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I got my first payment from Google Adsense this week for those ads I’ve got running in the sidebars of the archive pages on this site. I’m not allowed to disclose how much it was for but lets just say 6 months of ads would, if I were in the US, buy me an iPod. Since I’m in the UK where we don’t have a stupendously devalued currency they’ll go some way towards buying an iPod. As it stands I won’t be buying an iPod with the cash despite want/needing to replace my aging CD/MP3 player due to the move which might throw up unexpected expenditures and lost earnings. Plus there’s the usual quandary of suddenly having a lump of cash that could be spent on any number of kinda-luxury items (new camera, new hard drive, hypothetical laptop fund) but I think an iPod will win out. I spend a lot of time walking and on public transport and that’s justification enough.

But back to the ads. As I was watching the money add up I realised I was having to invoke some serious self control. Since, as I’ve explained, the ads are clicked on by random people coming here by mistake it’s very tempting to just put them everywhere I have a big block of text, to integrate them obtrusively into my content and to expand them onto other sites I have control over (all those words on BugPowder just sitting there…). If I didn’t have an inbuilt moral distaste for ads stopping me this blog who be positively plastered in them. I had this moment, while looking through the various options available, when I suddenly realised the devil was tempting me and I was starting down a dangerous road, and I literally stepped back from the keyboard. But I still find myself looking at the reports and thinking, “I could double that”. I’ve even thought about writing on subjects that get high paying ads but I couldn’t really be arsed.

It’s a slippery slope and no mistake. Before Google lowered the barrier to entry I had no way of getting into the advertising game. Now I’m in that game and am technically, but only just, blogging for profit. It’s easy to say this sort of thing won’t change you but it can if you let it.

For now, though, the ads are covering my hosting bills and that seems about right.

Yesterday I was finding it a little hard to get going so I figured I’d finally mow the lawn, since the grass wasn’t damp and I could hear many lawn mowers buzzing in the area, before settling down to the computer. It took five hours.

Late last night I realised to my horror I’d run out of tobacco and that the shops had closed, but no worries, Tescos is open 24 hours so once the pubs had kicked out and the likelihood of being jumped by drunks was reduced I bombed down there on the bike. The 1am air had that warm smell to it and having bundled myself up expecting a wee nip in the air I was sweating. Along the way I spotted straggles of inedbriated youths with their shirts off.

To my horror Tescos close their tobacco counter at 10pm when the stop selling booze which seems really odd since there aren’t any legal restrictions on when you can sell fags. Maybe it’s a preventative measure to stop drunks who ran out of smokes in the pub bundling in there but it was very annoying. Thankfully I remembered a bizarro pack of slightly perfumed and very thin Italian fags Sam had left over from when she smoked so I wasn’t completely stuck.

And so today I’m sitting with the patio doors open, a nice warm breeze is floating through the house and the birds are singing. This will all be shattered when the ice cream van makes its rounds but right now it’s quite idylic.

Truly we are out of big coat weather.

(Of course it’ll probably snow next week…)

So I went and I saw the room and the room was larger than I was led to believe, large enough to fit my double-futon-bed-sofa thing and my computer desk and given that it’s a kind of L-shaped attic thing I’ll be able to treat one end as an office and the other as a, well, bed space.

Which means I’ll be moving to Bournville within the next month. I’ll be living with two Andy’s who I shall refer to as Dr Andy, as he’s a PHD-type, and Bookseller Andy, as he’s a bookseller. Yes, that’ll be this Andy.

In the next three or so weeks I need to complete any outstanding webwork as I might possibly be internetless for a little while, sell a bunch of things on eBay (not so much storage space at the new place what with three book hoarders living there) and start packing.

Actual stuff is being shifted on the 21st (Bookseller Andy has hired a van already) and my last day in Kingstanding will either be then or a week later.

Yay!

Do you remember when I wrote about the New Years Eve party at that flat in Bournville? Well, it turns out there’s a spare room there and today I’m going along to see it. Thing is, it’s apparently not a very big room, long-ish but not wide enough for a double bed, and while there is quite a large living room it’s already full of stuff (including a drum kit) and not suitable for a significant amount of computering things. So, as a flat it’s already not ideal. And yet I’m still interested. This post is an effort to articulate why I’m interested so when I come to judge whether I can physically fit my stuff in there I can balance it against the less practical, more emotional reasoning.

As you’ll know, I’m not particularly happy living in Kingstanding. It’s not just tedious suburbia - it’s a chav-infested simmering boil of narrow-minded bigotry and crushed souls. No, really, it is. It’s not just the sort of place teenagers dream of escaping from - its the sort of place teenagers never escape from because there is no capacity for dreaming. And I’ve been living here for, ooh, 19 months now, the longest I’ve lived anywhere since 1995. As I’ve said before, the actual house I’m living in is fine - nice and spacious, well heated, big garden, all that, and my housemate Sam is triffic (I don’t know how she deals with living here although thinking about it she’s out most of the time) but the surrounding area sucks at my soul every time I walk to the shop or get a bus the hell out of here.

Then there’s the social aspect. Other than Sam and her mum off in Aldridge I know exactly one other person in north Birmingham and Phil lives a bit too far to cycle to and off my bus route, plus he works in the city centre so it makes more sense to see him there. Despite not having had a massive social life these last 19 months I do know rather a lot of people in Birmingham (thanks to having been to Uni and worked in the bookshops here from 1995 to 2000) and all of them, except Phil, live south of the centre. Most of them haven’t even heard of Kingstanding.

This wasn’t a major problem when I first moved here. To be honest, after the madness of London and the tranquility of the farm I wanted to just chill for a bit with no distractions and since I was on a budget not being easily tempted to go for a drink or whatnot was a bonus. But I’m getting incredibly itchy feet.

I also need to bounce of other people. I’m lucky in that the people I know, and the people they know, tend to be interesting and creative people, but I don’t see them that often. I’ve said a few times to people that, if I’m going to be working at the computer a lot I could really do with working in some kind of studio or something with like-minded folk. The main reason I’ve occasionally thought about returning to bookselling is that booksellers are nice people to work with and I really want to be around nice people who actually have something to say.

When I went out to Andy’s birthday drinks last Saturday I was acutely aware that the booksellers and musicians in attendance, most of whom I knew, were my kind of people but that, despite living in the same city, I was merely visiting. When I left to get the last bus back home, not having anyone to share a cab with and not wanting to sleep of yet another sofabed after a week away, it really hit me that there was this whole scene going on that I was socially inches away from but at least an hour away from by public transport, and that this was a bad thing. As another example, when delivering leaflets in Moseley I bumped into people I knew and the friend of a reader of this blog spotted me. Again, I was visiting but it felt like home, or that it should be home. That wouldn’t have happened in Kingstanding.

Now, Bournville isn’t perfect - In fact current tenant Andy did ask me if I really wanted to live in Bournville - but it’s a major step in the right direction. Walkable to Selly Oak, cyclable to Moseley / Kings Heath and there’s a canal towpath right into town. Most importantly nearly every Birmingham resident I know is within a three mile radius or less. Also, the flat is as cheap as I’m paying at the moment (a major stumbling block with moving to Moseley) and, above all, I’d be living with interesting people. Unfortunately they’re both called Andy G but one’s taller than the other. And yes, Bournville is shockingly quiet and reserved but one thing I do like about suburbia is the relative quiet. I’m not sure I could deal with noisy neighbors in three directions in some thin-walled flat on the main road.

It’s easy when you’re in a situation you don’t particularly like, to get hopelessly optimistic dreams about how fucking wonderful it’d be to be out of that situation, but I do think this flat would be good for me. If it wasn’t for the size of the room it’d be perfect, but I’ve lived in tiny rooms before and it’s not so bad. Just a question of organisation and rationalisation.

Okay. That’s that all figured out. Now to see this room…

Following on from back in the day…

Jeremy asked: What do you dream about? Daydreams, night dreams, anxiety dreams, whatever. Do you ever end up dreaming about work?

I heard somewhere, and I think it’s a fairly well accepted theory, as much as theories about dreaming can be, that the dream state is when the archivist in your brain comes it and shuffles everything around, cross referencing all your experiences and putting them in order. In the same way that resting allows your muscles to rebuild, you knowledge base, both rational and emotional, uses this time to get organized so it’s more useful. I like this idea, not just because it’s a cute metaphor but because it goes some way to explaining why my dreams are so realistic.

I don’t mean realistic as in “I was flying over an alien mountain range with dolphins and it was so realistic“. I mean realistic as in really quite normal, so normal I often confuse my dreams with reality.

A favourite story was back in the old fanzine days, circa 1995. I’d been doing a night shift job for a couple of months and had gotten into the habit of checking my mail before going to bed. Rol had sent a copy of his self published comic, The Jock, to which I usually wrote a letter which usually got published. I read said comic and went to bed. A month later the next issues came though and I was mildly pissed off that he hadn’t printed my letter until I realised I’d dreamt it and had believed my dream ever since. And that’s one of the more interesting ones.

I’ve stopped reading novels in bed because if I fall asleep I tend to dream the rest of the story in such a plausible way I can’t find my place again because I can’t find that bit which wasn’t there to begin with.

I frequently dream about people I know, but people I know shouldn’t get weirded out about that because it’s all quite innocuous. I’ll dream about us going to the pub or talking about something innocuous. This again can get confusing later on when I think back to things we’ve talked about, which might explain why I have a terrible memory of conversations I’ve had. To avoid embarrassment I just blank them all out, real or made up by my subconscious.

The dreams tend to be quite short term, so if I’ve met you a few times in the last week the chances are you’ll crop up in a dream but if I haven’t seen you for a few months you won’t. With my current somewhat restricted social life this means that with a few notable exceptions I tend to have quite dull people in my dreams - fellow temps, managers.

I very rarely, if ever, dream about fictional characters. When I was watching whole seasons of Buffy in one sitting characters from that might have popped up, but not in the sense that people usually dream about Buffy, I’m sorry to say.

One difference which does help me tell the difference is that in my dreams I’m always trying to catch up. Events and people are always moving on at a pace I can’t keep up with. This is probably some anxiety thing and nothing to worry about, but it’s rather odd and does make my dreams run at a slightly faster pace than reality, although given how slowly my reality runs right now that isn’t too hard.

Specific details about dreams I can never remember. On the rare occasion that I do have a really interesting dream it’ll fade a few minutes after I wake up.

As I was typing this Sam came downstairs and asked what I was writing about. She’s one of those people who has really fucking odd dreams about quite disturbing things which, at least amongst people I know, seems to be the norm. I’m not sure if I’m jealous or not.

Are boring dreams a bad thing? In some ways it’d be nice to have a really wild subconscious life but at the same time sleep is when I rest and escape from the madness of the real world. When I’m feeling depressed or anxious or scared my immediate solution is to go to bed and sleep for as long as possible because there it all makes sense. I’ll leave the freaky oddness to the real world.

More questions please - I think ones about me, rather that asking what I think about something, are the best. I’m in an autobiographical mood, god help me…

Well, I’m at home for the next couple of weeks and while I’m not bored there’s not much to write about. I appear to be fairly gainfully self employed in the website design lark, at least for a bit, and while that’s great it doesn’t exactly make for good weblog fodder. I could write about my trials with the crontab or describe some neat CSS tricks or Movable Type hacks but to be honest after working on them the last thing I want to do is write about them.

And I think I’ve exhausted the postage potential of tea.

I could write about the election, I suppose…

Or not…

So…

Um…

Maybe I should have a look around and rip someone off see what kind of subjects other people blog about?

Any ideas?