The Green Goblin Blog

Into the last quarter of the season and there are a mere 4 points separating the top 8 teams. Admittedly this gap will increase when Birmingham play out their games in hand but it is still amazingly tight at the top. Normally by now there are a few teams pulling away as dead certainties for promotion and then a handful fighting over the Playoff scraps. This time, though, it is anybody's guess what's going to develop. One thing I can see, though, is that Wolves' poor goal difference may be critical at season's end.

		P	GD	PTS
1	West Brom	35	23	63
2	Derby	34	9	63
3	Birmingham	33	18	61
4	Sunderland	35	16	60
5	Southampton	35	17	59
6	Cardiff	35	14	59
7	Preston	34	12	59
8	Wolverhampton	35	3	59

To achieve this masterpiece of parking involved leaving a carpark at a sedate speed and deciding not to follow a gently curving road. One can only assume that the use of a mobile phone played a major part rather than the major failure of the steering sub-system.

One of the (many) things I like about the restaurant at work is that they aren't afraid to feed you weird stuff. Today one of the side orders was "roasted red pepper with quinoa". Quinoa? What on earth is that? Looked like some kind of grain and tasted fine. Also it was easy to eat which was a high priority for me, having been to the dentist recently.

Intrigued, I had a browse on Wikipedia and discovered that quinoa, sacred crop of the Incas, is a pseudograin grown in the Andes that the UN has classified as a supercrop. As Peru, Bolivia and friends only produce 60,000 tonnes a year, I'm not surprised I hadn't heard of it - in contrast, the world produces 700 million tonnes of rice.

The dentist successfully fitted an implant into my jaw this morning. It's starting to ache a bit now as the anaesthetic slowly wears off. In another 3 months the jaw will have healed round it so that a crown can go on top. I'm now under dentist's orders to drink orange juice every day to help the bone grow.
As you can see from the picture, it looks suspiciously like a tracking device. Have to see if I set off airport metal detectors.

Review to follow

Labels: Comedy

Was encouraged to visit A&E so someone could check my back to see if it was anything serious so ... anything for a quiet life. Only took an hour of waiting before someone saw me, which wasn't too long. I'm glad it wasn't really busy. They didn't ask why we had turned up - wasn't exactly an "A" or an "E", more like a doctor's appointment - but were very professional, helpful and gave us as much time as we needed. His interpretation was that the cessation of regular exercise (cycling to/from work) since Sue left work and freed up the car for me has not been a positive move considering my sedentary worklife. Damn. I was really enjoying the warm drive in the cold. Plus point is that it may be time again to have those Friday morning back massages at Microsoft's WellBeing Centre (£25/half hour).

Great. Today my lower back has siezed up. Received wisdom is that this may be down to all the coughing and sneezing that has been going on through the week and how this can build up strain on the back.
This happened a few years ago, summer of 2002, which encouraged me to make use of the professional masseuse at the corporate Wellbeing Centre. I only stopped my pseudo-monthly 30 minute visit when the price rose from £20 to £25 as I felt it a trifle indulgent.
Moving around has become an interesting trial. Walking around isn't a big issue but getting into and out of a car or bed has become challenging as the body twists aren't as easy as they used to be.
All in all, a pretty poor week.

For some reason, every now and then, the chorus from an old Vapours tune comes into my head:

"What am I supposed to do
Sitting here in this eternal zoo
With no shoes on"

from "Here Comes The Judge", the B-side to the classic masturbation song, "Turning Japanese".

Obviously strikes a chord for me in some way.
Must give it a spin on the gram-o-phone some time...

No, we didn't leave the door open all night - the car IS still there.

Doesn't this look like the nicest place on earth to work? Battleship Grey in the winter looks so gulagesque.

Two days now of being ill and off work - I don't think I've been this "lucky" in the sickness stakes since I caught chickenpox in 1995. Normally I am ill at the weekends or maybe starting in the afternoon and gone with a good night's sleep. Of course, this week is a great time as my work colleague is now in the US at a technical conference and there's no-one else in the office to do our work!
Yesterday was weird. I'd lie in bed for an hour or two at a time, not really sleeping but only able to concentrate on one train of thought. Come this morning and I try to put into words what I was thinking yesterday and it's all gone. It made sense at the time so I must have been really ill.
This morning we had to get up at 8am to make sure the kitchen was cleared ready for the boiler repair man to wave his magic wand and bring heat again to a frozen world.