Christmas blues…. it’s the house again.

I alluded to the crappy mood I’ve been in these last couple of days in the little Christmas report a couple of days ago. But I still can’t really do any more than that. It’s one of those strange, reasonless depressed states that I seem to fall victim to so easily.

It’s been a strange Christmas holiday really. Very low key. Molly has loved it all of course, and Louise had more time off than she normally gets and enjoyed it as well. But me? I let things get to me more than I should have done, got too stressed out and fed up with things, hit a bout of depression head on just after the big day and just about kicked it in time for New Years.

The house has been playing up again. Again. Some days I really feel we just can’t catch a break with this and there are times when I really feel that, although I wouldn’t change where we live in terms of the town, I’d certainly change where we live in terms of the house. The roof still leaks and the outside walls are showing a few signs of the water penetration coming back. The main problem lies with confidence in the builder. He’s messed us around so much over the 18 months that this has all been going on that if he were to turn up tomorrow and tell me the sky is blue I’d not only go and check but I’d want a second opinion on it.

We’re deep in the complaints procedure with the NHBC at the moment and it really looked for a while that the builder had completely washed his hands of us. Which was great. That meant that the NHBC would have to sort out their contractors to come in and put things right. I’d get my second opinion and all would be well. But then builder boy comes in at the very last minute and says he’s possibly going to be able to sort it out. Not great.

Like every big organisation the NHBC just loves it’s rules and notice periods. So it has to give the builder another couple of weeks to organise something. I’m really hoping that he doesn’t bother. But he’ll just end up getting in touch at the very last minute and stringing it out again. And then if he fixes it and tells me it’s all okay this time, I’m going to be left wondering if it really is. After all, he’s said it was all sorted last time. And the time before that. And the time before that. And the time …..

You get the idea.

Hence no confidence in what he says. We’re seriously considering spending the extra money to get someone independent in if the original builder does do something. It’s worth the extra expense just to have that peace of mind.

In fact, if I had one real wish for 2009, it would be just that: peace of mind over the house. I’ve spent the better part of two years continually worrying about something or other to do with the house and i’d just like the worry to stop.

So that rather sullied the wonderful christmastime I was planning on having. Maybe this time next year I’ll be able to look back on the season with a lighter heart and more enjoyment. Yes, there’s always next year.

Weekend misery – it’s that roof again…..

Oh yes, here we go again, the roof is leaking once more. But this time it’s doing so in a place different from the last time (which was the place the idiot builder was meant to have fixed last time). This time it’s doing so from a place the builder was meant to have fixed the time before last. I swear, if I ever meet that idiot there shall be blood.

Anyway, today has been spent with me in various stages of depressed isolation and misery as I do so very well. When not in misery I’ve been in the attic with plentiful towels trying to mop up the water and stop it getting through to the ceiling below.

As usual, I’ve been feeling crap but Louise and Molly have been absolute troopers, letting me get on with it when I needed to and saying all the right things when I needed to hear them. God knows how i’d get through these times without them to be honest.

Monday morning we’re back on the phone to the NHBC to try to hurry the whole process along. It seems the builder wants nothing to do with it anymore and it’s all with the NHBC now. Although they keep saying they have to give the builder the opportunity to sort out the repairs himself. Too bloody late for that. Anymore waiting and the water damage will start to get really serious. Surely that idioy had his chance when we spent so long phoning him asking him to put it right? We shall see how it develops. If it’s not done before Christmas I think we shall be needing many more towels…

It’s a Wonderful Life ……. Oh yes it is.

Today was a day of surprises, disasters, redemption through film and a shocking realisation…..

So, let me tell you a story…..
The day started out much like any other Sunday; slowly, tiredly and with a blistering headache. Our plan to head off to York to see some Christmas stuff and do a little shopping was altered slightly when I got the idea into my thick head to get the car washed today. Realising none of the car washes would be working due to the freezing weather but I figured we’d head out to the hand car wash on the A1079.

Off we went and joined the queue. The long queue. But my wonderful wife and child agreed that we’d stay in the queue as we might as well get it all done now. Time passes, we snake slowly forward in the queue as each car comes out glistening. It’s freezing cold, the heater’s on and the radio is keeping us company.

Can you see where this one’s going? All that electrical stuff on and the car stopped without the engine running?

Yes, I went to turn it on and got nothing. Just that sickening click, click, click of a dead battery. I’d love to say I handled it well. Love to be able to say that I kept completely cool. But I didn’t. I did the works, got upset, shouted about how unfair it all was and what a crappy day it was. Moaned about the money it was going to cost to get fixed, shouted a lot and upset Louise and Molly.

To skip to the end, we got a jump start, drove home and since then I’ve turned it over a few times during the night and all seems well. Whether it will be okay in the morning I have no idea; guess I’ll find out in the morning. Molly and Louise accepted my apologies for blowing my top and we settled down for the night.

Which is when it started to get slightly strange. Because tonight all three of us went to Pocklington Arts Centre to see It’s A Wonderful Life.

It’s A Wonderful Life is one of my favourite Christmas films. Along with Miracle On 34th Street and Love Actually it’s a film I will always end up watching at some point during the Christmas season. So to have it at the local cinema was something we just couldn’t pass up. We even convinced Molly to come along and she rather enjoyed it. Some things went over her head perhaps and it was rather a surprise for her to see both mummy and daddy wiping away tears. I always start blubbing when George is on the bridge and realises that he’s got his second chance and it gets much worse as he’s running back down Main St of Bedford Fall. But I start to really weep at the very end, as the townsfolk come in and give George money to rescue him and the Buildings and Loans firm. I controlled it somewhat with Molly there, but there were still plentiful tears to wipe away by the end.

So, what do these two things have in common? The battery and my moods and It’s A Wonderful Life? Well, as Louise pointed out to me afterwards – I am George Bailey. It’s me on screen. Okay, not the owning a bank, saving his brother’s life and generally being the lynchpin of his community, but the moods, the stresses, the feeling of confinement and that life is just bearing down on me – that’s all me.

Oh, dear god. She’s right as well.

I guess the start of December is as good a place as any to make a change then?

Complete and utter stupid behaviour

There’s something completely and utterly messed up about getting to midnight and, having just finished one review for the FPI blog, deciding to spend another hour on the next one instead of heading for bed as it’s back to work in the morning.

But there’s something really, really fucked up beyond belief when, at 1am, having finished the second review I decide to get the school stuff together, sort out the file, load up the usb sticks and start bloody work on a lesson plan.

Therapy would have a field day with me. The depressed mood hasn’t really lifted. Spent the entire day just black as black can be. Nothing brought me to life, nothing made me snap out of it. And that lasted till about 8 this evening. Molly and Louise had kept away. Molly kept sneaking me little notes and work she’d done on this big DFC review / art thing we’re trying to do. Very sweet. She knows something’s wrong with me but has learnt that I snap out of it eventually. That will probably resurface later on when she’s a teenager.

This evening I just started to cheer up a little. Not much mind, just enough to start thinking properly about it. Still stressed about the roof, still worried that we’re never going to get it sorted, but steeled towards talking to the builders about it in the morning.

Right, back to lesson pland. 1:30? Early yet!

Here comes the rain again … drip, drip, drip

Yorkshire. Winter. Rain. Leaking Roof.
These things just keep coming back to haunt us.
I was going to bed last night when I heard the familiar drip….drip……drip….drip when I went in to tuck Molly in. Get the ladders out, into the attic above Molly’s room, turn the torch on and no surprise at all – there’s the water coming in through the roof again.

Obviously what’s happened is that the water has been coming in for a while, dripping in and soaking all of the cavity wall insulation until it can saturate it no more and finds release by dripping onto the plasterboard of the ceiling below. No marking on the ceiling fortunately but that’s small consolation really.

As always, it happens on a weekend so I get to be miserable, stressed, depressed and generally feel crap all day and night before I can start the all to of familiar cycle of frustration that is trying to get hold of our builders. We looked back on the letters today and realised it’s been 21 months since we first reported this to the builders.

Both Louise and I are wondering how on earth we’re ever going to get this sorted properly. It’s hugely depressing. What a shit end to what has been a lovely half term.

Too much to do, Too much to do, Too much to do….. Anxiety time

Of course, after such a wonderful holiday, it seemed only fair that things come crashing down again.
Not only do I have to contend with the oncoming return to school after 6 weeks off, but I appear to be rather unwell.

So unwell in fact that I went to the doctor about it. He reckons it’s possibly a chest infection that’s causing the tightness in my chest and the fluttering heart. But I’ve talked to others who think it has far more chance of being Anxiety of some sort.

Those who know me will, at this point, be nodding their heads in a knowing and not very surprised way. But for those that don’t: I’m a melancholic (depressive) with crap sleeping habits, a tendency to obsess over even the smallest things and a habit of getting stressed over these self same tiny problems. (See Black Dog, Sleep and Health for examples)

So the idea of me being overly anxious is so plausible as to be almost certain. Especially when we have a little look at some of the symptoms:

(From NHS Direct & The BBC) People with generalised anxiety may find that they:

• easily lose their patience
• have difficulty concentrating
• think constantly about the worst outcome
• have difficulty sleeping
• become depressed and/or
• become preoccupied with, or obsessional about, one subject

These mental symptoms lead to, and are supported by, physical symptoms. These can include:

• excessive thirst
• periods of intense pounding heart
• periods of feeling winded
• headaches
• dizziness
• pins and needles

That’s exactly me. The mental symptoms are me all the time. The physical ones have manifested over the last few weeks or longer, culminating in the pounding heart and tightness in the chest I’m feeling now. I think I see a radical change in lifestyle coming on.
So of course, as in so many things, now that I have been to the doctors and then got more information I’m probably going to have to go back to the doctors and ask him about Anxiety and if it could be exactly what’s causing them problems. But at least now, between the possible treatment from the doctor and an idea of what’s going on I can try to effect some improvements.

And as usual with any posts about my health, please don’t worry, all is fine. I’m posting it because I’m working on it. Actually writing about it makes me feel better about it, isolates it, defines it and makes me concentrate on making it better.
It’s all the crap I don’t write about that you need to be worrying about!

The long dark working day of the ict technician….

Another day, another nightmare, another crisis of confidence.
Got in today and admin couldn’t get onto the network. Sorted with telephone assistance from network expert who did the reconfigure yesterday. That was the high point of the day.

It just went downhill from there.
The plan was to go around the place and sort out the computers, put printers on, sort desktops, make sure everything was where I wanted it etc etc.
I got as far as the ict suite. There are huge software issues. At least 5 bits of network software just aren’t working right. And not coincidentally, they’re not working right on all of the machines that I’ve had a hand in setting up. Great.

So by the end of the day I was totally stressed out, fed up and contemplating looking for an easier job. The Teaching Assistant side of this job, working with the children, is so wonderful. But the network and hard ict side is just proving too much right now. Maybe I’ll get through it this time. But what about next time. Or the time after that?

Not happy. What a tremendous understatement that is.

Bruton Mansions Sunday and the misery of networking

Molly and Louise are lazing around downstairs watching Oliver on dvd. (Molly wanted to get this after watching the godawful advert for a west end musical that the BBC is putting out right now.)

I retreated upstairs to my desk. After checking mail, checking newsfeeds and generally mooching round the interweb for a bit I’ve started musing on the last week.

It’s my worst week ever at work. The problems we’ve had with the network have completely destroyed my confidence in my ability to actually do the job. The problem lies with my lack of network knowledge. Any network issues are a challenge and anything more than minor problems really cause me trouble. So far I’ve either been lucky or blessed with just one major network issue when the whole thing went down but was fixed within half an hour by the people who put the thing in place initially.

Now we have the prospect of having to roll out the SIMs registration thing across the network and things have become more difficult. Part of it really isn’t my fault though. The initial network setup was done either badly or lazily, having a network without any real defined users and everyone on similar access levels was never a good idea. Unfortunately this is now my problem and I’m going to have to get someone in to fix it so we can work SIMs and the Learning Platform thing that East Riding is rolling out over the summer.

So I was left feeling completely defeated by my inability and utterly miserable.
The only upside was that after talking to first Louise, then the ICT coordinator and then the head, I was reassured that they thought I was doing a good job, concentrating on the pupils and their ICT skils rather than the technical side f things.

Plus I have to keep thinking that I’m not being paid to be a network manager and that the amount of time I’m contracted for means that I have a whole 8 hours spare when I’m not in lessons.
That’s 8 hours to do everything. All the various problems the teachers manage to get themselves into, generating new resources, updating the website and all the other countless little jobs that make up my day. It just doesn’t add up and certainly gives me no time to sort out the network.
So like everyone says when something goes wrong with the network I just have to accept that I don’t have the skills or the time to sort it out and have to get the professionals out.
But with my control freak personality I’m finding it really hard to actually accept this.

So all week and most of the weekend has been spent in a hideous bad mood. Utterly miserable and wondering what the hell I’m meant to be doing.

Tomorrow I go in and try to find out how much we’re going to get charged for the network update. Hopefully I shall be able to pick myself up and start enjoying it again.

State of the me, Easter 2008 – part 3

Relaxing.

I seem completely incapable of doing this relaxing lark.
I don’t seem to be able to relax at all, and I think it’s getting worse. I function best when I seem to have a to-do list as long as my arm. It gives me a sense of purpose and a goal. But I have noticed that when I am successful and manage to reduce the to-do list to something manageable, to a point where I can actually see the end of everything I need to do, I start to stall, start to slow down.
This means I’m deliberately sabotaging my life, deliberately preventing myself from taking time to actually relax. It’s a very disturbing realisation to be honest. Does this really mean that I subconsciously don’t want to have any relaxing time?

Then there’s my completely screwed up metabolism. Without any external influence at all, I truly believe I’d wake up sometime around 2 or 3 in the afternoon, laze around for a while, have breakfast around 6pm and then slowly begin to come round until the 10 or 11pm mark, which is when I start work and go through to 4am.
And this is pretty much exactly how I got through a whole chunk of university , particularly around exam time. I’d deliberately alter my sleep patterns to fit around the best time for revision and work. It worked.

But of course, I can’t do that all the time.
Life always seems to get in the way. beautiful, wonderful life.

So I adapt and compromise. This results in my waking up badly when I need to, being a bit crap in a morning, then crashing around 6pm, only to wake up mentally around 11pm, get creative and mentally raring to go until I force myself to go to bed sometime in the early morning, 1am, 2am, 3am.
Then I repeat over and over.
Until the weekend where I know I can have a lie-in and my body crashes out.

But this is the one thing I have real control over. I can’t overnight fix my anxieties over the house or the job, but I can force myself to go to sleep at a regular time and I can attempt to relax more and relax better.
I live in hope.

State of the me, Easter 2008 – part 2.

The Job.

I love the job, it’s everything I wanted to do. Working in a primary school is incredibly rewarding and every day gives me so much enjoyment that I just couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

But there are moments in the job when I have reason to think back many years to when I was working at Lordswood Girls Secondary in Birmingham. I was science technician there and bloody good at it. I’d advanced to the stage where the job took care of itself and there was very little reason to be stressed out about it. Of course, the management team at the school seemed to spend the entire time looking for new and interesting ways to fuck over the staff, which was where all the stress of the job came from.

Anyway, at some point a few years into the job our ICT technician left and they were trying to work out what to do about it. I was as much of a computer bod there as I always have been and knew my way around the basics. So they offered me the job. I politely turned it down giving as my main reason the love of being a good science techy and a lack of confidence in my abilities to do the ict job.
What I didn’t say was what I’d told the outgoing ict technician; that I thought being an ict technician in a secondary school is a completely impossible job. The demands put upon the ict technician are never ending, there is never a stable position and the jobs never really end. Something is always needing fixing, something is always obselete, something is always wrong.

Which is exactly what I think of when I worry about the ict job at the primary school. My basic problem is that I know enough to get by but not enough to convince myself of that. When I was hired the head made it quite clear that my role was primarily to work with the pupils on ict. The whole technician side of it was a distant secondary priority. And it was with great pleasure that the last time the head walked through the ict suite with visitors she introduced me as the ict technician and teaching assistant.
So I know I’m doing the job that she wants me to and from the feedback I get from her and the staff I think I’m doing it well.

But still, at the back of my mind is the feeling of what if? What if something goes wrong? What if I’m needed to do more networky stuff than I’m capable of doing? Will the head be as understanding when I tell her I can’t do it and we need to get people in at a few hundred quid a day to sort the network out?

Again, as with the house, much of this is ridiculous and merely my worries getting the better of me.