Christopher Hamilton

I’m going to be offline for a few weeks. There is some stuff going on that I’m not going to talk about here.

Until I’m back, talk amongst yourselves.

I achieved absolutely nothing over the weekend. Which was my aim going in, so I suppose that’s an achievement of sorts. Anyway, after working the last twelve days in a row, with a couple of those being late nights, I was adamant that the weekend was purely for recharging the batteries, and catching up on some much needed sleep. Fortunately there was an abundance of sport on TV to aid my efforts in avoiding anything, although some of that I could have done without watching, Scottish Football team and Alex Arthur I’m looking at you.

I woke up late on Saturday, dragged myself to the shower, and then out just in time for the Scotland game to start. I wish I’d stayed in bed. After the game, my flatmate and I headed home to make lunch and kick back in the living room. After a quick scan of the TV we discovered there was nothing of interest on, and with this weekend set aside for sports and relaxing, decided that “Any Given Sunday” was the ideal DVD to watch. This was followed by a web stream of the Andy Murray -vs- Nadal match until the rain stopped play, and then the Alex Arthur fight.

Sunday was a lot more of the same. I woke up even later than Saturday, and made my way to the living room to watch the Formula One on TV. It was pretty dull until the last few laps, and I’m a little disgusted that they took the win from Lewis Hamilton. I really hope they win their appeal. I’m not really a fan of Lewis Hamilton’s but he deserved the win, and it’s an injustice that he has currently been demoted to third.

Sunday night had me searching around the web for a live stream of the Falcons game. Thankfully I found one and got to watch my boys run all over the Lions. I think Michael Turner is going to be the signing of the offseason, and I can’t wait for next Sunday. After my NFL fix, we watched Andy Murray play outstandingly to beat Nadal and progress to the final. He’s looking better and better almost every tournament, and I’ll be shouting for him in the final tonight.

That weekend looks as though it’s going to be the only quiet one I get this month, with moving house, and another weekend of work looming, so I’m glad I took the opportunity over the last two days to do nothing.

I played football on Tuesday evening for the first time since the injury. I was a little concerned how the ankle, and foot would hold up through the course of the game. Especially as I’m right footed, it was going to be subject to a lot of impacts throughout the night.

Thankfully there were no real problems.

After about twenty minutes of play I could feel a dull ache beginning to spread through my foot, and made the decision to avoid hitting many more shots to attempt to stop it getting any worse. That didn’t matter for too long though. After about ten minutes of passing the ball around, instead of shooting, the pain in my foot disappeared completely and I was able to play on as normal.

Wednesday morning I was expecting there to be some soreness, but thankfully there wasn’t any. My ankle felt a little weak compared to the day before, but walking on it for a short time solved that issue.

I’m going to continue to keep an eye on it, but it looks like all the damage that was caused has healed successfully.

So Derek Riordan returns to Easter Road. I was unsure about it when I heard the rumours a few days ago, but the more I think about it the happier I am. He was a player who scored 61 goals in three seasons for Hibs before he jumped ship along the M8. Hopefully he’s going to bring a cutting edge to the club again this season as the current strikers, though very good, especially Fletcher, just aren’t getting the job done at the moment.

I’ll be very interested to see how the fans react to him, but then Murray who left in a much worse scenario has been warmly welcomed back because of the effort he puts in. If he keeps himself out of trouble, which shouldn’t be hard since he’s banned from every night club in Edinburgh, and can return to his goal scoring ways I have a feeling he’ll be embraced by even the most serious of doubters.

I just spent the weekend doing an email system migration at work. From the looks of things today everything went well, and there have been no major issues. Except of course to my general well being. I’m shattered. Having to use your brain all weekend for eleven hours at a time, and make sure you make no mistakes, coupled with a couple of boozy nights to wind down is certainly a recipe for trouble.

With a poker night arranged for Friday, I won both tournaments we played, that ended at what I think was 4am Saturday started very slowly and took me several cups of strong coffee to get going at all. I left work at 9.30 that evening and was fit for nothing but sitting on the sofa watching tv.

Sunday was a little better. I was fresher and most of the difficult work had been carried out on the Saturday. I left the office at about 6pm to finish off the rest of the configuration remotely, only to discover that it wouldn’t work. So I dragged myself back into the office and slogged away until just after 8pm.

When I finished up I was in need of a wind down drink but had already given up my ticket to Princes Street Gardens for the fireworks. So I met up with my friend Darcie, and caught a blues band that her uncle played in at The SpiegelTent. The evening turned into a pretty drunken mess with us ending up at Whistle Binkies on South Bridge listening to, from what I remember, a couple of pretty crap bands. I think I left around 2am and staggered my way home. Only to get up early and head back into the office.

The users stress tested the system and excluding a couple of little glitches, everything went very smoothly. I even got the bonus of the Chief Exec telling me that he’d have a word with my boss about getting me some time back, I normally get nothing for these things, so that brightened me up a little.

The last hour or so of my work day today saw me flagging drastically. So much so that instead of cooking the dinner I had planned, I bought a curry from the takeaway at the end of the street. Grabbed the bottle of wine I decanted yesterday and sat myself on the sofa. Most of the wine is gone, just like my energy and it won;t be long before we’re both done this evening.

I’m going to sleep very soundly tonight.