Category: Blog Post Page 3 of 4

Ours is not a usual office. There was no crazy drunkenness, no inappropriate canoodling, but we did have colouring!
We generally work remote from each other today, so although we know our close team members really well, some of the wider team members we don’t meet and we hardly know them. The Christmas party is a great opportunity to meet with them and show them who we are.
This years was today, and went quite well. There were a few games and quizzes for the team to play, but I love that they had thought of the introverts and provided colouring sheets and origami for us to do if we were feeling overwhelmed or shy. I coloured in a bus and I made a origami Christmas tree.
Actually tho, most of the stuff was really good. We had to submit 3 words for use in a game, and the words were a hilarious mix, people like me had submitted ‘cat’, dog’, ‘tree’ etc, but others had submitted jargon words from the work we do like ‘bicycle hanger’, ‘west midlands combined authority’ and names of our various chief executives. It was kind of like charades, we had to describe the words so people could guess them, the first time there were no rules, the second time only one word and the third time with no words. Fortunately Rad’s sign language skills came in clutch!
We also had a quiz where all the answers were related to Christmas – I scored big buy knowing that Alan Shepard was the first American in space.
Sadly I had to reject the food, because a ton of pizza was not good for my IBS, so they bought me a random box of potato wedges, which I ate, but it was a lot of potato in one go.
I had a nice but unexpected day. Oh also, the prizes for winning were ducks.

Online grocery shopping is a weird thing. Not everyone likes it, and I also understand it’s hardly profitable. However, it makes me feel like I live in the 1800’s and I’m an important count or gentryman. In that scenario the little van that turns up to my door is like a grand horse and carriage. So I can be glad to be keeping up the traditions of my elders, and that I receive my chicken nuggets the same way they did.
So, of course, our water is still not fixed. It comes on a couple of times a day for a few minutes, so we are not entirely without, but it does mean that we need to have simpler food and eat off paper plates – like it’s a childrens birthday party.
Which of course brings me to the topic of ready meals. Now, ready meals are usually something I quickly grab if I’m too tired or lazy to cook. Which means I never really look at them and compare them. But now I have to consider them properly as it is all we can eat. So, I’ve lined them up in order and done the reserach and this is what I have learned:
They are overwhelmingly meals for one. In spite of the 1980’s stereotype that microwave meals are for lonely people, my number one research result is that in 2023 is that ready meals are, in fact, still for lonely people.
If you want a healthy meal – it has to be mixed beans in a plastic pot. They can be from anywhere in the world, theres mexican mixed bean, morrocan mixed bean and indian mixed bean – all in the same plastic pot. But that’s it, that’s the healthy options, there no variety, except in the country name. All of the other ready meals are unhealthy, a 50:50 mix of salt and fat, with some element of flavour thrown at them. With one exception, there are some ‘diet’ready meals. These are much smaller and taste the same as theit cardboard packaging. On the one I’m looking at, the box proudly states ‘Contains salt substitute potassium choride’ – which I’m not sure how to react to.
Soups come up as ready meals in a search. That’s wrong, they are only half a meal. You have to eat something else with soup.
My microwave has taken pride of place in my kitchen. No longer sitting in the corner unloved, only getting used when the coffee has gone cold, it is now the star of the show. It’s happy, but it’s feeling the strain. Once I’ve cooked a family’s worth of meals for 1, it starts going ‘baaaaahhhhh’ instead of ‘hmmmmmmmm’. It still seems to be working, but I think it’s days are numbered.
We are nervous the water won’t be fixed for christmas, to the point where I’m looking on Amazon for a christmas gift for Mrs Rad, I’m tempted by the christmas themed paper plates for the 25th.

Do you ever feel like you don’t get much done in a day? Well today wasn’t one of those – it was three days in a day.
I got up at 7:30am to do parkrun, in fact maybe earlier. I got myself ready and went out. However, It’s always complicated getting ready for the parkrun stream because so much equipment is require and I usually forget something. This morning it was my watch. But I didn’t realise until too late that I would need it. Anyway I went out on the bike, fortunately it was not too cold this morning, so I was able to ride my bnike in shorts and sit outside McDonalds and talk to chat. The reason for getting up so earli, of course, is so that we can get to parkrun by 9am. It was good conditions for running and I felt I did really well, I took an nice pace and I didn’t feel like I overstretched myself. With over 100 5k runs now under my belt I was hoping for a good time. Unfortunately that didn’t come, and I think that was probably because I forgot my watch and couldn’t pace myself. Anyway I trundled back home again via mcdonalds so that I could bring back some food for the family.
Day 2 started at home at 10am. I wanted to laze about the house for a while, and maybe get some sleep, but they turned our water on for a couple of hours this morning (remember this whole saga?) so I had to set to with the jobs. Firstly a quick shower and then to get all the washing into the machine on the super short 15-minute cycle so I can get the stuff out before the water goes off. In theory I also do a Dishwasher load, again on the short cycle, but there wasn’t time before the water broke again. Hopefully this will all be fixed soon. It was supposed to be fixed ‘by the end of the week’ but that has happened, so fingers crossed.
And then finally the third ‘day’ of my day. We went some friend house, that we have known since university – so nearly 30 years. The live in Alvechurch with is about 30 minutes from here on the train. We played some fun board games – one about a pickle and another one about moving magnets about. We also had delicious pizza and some white chocolate that was made to look like it was Camembert. A bizarre experience.
So all in all a nice long day. This is just a record of it.

It’s a slightly bitter story today, but life’s not always a party. The bad days are what make the good days feel better.
Sometime Christmas feels like it starts earlier every year, pine trees in may, Santa in August and Mariah in June. For me, this year has been different, its been busy at work and we’ve had lots of hassle at home and suddenly it’s only 12 days until Christmas day.
So I thought, what a nice plan it would be if I organised some ice skating with work this year. Lots of people told me they would like to go – saying things like they always wanted to go and nobody will go with them. So I decided ‘I can solve this problem’ and i found a date when we could go. I even emailed a few of them before I arranged it to check they wanted to. A chance to emulate Torville and Dean -yes please.
And yet, here we are. We supposed to be going tomorrow. I’ve bought my ticket and I’m ready. And gradually the people have been dropping out. But they don’t say, I can’t go, not at first. They try and soften the blow in the most obvious ways. Message 1 – ‘can I just check how many people are going?’, Message 2 – ‘I can’t go’. Or the classic – message 1 – ‘I think I might be coming down with a sickness bug’ message 2 ‘I can’t go’.
So tomorrow, it may be just me. However, I can’t take this personally. Everyone has been really busy and I understand. I’m gonna make the best of it, and maybe someone will turn up. This ultimate opportunity for me to have a broken leg for Christmas, and I’m not gonna give it up.
I’m also gonna try and bring the stream with me. I’m not sure how happy they will be about me recording but I’ll give it a try if I can. And if you can’t come to stream – remember to make a lame excuse beforehand!
On the slightly brighter side, Amazon gave me a £20 refund on my air fryer.

It’s hard to keep romance alive these days, because of our busy lives, balancing the demands of children and of course with me being generally unattractive. However, I’m here to share the solution – lockdown!
Thanks to the dubious pleasures of homeworking, no longer do I just see Mrs Rad for a few minutes in the morning before it gets light and a few minutes in the dark after work. We get to see each other in the day. I admit daylight doesnt really help the attractiveness thing, but working from home allows us to spend a litlle more time with each other. And sometimes we even get to go on little dates at lunchtime. Which is what we did today – and the location of choice for this date? Tesco’s Cafe.
Tesco is a modern marvel. The most ubiquitous supermarket in the UK, it thrives on it’s general ok-ness. The prices are ok, not the cheapest but not too bad. The decor – uninspiring. The produce? Unremarkable. The staff? Would do anything not to be there.
But it’s available, and it’s close to my house. And they have a little cafe that is the perfect home for my little date with Mrs Rad. She ordered the food while I did a bit of shopping. She sent me a photo of the menu for me to choose what I wanted. When we sat down, I discovered we’d ordered the same thing – Fish and Chips – proving that true love never dies. The only difference was that Mrs Rad had pushed the boat out and had mushy peas, whereas I had garden peas. Psychologists will have a field day analysing what that means about us – two peas in a pod? One squished tho.
The chips were chonky – hom nom nom, but the fish not so much. I was impressed by the amound of care that had gone in to finding one that was as thin and tasteless as the one I had today.
And the best thing about dates in supermarkets – you can go and get large bags of special offer chocolates for pudding.
Its been roughly 3 years since COVID started, and yet it’s legacy lives on in my life in the form of my mini lunchtime dates.

So I’ve broken the world record for the slowest christmas tree decoration. On Saturday night I built the tree and put the lights on it and today, three days later we finished it off with the rest of the decorations.
Why, well our water is still broken and we have been trying to figure it out with the building owner. As you can imagine it’s been a bit of a hassle, and hasn’t left much time for christmas decorations. The issue is essentially that the pump that pushes water around the buidling is broken. The owners and their agents claim it takes them a while to get quotes for a new one whereas we as residents just keep saying that WE NEED RUNNING WATER. Fortunately, I guess, we haven’t been completely without water, it goes on and off sporadically, usually lasting for a few hours when someone resets the system, and they have also delivered us a few bottles of water. Even so we remain frustrated, because it’s 2023 and these problems ought to have an immediate fix.
Tomorrow is another day, maybe it will be fixed then. I’m learning a new song to try and encourage the water supply – it’s raining men!

There are many great examples of domes in the world – the dome on top of St Pauls Cathedral, the Superdome in Louisiana and perhaps greatest of them all, the dome in a garden in West Bromwich where I ate my lunch today.
It was great, but we walked into a buzzing full restaurant of people eating their Sunday lunches, only to be led outside past the bathrooms and into a little garden containing 3 domed greenhouses. It was a surprise, but super cool. The dome was built from hexagonal glass panels and inside was a single table with 8 chairs and a heater. It was also hi-tech, we had a button which was to be used to call the waitress and a Bluetooth speaker, which provided the dulcet tones of Wham to accompany our meal. Sir Christopher Wren himself could not have imagined a finer place to eat an Italian.
If I’m honest, these domes were probably more intended for summer events. It was a rainy day but it had stopped raining by the time we got ther, although I would have been interested to have the experience of eating outside during a rainstorm. The other minor issue was the low winter sun meant it was a little hard to see at times. Fortunately it was England so that problem didn’t last for long.
We were there to celebrate the birthday of Mrs Rad’s mom, so they had booked this special outside pod as a surprise. The food was super nice. There was a normal Italian menu, so pizzas and pastas, but also a set menu of traditional Sunday lunch. I assume that was to cater for the stubborn English crowd, unless Yorkshire puddings are also a Tuscan delicacy.
I had pasta – because when in Rome, and in a dome, you should do as the romans do. It was pretty filling, even more so ones I had the chocolate brownie we had for pudding. I was quite taken by the predicament of the servers bringing us all this food. They came out of the restaurant elegantly, holding high the beautifully presented food, and then placed it on a table outside the Dome. They then had to unzip the dome in order to squeeze in a pass out the plates, then shut the zip as quickly as possible, giving the whole thing more of a camping in a tent aesthetic.
I love these eccentric suprises, and I really enjoyed this meal. It is definitely in the top 3 domes I have eaten in.

So I’m supposed to be shy, introverted rad. I sit in the corner at parties, I struggle to make eye contact, I’m even scared to make a phone call.
But sometimes I do something wild on whim.
And that’s how I ended up on a solo coach trip around Europe with a tent.
When I was 20, I took a job in Middlesbrough. It was a ‘placement year’ from university. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a year in the middle of university where you work for a bit in order to try and pay off some of your student debt. I used to earn £160 per week, and it still felt like the most money I’d ever had!
Because I had almost no expenses, I was able to save a bit – I think I saved nearly £1000, maybe less, and I bought my ‘Eurolines Pass’ 30 day ticket for £149.
In hindsight this was crazy, it was me and a rucksack with a tiny tent and sleeping bag in it. But off I went.
Did I mention that most of the coaches were overnight, so I ‘saved’ money by no having to buy accommodation, but it also meant that I saw less than I thought I would because I was so sleepy.
I seem to remember I spent the first few days in Bordeaux, in a campsite near the beach. From there I headed north to Amsterdam, I think, and then on into Scandinavia where I went to Copenhagen, Gothenburg and Stockholm.
Then I randomly returned to the UK, to refresh myself, I think I had been a bit unwell. Not a surprise. But to finish off in style, I took a 24 hour coach trip from London to Prague, stayed for a couple, of days and came back.
However, for the life of me I can’t remember much about these places. The standard trick was to take a double decker bus tour of the city, because it did the touristing for me, and because I needed to make more buses. I also remember that I’d never really been to Mac Donald before, so It’s definitely how I learnt to eat chicken Mc nuggets,

Ok so, I’ve discovered that 30 days of essay is much harder than 30 days of 5k. It would be so much easier to run to the moon than to have the discipline to write a piece each day. However, it’s late at night and I’m trying. Today has been a hard day, so much stuff going on. Work was hard, home is hard and I’m exhausted anyway, so I’ve just wanted to sleep. Also they’ve changed Discord. But you know, I’ve finally built the Christmas tree. The lights are connected by WiFi, in the most unnecessary but cool Christmas thing ever!! They are currently showing the Italian flag, because Radling 2 wanted it – because we had pizza! It’s so much ‘like father like son’. Hopefully we’ll get some chance to do some fuller decoration tomorrow I need my radish Christmas house. We were supposed to go to London tomorrow, but with everything going on in our lives that’s looking difficult, so hopefully we will have a nice family day at home. So that’s it, that’s the update.
Some days are hard, some days are easy. Bring on tomorrow.

Streaming is weird. This is obviously true because most of us are weirdos. But what I mean more is that it is very unlike anything else in life and can create a lot of moments that are unique to streaming.
So last night we had a great stream, playing the game My Time at Sandrock. We definitely had a wild ride with the character Earnest, all in the space of a single cutscene. Firstly we were thinking he was possible marriage material, then we thought that he was a criminal and finally we watched him destroyed by a 9 year old. And then we never saw him again, he left our lives as quickly as he entered.
But my favourite experience is when we raid somebody, and we get to take the stream to a random person that I don’t know at all on the other side of the world. This was the case last night, where I was just able to raid a streamer from the US who was playing Sandrock. They were really friendly and we had a lovely chat about the game. I think these random connections are one of the nicest things – the person doesn’t have to be anything like me, but we can still just have a little interaction and it’s super sweet.