Re: The Old Favorite

In your message regarding Re: The Old Favorite dated 07/08/2014, Bernard
Peek said ...

I'm still here too.

I'm still alive, well, most of me is - not sure about the contents of my
skull sometimes.

I'm still mostly out of work. At the back end of last year, I did work for
a few months doing door-to-door charity fundraising - the equivalent of
mugging somebody on their doorstep with the additional joy of interrupting
their dinner, putting the kids to bed, making new babies etc... My team
leader was barely literate and wasted half of our knocking time on endless
visits to shops and cigarette breaks, which cut into my actual productive
time and thus my success rate. After a few months, the lack of sufficient
results meant I was out of there.

I did do some contract work at the beginning of the year, which was good,
but that is likely to be the last of it as they client is moving away from
the technology they need me for.

I've been volunteering in a charity shop since the beginning of last year,
and since early this year, I am now trained up as a relief manager, so I
get to manage the shop on occasions and get paid for it. I did quite a few
days recently, helping at another shop where they were short a manager, but
they have now got a new one in place (sadly, not me, though I did apply).

Shock horror, I've not been doing a lot of reading lately... slowly working
my way through Piers Plowman to brush up my Middle English, reading stuff
about John Dee and various bits of light reading, such as Pratchett,
Butcher etc.

I'm doing a lot of reading online, and a lot of writing - playing the
character of Nathaniel in a Second Life RPG - or, as I prefer to call it,
collaborative story-telling. That's two lots of writing, because there was
what I do during the RP sessions, and then there is writing Nathaniel's
diary in the form of a blog. There are two of them - different timelines of
the same character, though one is horribly out of date[1].

I'm also in a writers' group on SL - we get together once or twice a day to
do a "dash", which is an exercise where we write something for 15 minutes
based on a one-word prompt. Most of mine are from the same setting I used
for two entries[2] on the THWC (for those that remember that). In between,
I write others stuff when it occurs to me. I've become occasionally popular
for helping people create character back-stories for SL role-play.

Still muddling along with SCA stuff, though it often frustrates me. Like
any other walk of life, you have to deal with idiots that make you question
why you bother. Feeling good about it at the moment as we finally succeeded
in getting a good friend of ours elevated to the peerage as a Pelican this
weekend. The weekend also included a very enjoyable visit to a privately
owned medieval manor house. Plans are being hatched as it could be a good
place for an SCA event of sorts.


OK, that'll do for now.

Ian
[1] There are two timelines, because I got invited to play Nathaniel in a
modern setting. Rather than skip a few hundred years, I forked the time
line at the point where he left London in 1891...

http://nathanielballard.wordpress.com/ - the main Nathaniel timeline -
currently about a month behind on updates - Nathaniel is somewhere in
Faerie and has no idea when he is, though he suspects about 300-400 years
before he was born

http://sevenseasofwhy.wordpress.com/ - in the other timeline, Nathaniel
didn't get shipwrecked and end up out of time. He made it to Germany,
failed to find his sire, returned to England and became an
importer/exporter and lived to the present day. This blog is about 3 or 4
months out of date (there being a big gap between one sim closing and
another opening). Currently, he is in New York and owns a pub. I will get
to that eventually.

[2] The first two THWC prompts -

http://seouthcearu.wordpress.com/the-moving-finger/windseeker/storm-friends/
the prompt was Raggedy Ann in a storm
http://seouthcearu.wordpress.com/the-moving-finger/windseeker/storm-friends/
the prompt was takes place in a bowling alley



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