Right!

Okay, first of all, some bizarre twist of fate has destroyed the slideshow I had running on my account of the towers getting knocked down. Let me go and fix that this instant: (01:21).

01:27 - RIGHT they're working again.

Okay, so what have I been up to?
I would say "not much" which given my current situation, you'd be forgiven for believing. And you'd also be wrong.

In all honest, I've been "making", yes "making" as opposed to buying, a christmas present. And yes I've been spending 12 hours a day for about the past 6 days exceeding my bandwidth limit, wearing the letters off my keyboard, crashing my computer through lack of memory, and generally doing sincere family christmas work while cunningly looking like I was selfishly spending time on my computer...

Right... Let's get in the mood.

It's 04:29, the window is open, the smell of wet asphalt and bonfire smoke drifts in through the window, the lights are out, and this is on... Don't worry, I'll wait, I don't mind if youtube is slow (It has amazing guitar solos anyway).

So what has been happening recently?

Well, as my somewhat hasty blog hinted, I've not been up to much. nothing outside the house at least. I've been taking Christmas pretty seriously though, and have been working, as I said, for 12 hours a day, on a christmas present for one particular person. I'm not going to go into detail just now, maybe in a couple of month's time.

So what else has been happening? My fitness has improved. Far from considering 10 minutes the absolute ragged edge of my running, I've settled into a steady pace and can now run for 20 or 25 minutes, longer even. My training, as per the army "pre recruitment fitness" thingy seems to go well, and not before time it seems.

My dad has renewed his efforts to get me to go into the police, which is, for him, fairly alarming. It seems that with my dad's insistence that I go into the police, and my mum's continuous statements that I "won't be available" for their 2009 years in Italy, it semes they're finally convinced that the Army is where my future lies.
Good. I'd never really been 100% convinced. Now maybe the family's beginning to take it seriously. I can just get on with it,

The time draws closer, I'm getting fitter, and sooner or later I'm gonna have to sign on the dotted line, which both scares me and exhilarates me. I don't want to spend the rest of my life in crappy dead end jobs. And as for this recession? the future remains to be seen I suppose.

Civilian employers are hardly likely to be hiring. Which is fair enough, considering I wouldn't take a civilian job for than a couple of months. The world is falling to bits, financially, politically and militarily.

It seems that no one is assured of an easy life, and at least at the sharp end, I get to take some shots in anger, of my own. Let's see what happens.

I'll keep you updated.