As good as it gets

I went to see the endocrinologist this week. Last time I was well prepared with copious notes on my state of mind and body compiled by Dena and me. At the time he was most impressed and asked to keep them on file as a testament to my current condition and then reduced my dosage as I was obviously more out there than I should have been.

This time I didn't have any notes. Nothing seemed to warrant notes or lengthy explanations. For sure, I was tired but then I had just been to the UK 3 times in 6 weeks- wouldn't that make you tired? Neither Dena nor I had much to write down ahead of the consultation as I arrived I realized that the very fact of not having much to say was a good sign. Sure enough my blood test showed that I now have a normal level of Thyroid hormone in my body. Hooray! (I think at least it is worth celebrating, although when I did celebrate it I ended up with a nasty hangover which I simply would not have had last year if I had consumed the same amount of alcohol.)

I guess I have to conclude that (at my age at least) being able to fly round the world, work from 5:00am till 11:00pm and keep myself turned On and Off using shed loads of coffee and beer simply isn't normal. It seemed to work just fine last year but...well at this point I should admit to you Dear Reader that my experiment last year failed.

You may be the master of your own body, but it's still going to go on strike if it doesn't like your demands.

I am now down to one thyroid suppressant and one heart rate suppressant and as far as I can tell this is as good as it is going to get. (The doctors don't want me to come back for months). So now I need to start exercising again and trying to lead a normal life. But I guess I need to lead a normal life where normal is a little less intense by my own standards. I've started trying to do this, but I am still wondering what is normal.

Do you know?

Another Partner Meeting (APM)

Another year another ARM Partner Meeting and one which I was quite pleased not to be presenting at. However, I ended up presenting twice to our marketing team beforehand so I didn't entirely get off scot free. All in all my ramblings on the future of location based social networking and Mobile Web 2.0 seemed to go quite well and I think I captured the imagination of the audience with my vision of the present and future.

"A bit better than talking about the next version of the tools eh?" my colleague commented.
Hmm... yes I guess it actually really is quite a lot better. Adjusting to my new role has been a bit hard over the past few of months, not helped by adjusting to my slowed down metabolism but I am definitely getting there.

I must admit the novelty of the APM itself has worn thin. Every year it seems to follow the same prescribed formula:
Day 1: Endless meetings which preclude anyone from attending any of the presentations followed by a 7 hour drinking session.
Day 2: More meetings with people looking decidedly the worse for wear (see day 1) followed by a 7 hour drinking session.
Day 3: People leave early looking quite unwell.

Over the years I have managed to embellish my itinerary at the event with such things as coffee and wi-fi in Heffers (the wi-fi at the event never works) and lunches at 7a Jesus lane with partners. The APM ends for me with Prue taking me to the Wrestlers where we can get some decent food and chill before heading on to the office.

This year I didn't go on to the office until late. I spent the afternoon with Zogger walking and talking around Cambridge. It was very pleasant. In fact I would probably say that afternoon was the best part of this whole trip. He took me round the faculties where his late father had worked and where he had been allowed to run free as a boy.We covered a lot of ground, physically and mentally and by the end of that hot August afternoon I felt a lot happier in myself that the future is bright.

There was one other great moment though: The Big(ish) Curry at the very end. Post APM I always try to get my friends together for a final meal and a beer with Zogger and myself and this year was no exception. However, this year was slightly different, Gavin was in town too, so Zogger invited him, and with my new zeal at renewing old friends I decided to give Jamie a call and see if I could persuade him to join us (given that we were only 3 streets away from his house). The last time I saw Jamie was in Feb 2007 for lunch and that was the first time he had been out with anyone for quite a while. Working for Marco for stock and no money had taken its toll and Jamie just couldn't afford to go out anywhere, nor could he afford the time to stop hacking the software for Marcos latest get rich quick(ish) startup. So Jamie had become a recluse and no one in Cambridge had seen him for several years. When Jamie walked through the door of the Cambridge Blue, Andy's face was a joy to behold- he had really missed his old friend. When "time" was called Zogger and I hopped in a cab back to the college and quick final pint at the Mitre which as luck would have it was open until Midnight. Friday came round all too fast and after a few hours sleep is was time to stuff ourselves into our respective metal tubes and head home.

Meanwhile in Tahoe

Dena took the kids up to Tahoe for Betty's 8xth birthday bash. I am glad I didn't see Fiona strapped into this little number until after I got back.



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Clive and Kev

With Marys passing I have become determined to reach out to as many of my old friends a possible before the year is out. If there is one thing we can all learn from her passing it is that friendship is important, having friends is important and if you have friends it's important that you value that and make sure they are doing alright.

And so it was I went out with my two old school pals Clive and Kev for a curry in Burton Latimer. Where is Burton Latimer you may well ask? The years have done something to my sense of local Kettering navigation. I don't know where anything is anymore but luckily the taxi driver did.

Clive are pretty much just the same with the same sense of crass schoolboy humor. I think I laughed as much at seeing them being just the same as they were at 16 as I did at their jokes, but I guess there is no harm in that.

I wish I had brought a camera with me.

The Parcel

I arrived in Kettering today and spent a delightfully quiet weekend with my parents ahead of next weeks madness. My mother says life at her age is something akin to being either treated as a child or a parcel, to be handed off to the next "responsible" adult. Still she doesn't seem to mind too much about this situation. She just observes it and (thankfully) is accepting of it.

My father is somewhat worn out and I don't mean that lightly. Since the whole stress of being on all hours while mother was in the hospital my father has caught up with his age. Ali warned me this was likely to happen. What he did in terms of being there, morning, noon and night would have worn me out and he is 81. His ankles now swell within a couple of hours of getting out of bed to a point where he must where his shoes unbuckled and he is now complaining of breathlessness. He won't get further tests until September. We shall see...

Dinner with Andrew and Sarah

This is my 3rd time in the UK in 6 weeks and I must admit I won't be thinking about coming back for a while. I find traveling quite fun but also quite disruptive. There is the ramp up to the event where your family doesn't like that fact that you are going away and consequentially doesn't like you. There is the knowledge that anything you start doing is going to go onto on hold for the duration of your trip and then there is the ramp down as you try to adjust to "normal" life and normal sleep patterns amid the turmoil of being missed. It sucks and I've had enough of it, but it goes on being required and I go on doing it because it keeps me close to my aging parents and friends...

Today I got off the plane, had a few meetings and then turned up on Andy and Sarah for a curry. Andy was somewhat surprised by the intensity of it all- I pointed out that was nothing compared to last November where I got off to the plane, went to some meetings, had my job taken away from me and went out for a curry.

Our evening was very pleasant despite the jet lag and I ended up playing Andy and Sarah, "Kanute" one of my latest releases and Andy laughed, he totally got it and I was quite chuffed. I still need to get the website done though. Andy commented that it was altogether intensely upbeat from start to finish and might improve with some additional downbeat sections, but Sarah countered with (as I recall) a commentary on a Jane Austin novel which pointed out it was exactly as it should have been [Sarah feel free to comment/correct on my recollection].

In the mind

I went to see my Cardiologist today. It was a strange appointment. I was sure there was something going wrong with my heart, I've lain awake at night listening to it, hour after hour, sure it was going wrong, sure my appointment would flag up something previously unseen, something potentially fatal. I knew I was broken and I knew it was all going to come out when he gave me the ECG scan (my first for several months). I was ready for the worst.
"Hmmm... another boring ECG scan. They were much more interesting when I saw you back in March. Now everything is just normal. Well I won't need to see you 6 months so I'll see you in February."
So what now... my heart is not broken. Does my mind remain broken from the thyroid, or has the whole near death experience left me paranoid and is this normal. I guess I don't know. But at least I know I'm wrong which I guess is good.

Returning to Amsterdam

This week I went to Amsterdam to attend a committee meeting. It's quite a committee- comprising folk from all over the mobile phone industry and it meets every 3 months at locations around the world (next stop Korea). The committee (part of a foundation) is charged with trying to decide what software should be part of its software platform.

It's been a while since I stayed overnight in Amsterdam. In fact I think all my previous trips have a day here or a day there except for one... It was around September 1982 and Paul and I were inter-railing around Europe... We'd arrived in Bergen in Norway only to discover that the Youth Hostel had closed for the Winter! With nowhere cheap to stay it looked like the best thing to do was head back towards Belgium and the boat home, our main stopover being Amsterdam.

It took a while to travel down to the Netherlands and as we rolled through Germany we were joined in the compartment by one other fellow inter-railer. We chatted... he had a box of Jaffa Cakes (half cookie half cake)... we shared and all went well... until we arrived at the Dutch border. By now Paul and I were quite used to the border crossings with the curt guards scrutinizing our passports and tickets. Needless to say Paul and I passed inspection, but our fellow passenger was unceremoniously told to get off the train. He said goodbye to us and headed off down the train platform to somewhere other than Holland. As far as I know to this day this guy was no different to us, just a fellow traveler seeing the world from a train. Except for one thing.... he was black. I've never forgotten that.

Walking from Amsterdam's Centraal Station to the Vondel Park Youth hostel late at night wasn't much fun either. People wanted to sell us stuff that we really didn't want to buy. The Youth Hostel (later featured on an Episode Dr. Who) had very big door which was shut tight and an intercom system that we use to gain access. Inside, every locker had been prised open and the lock smashed. The place looked like the inside of a housing project gone seriously wrong. Robbed once we slept on top of our things, the night passed and we headed off to another country....

As the taxi pulls up to the Vondel Park Hotel on the quiet Vondel Straat I am left with these images and wondering just how different it's going to be. The hotel turns out to be quite delightful. It describes itself as a "Boutique Hotel" which I think means that someone has spent some considerable time looking at every aspect of the interior decor and crowding ornaments, statues, paintings and plants tastefully in it. The overall decor is black and oak. It works for me. My eye is pleased almost everywhere I look and the place feels cozy rather than a museum. It also has a free community laptop which I toy with.

First night the girl serving at the bar is Polish (of course) and rambles away about her life of late night buses and early studies at the University. Second night the guy at the bar is very Gay and seems to find everything is a rush and a stress. The peaceful ambiance is wrecked for me and I decide to eat elsewhere, but before I go I note he has taken time out of his busy schedule to apply first aid to an elderly American tourist who has fallen downstairs and cut his knees open. He is very thoughtful and caring in his attentions despite the whirlwind of customers, checks, orders, specials, drinks turning around him. People who care about people. It's so nice to see this.

The committee meeting takes place at an upmarket Radisson Hotel in Rusland. It has none of the quaint decor of my hotel and is little piece of America in the heart of Amsterdam. Next to the Radisson is the Mars Embassy which strangely enough doesn't seem very busy. Next to the Mars Embassy is BasJoe's Coffee shop where you can buy cappuccino, freshly squeezed orange juice or cannabis or hash. The interior decor is like a coffee shop from the 1960's and I don't mean that it has been done out like a 1960's coffee shop, I mean it is an unchanged 1960's coffee shop. Some of the posters are new and there is a widescreen TV showing the latest SKY sport but apart from that the place is a dusty time capsule. It's as if the coffee shop opened in the 1960s and started selling weed and that was just soooo cool. So cool in fact that there was no point in making any changes or bothering to do anything else. In fact life has just been so mellow since then it really can't get any better.

I've known people who have found God and given their lives to him and others who have found cannabis and given their lives to that. To me there's not a lot of difference. They simply become lost to the outside world and this place embodies that. As the taxi goes round the Dam you can see how much this is a young peoples city, but you can also see the young people who stayed just that little bit too long.



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