Cardiff Calls

Ah yes. The early get up. The hour long drive to work. The ten hours without a break. Then driving home for another hour. Welcome to the glamour of working in TV.

In all seriousness, it's actually been quite nice to be back inside a production office again. I slowly remembered all the steps and got into the swing of things. I'm only doing cover work so I don't need to be mega onboarded with all the job's various ins and outs, which is a little refreshing. The drive to and from Cardiff is a bit of a bore though, I blazed through the one podcast I was excited to listen to, now I need something else... 

Gourmand Cat

We felt a bit guilty once we got home only to find the cat's automatic feeder didn't go round for her while we were away for 24 hours. We opened up the case and just let her go mental and gorge herself on a buffet of wet and dry meaty bits. Otherwise I did the routine packing of my work bag before starting on another few days of work. I'll be up in Cardiff next week doing some days in a Production Office, hopefully it all goes well. I've had the Sunday scaries for most of the week now, I've been off the wagon for a while now and I just want to do a good job.

Stasis til Curry

Back on a London bound coach to meet up with Rebecca and her family. I managed to finish up the last few chapters of my book club read on the journey and while enjoying some quiet time in the living room. Mostly I was in stasis til the main event if the evening: a curry with some family friends. When the meal was all done they came back round to the house to watch the football game, and the post match commentary. I can't say I was especially excited by the footie but it was a fun evening.

La Dolce Vita

There's an evolving answer to 'best film I've never seen'. Until today I suppose I would have said La Dolce Vita (I guess I'm doing pretty well if I'm scraping the barrel with Italian Neorealist works). I'm working again next week so I thought I'd sieze the day and give the film a shot. I've always heard it's either a self indulgent mess or a masterpiece, and thankfully I lent rather favourably to it. 

I rode that high for most of the day til the evening. A few jobs in Bristol were preparing to wrap up this week and by proxy I got invited to drinks. Somehow I ended up at a wrap party for a job I didn't even work on, I couldn't help spending the whole time giggling to myself about how the hell I got to free karaoke, but I didn't question. It sure is a sweet life I'm living.

De-hermitting

With Rebecca out of town I found myself home along (minus the cat). While I always manage to find ways to busy myself, I must confess that I felt like I've become a mite reclusive this week and needed some human interaction. I was delighted then when Lucy said she'd be in my neck of the woods this afternoon and wanted to grab coffee. We're both going through small patches of unemployment, but as chance would have it we also both just caught wind of some very promising opportunities. I expected us to commiserate over coffee, but we actually did some early celebrating which was lovely. As a double whammy, I played with a group of 12 other people online to do some social deduction. There were a bunch of new people tonight but I got stuck in and chatted away with everyone (when we weren't trying to murder eachother). 

Consider myself de-hermitted.

England VS Argentina 2026

There was electricity in the air all day leading up to the big semifinals. Just moments before kickoff I waved Rebecca goodbye, she's heading up to London before me so I'm staying home with the cat for a couple of days. The first half hour I spent figuring out which device had the most 'live' version of the match. Eventually I settled on the iPad because I remembered that I live in a neighborhood where everyone cheers loudly at their TV's. If anyone started shrieking, that was my cue to turn my head and watch the next time-delayed 30 seconds to see what all the fuss was about. Our goal caused a ruckus, our defeat caused groans, then silence. England's dream died once again at the semifinals. 

Baby Steps

Jamie is currently staying over at ours for a few days and we've both been enraptured by a game I picked up called Baby Steps, in which you control a blubbering man-child up a treacherous mountain. Catch is, the controls and the obstacles are designed to test your patience. You operate each of his legs individually while also influencing his centre of gravity. This means that every step is an ordeal, and every fall while going uphill is a potential catastrophe. In spite of it being intentionally infuriating, it's compelling in a bizarre way. We filled all of our spare time playing it today it felt like. Laughing when we made a slip, undoing several minutes of progress.