I know I’ve been quiet here of late. Three main reasons for this: visitors, notice period, and Tiger Woods 2004.
Visitor-wise, we had Julian up from the far South the weekend before last, and right now we have Abi’s mom staying with us for a fortnight. Blogging is a social activity, but in a virtual context. My computer sits in our living room, and when I’m at the keyboard I have my back turned to the sofas. This is fine when Alex is off to bed and Abi is binding books at the dining room table, but it’s not terribly conversation-friendly when we have guests around.
Then there is the notice period. I handed in my resignation letter at work three weeks ago, and I still have one week of notice period left to work there before leaving. I don’t know how other people feel about it, but I hate working out notice periods. I’m not going to talk about the reasons for leaving my current job, save to say that I was experiencing a certain amount of dissatisfaction with it.
Knowing that I’m going to be starting a new job could have given me the mental resilience to just soldier on for those four weeks, knowing that I didn’t have to be dissatisfied forever, and that fresh challenges lay just around the corner. It didn’t, though. It just made impatient about having to wait four weeks before being allowed to leave all my niggles and gripes behind. It’s like winning the lottery, and then being told that you can’t access your millions until you retire in thirty or forty years’ time.
Well, maybe not that bad, but…WANT INSTANT GRATIFICATION NOW!
I could cultivate a “not my problem any more” attitude, and glide through every working day with the intent of achieving as little as possible, but that’s just not me. Forcing myself to come up with 100% every day, though, is turning into a struggle.
And so in my spare time I have been doing everything I can to leave work behind me. It’s a containment strategy to stop my 9-5 worries from dragging down the rest the hours in the day. Hence: Tiger Woods 2004. Man, that game rocks.
It’s easy to pick up and play, has lovely graphics and well-rendered courses, and above all is immensely absorbing. It usually takes me a little under half an hour to play round 18 holes. Tackling one of the 4-round PGA tournaments takes 2 hours. As you win more money in tournaments and other matches, you can gradually increase the statistics and abilities of your character. Also, there are hundreds of items to unlock throughout the game, from clubs that give extra power and accuracy to your shots, through to lucky shirts and socks that improve your chances of landing in favourable positions in the rough.
So I’ve been losing myself in the land of virtual golf for up to three or four hours an evening. Hasn’t left much time for blogging. But you know what? The rest of the web gets on just fine without me. Wow. Fancy that.