Pete Ashton’s Blog

It occurred to me that I hadn’t updated the blogroll thingy on the main page for an age, but I’m slightly reluctant to update it because it’ll only get old again. There are ways of making it dynamic and such but in the meanwhile I’m going to go through my Bloglines account and pick out some of the blogs I’m currently enjoying. I was going to do them all at once but cycling uphill into a gale rather took it out of me tonight so it’ll be a serial. Hold me to that, okay?

Stupidmonsters, Gary Northfield’s stripblog, has been somewhat quiet of late as he’s been developing the excellent Derek’s Diary, “the day to day ramblings of a sheep in a field”. I think this could be the first instance of a Beano character having his own blog.

Robot Alert! is the blog of Matt Broersma, Birmingham-based-Texan-cartoonist-published-in-France and friend of mine. He usually blogs about robots.

Cleanskies, the LiveJournal of Jeremy Dennis, is always good value for words links and pics. A prime example of how a LJ can be consistently excellent and still intrinsically part of the LJ world. Jeremy has a new Blogger blog and does the wonderful Weekly Strip because she’s also a cartoonist of note.

LinkMachineGo was one of the first weblogs I ever came across in 2000 and it’s still exactly the same, one link a day, every day, which is a testament to Darren in some way or other.

PlasticBag was also one of the first blogs I saw and it’s been weird watching Tom grow into something of a major player on the international blogging scene, hanging out with Cory and IMing Mena. More “supplementary links” than blog entries of late, but they’re often good quality.

Thinkbottle is Jim McBride’s stripblog. Nice blocky art and strips about pebbles.

The Coffee Grounds by my man Jez. Nuff said.

Hydragenic I raved about here. Still applies.

More to follow…

So Saturday night was my monthly drinking with the gang session which I was looking forward to having missed the last one due to the silly job and what with this, along with the occasional cinema trip with Andy, being pretty much my social life these days. Not so many of the chaps were there and it looked to be a fairly relaxed night, which was probably a good thing, but while at the bar I noticed a box of black cigar cases next to the spirits containing Absinth. Thinking this rather noteworthy I informed the table and John immediately went to check them out. Then, on buying a round later on, he returned with five tubes and handed them out. And then Phil went to the bar and returned with another five tubes. And then John repeated the exercise. And then it all went a little fuzzy. At about 10.30 I decided that in this state I really didn’t want to be stumbling around Birmingham trying to find a minicab to get home so I gathered together my will power and headed for the bus. I must have gotten on one as I remember getting off it but not much else. The next day Phil phoned me asking what had happened as he’d blanked out in the pub and when he came round everyone had gone. I wasn’t much help.

Anyway, so I’d woken up with something of a hangover and my phone beeped with an incoming text message from brother-in-law Jeff asking me to phone sister Lucy at our mother’s house. Which sounded far too ominous to be dealing with in my state so I went back to sleep. When I finally rose Sam told me Lucy had called and could I ring her back. There was some kind of family crisis going on. I didn’t really feel in the right state to deal with whatever it was but the longer I put it off the more I speculated on how bad it could be, so a cup of coffee later I picked up the phone.

It wasn’t as bad as I thought. As you know, Lucy had a new baby over Xmas and Spike joins Isobel who is 16 months old. On top of this, Lucy developed Anemia after the birth so her tiredness levels were up. Last week coping with two babies on top of this had become an issue so she’d gone to stay with mum for a bit, but then mum started having coping issues too. A sensible long term plan had to be sorted, and quickly, or else everything was going to go to shit. Which is where I, the brother with far too much free time and no commitments, come into play.

Next week I’m going down to Banbury. They’re essentially employing me as home help, doing the housework, shopping, feeding and entertaining Isobel and all the relatively minor jobs that tend to build up so that Lucy and Jeff can firstly recover from the last few weeks of hell and make some plans for dealing with this long term. Whether than long term involves me remains to be seen. I might take to this baby-stuff well, I might run screaming. But at the very least it’ll be a change from the agency work and a chance to get to know my neice a bit better.

Well, I had a full week of work all sorted, but then my back went, which is really annoying after weeks of not having the work I wanted. It’s not the end of the world as I appear to have a full five days next week, but even so. I was trying to figure out why I suddenly had this not incapacitating but still rather uncomfortable pain in my middle back muscles given that on Wednesday and Thursday I didn’t do anything particularly hefty. It was all rather puzzling until I realised it was because I’d been stretching in many different and unusual ways. On Monday morning I was at the shitty metalworks assembly place down the road stripping large sheets of sticky back plastic off large sheets of metal, which involved a pulling my arm from an stretched out position in front of me to one behind. When I do this movement now pain jolts painfully. On Monday afternoon I was then cleaning the residue acid off these sheets of metal (we’re talking lemon-juice strength in case you’re worried) with alcohol-soaked clothes with a sideways wiping action. On Tuesday I was back there cutting large pieces of, I dunno, spongy plastic sheets with a cottony-type backing I guess, into 6 ft long strips using a stanley knife, then gluing them onto large 6ft long pieces of steel. This involved a number of moves. First the cutting motion, then the lifting of the steel onto the table, then the application of the evil glue using a roller, then the lowering of the finished product back onto the floor. On Wednesday I was at the Land Rover factory doing an inspection job on the line which involved getting in and out of about 200 cars. Nothing too hard but firstly I’m not used to getting in and out of cars and secondly there’s a fair bit of twisting involved, especially as I was never actually sitting properly, just perched there with one leg hanging out while I leaned over to tick a box on a piece of paper stuck in the window. On Thursday it was the same and I started to feel a little tired, like I was coming down with some kind of flu and my body was aching. On the bus home I couldn’t get comfortable. Okay, that’s not news, but every time I shifted the pain came. Today I was supposed to be working at an art print warehouse in Erdington, the same company I worked for in May last year only they’ve relocated. I was going to cycle down there, not out of choice really (having gotten caught in a torrential storm the other week I decided not to cycle again until the spring) but because getting the bus would take far too long, but when I woke up at 4am with the damnable pain I figured, nah. Lifting stuff just ain’t the right thing for me to be doing right now, and cycling with a fucked back is just not a good idea. So I phoned in before the agency office opened and left a nice message.

So it’s DVDs and AVIs for me today (did you know you can Torrent the Daily Show?) and a nice flat hard floor. I think it’s just bruising, nothing more serious, and should be cleared up by tomorrow. And I just heard I’m going to the art-print place after all on Monday for a full week. Which is good as it’ll be a little more civilised than I’ve been used to of late. The only thing that’s worrying me is this time last year it snowed, really badly (remember?) and I’m going to be cycling about 10 miles there and back. Ah well!

Touch wood, this could be a week of full employment, which will make a change. I might actually be able to buy a drink for someone other than myself on Saturday. After a couple of days at the grotty Kingstanding factory I’m off to Landrover in Soluhull to do something or other and the commute means I probably won’t be posting anything until the weekend. So taking advantage of that I’ll be turning the tables with another survey. This is for regular readers, meaning you come here at least once a week and have done so for at least a month.

1) Last year I asked if anyone read the blog in an RSS reader. Pretty much everyone didn’t know what RSS was. Has anything changed a year on?

2) If you do use RSS, do you use the individual feeds or the combined feed (called http://peteashton.com/all.xml)

3) This site consists of 5 sections, the weblog, the linklog, the mp3blog, the podcast and, indirectly, the Flickr photostream. Which do you follow, in order or preference please.

4) What sort of posts work for you, subject-wise? Is there anything you’d like me to write / post about?

5) Finally, and most interestingly for me at the moment, how would you like to see the site develop? I’m thinking about the technical side here - layouts, navigation, archives, that kind of thing. Bear in mind that I can do pretty much anything with this data. It doesn’t have to be useful - cool and interesting is good enough.

Answer as many questions as you care to in as much detail as you can be bothered with. You have until Sunday morning. Thanks!