mind if one of my pictures was used for a drawing.

I don’t really understand why, but at first I was very reluctant. I’ll admit to be asked was flattering, and my pictures are out there for people to look at, so why not? I decided to to keep quiet about it, as my main concern was that I hadn’t seen any of the artist’s work.

I had no need to worry. The preliminary sketches were very good, so it was just a matter of waiting for Nathan to finish.

Today I got a mail and a link to the completed picture, and I was able to surprise Ginger with a link. So Nathan, thanks for asking, and thank you for an excellent drawing.

Identity Crisis

More proof if I needed it that my family is awkward.

My mother’s Christian name is a little different, being a combination of two fairly common names into something a little more unusual. When Ginger was staying I told her the story of my mother’s name, producing my birth certificate with a flourish as proof. I then had to eat my words when I saw her name wasn’t spelled the way I thought it should be.  I had to make an excuse about the story behind her name obviously being a family myth.

Two months later and I’m filling in visa paperwork and once more pull out my birth certificate to double check I’m getting my mother’s name right, and I’m wondering how Ginger got it wrong on the form she completed as an example for me. So I checked the photograph I have of my mother’s grave, and found her name spelled differently, in fact spelled the way I always thought it should be. I then checked her will and bank book which I still have. They all agreed on the spelling but that isn’t how her name is spelled on my birth certificate, so which spelling is correct? It was time to call in help. I ‘phoned my sister. She confirmed that the spelling on my birth certificate is the same as that on my mother’s passport and marriage certificate. Okay. So somehow it was wrong in her will, and that was how it got wrong on the gravestone; or was it? I asked Sis to check mother’s birth certificate, and the spelling there is that on her will and gravestone. So my birth certificate is wrong, and so is our parents’ marriage certificate.

At this point hysterics set in as I and my sister called each other illegitimate, a practice to be repeated later in the day when I caught up with my brother. We will never know what happened. My mother registered my birth so we can’t blame our father for getting it wrong. Maybe she wanted it to match the name on their marriage certificate, or maybe, back in the days of manual typewriters she couldn’t be bothered to get the Registrar to re-type my birth certificate, or maybe she just didn’t notice. Further checks showed that her name is correct on my brother’s birth certificate. In the course of my investigations I found out my brother misspelled our father’s Christian name on his marriage certificate!

So what did I put on the visa paperwork? The name that appears on my birth certificate, as that is the only document I have that ties my mother’s name to me. It is no wonder people have trouble investigating their family trees.

A typical example…

…of why everything takes so damned long.

I scanned my Visa application instructions for Ginger, and so that a copy can be put on the www for others to see (the version online right now is out of date).

I had just finished when I realised the first page had all my personal details on it, and so I had to scan it all over again.

Resignation

I have to give three months’ notice at work. So linking the end of my employment to having my US Visa is a nightmare. Despite all the warnings on the Visa paperwork not to do anything rash before one’s Visa is approved, I don’t have much choice but to second guess when the Visa will be sorted and resign.

With a planned travel date of 28 November, I put in my resignation today, giving me a final working date of Friday 21 November. That leaves me a week for final preparations.

My little car

Once petrol went over a £1 a litre I noticed an interesting phenomena. Suddenly most of the big gas guzzling SUVs, BMWs, Mercs and Audi’s et al started cruising at modest speeds in the inside lane leaving the fast lane free for nippy little compact cars like mine to zip along.

I’ve always thought SUVs were a half baked idea in a country where most people couldn’t find somewhere off road that wasn’t a car park. So the fact they now have to pay excessive sums of money to keep the unnecessary things motoring amuses me. As for me, my little Fiat Punto gives me nigh on 500 miles from a tank of fuel, and I’m ashamed to say it but I also love the colour.

Confession: I guess I ought to admit it; I used to own two huge Volvo saloons…

Graduation

I was deeply upset when I missed Robert’s graduation last year, but there was so much angst and animosity surrounding our separation I just wasn’t welcome. At the time I tried to make up for it by helping out with Graduation at work, it didn’t really help and I felt very depressed.

So it was great to be able to go to Keith’s graduation, and good that Robert could be there too. Because Robert couldn’t stay for the official photographs Elaine and I took some of the three of us. Someone offered to take a picture of us all, but Elaine said no thanks. I think that was a shame, and it was a pity she wouldn’t agree to an official picture of the three of us.

Elaine has yet to come to terms with the fact that we are all still part of a family no matter what has transpired between us. We will need to work together on family issues at some point, and the sooner we adapt to that the better. I guess this might change slowly over time. we’ll see. However, I think it will be a shame that in 20 year’s time when Keith looks back at the day, that there isn’t a picture of us all together. We were all there. Maybe if Elaine had walked out on me, I’d be reluctant to let her rejoin the family. I guess I’m just a delusional optimist to expect the family to be able to function again.