montage monday: lions

I've "officially" been working on this Montage for over a month now. Unoffically I've had the idea for a while... probably since my visit to the Body Mind and Psychic Fair... and the fact that I see three of these lions every morning on my walk...

The only shot that isn't new is the centre one... that's from a trip to the Zoo about four years back not long after the lion cubs were born. And I'm guessing that the Chinese lion (fourth row, right hand side) actually IS a lion...

Okay, that Three Little Pigs quote I made this morning about "huffing and puffing"... a little bit inflammatory to the Universe methinks... no, the house is fine (cold, but fine), but the heavy grey blanket of cloud that lay over the city as I made my way from the bus stop to work this morning didn't bode well...

I looked at the cloud (it wasn't even "clouds" plural, it was just one big cloud from horizon to horizon) and thought "if that can just hold off until I get into work, I'll be okay"... which was tempting fate once again... because just as I was being blown through my usual shortcut between two buildings it started to HAMMER down. We're talking "somebody start finding two of everything and a lot of lumber" kind of rain... which was also blowing horizontal and upwards and whatnot because of deflected wind from various big buildings.

But I found a little nook to hide in at the base of one of the aforementioned big buildings, but I had no idea how long the rain was going to last, and work was just a quick dash across the street and so temptingly close...

All of this might have been a moot point if I'd bothered wearing a jacket this morning... but I hadn't, since the last time I saw a weather forecast it was supposed to be ick this morning and then improve, so I figured I wouldn't need it, and with the insane wind there was no point in using my umbrella (which I had brought with me) because then all I would have had was a broken umbrella.

So I dashed across the street...

I dashed across the street, in fact, just as it started to hail (those little tiny stinging chips of ice that feel like hard rain, but then you realise rain never gets that hard... although as I said to Ma a few weeks ago, you just don't get hail these days like you did when I was a boy... big, scary, 20c piece sized hail)... And then I (along with a group of other people) discovered that the security guards, in it's gormless capacity for mediocrity had LOCKED the side doors where I usually go in. Of course there's no way to get from the side doors to the main doors without going back out into the elements again (coz that would be silly, providing cover from the weather between the doors)... the upshot is that when I got in the building, my pale ecru business shirt was basically transparent (and yet flesh coloured, so not easy to tell where I stopped and the shirt started). Thankfully I haven't worn a white business shirt in YEARS, because that would have ended badly for all concerned.

Then, when I went to see if the bathroom on my floor had one of those warm air hand blower things, no luck. But I know there are some in the building somewhere (and I should, given the number of floors I've worked on), so I went down floor by floor (fortunately the men's bathroom is right next to one of the stairwells) for about five floors, sticking my head into the bathroom to check on the air dryer situation... nothing. Fortunately the overly warm air in the building, and my running around had taken the "very wet and clingy" aspect of the shirt away, and it did dry off pretty quickly (by about 11am I was all good).

And we won't even talk about how much of a twat I was not to bring a jacket given how arctically cold the wind was at lunch time (and again on the way home) or about the window that's situation just in front of my workstation that kept making odd little rattling noises, or that I'm sure I felt/heard the building swaying once or twice in the afternoon... the less said about all of that, the better...

Other things we won't discuss include the fact that the tasks they're currently discussing about the website right now are actually all the stuff that should have been discussed BEFORE I GOT THERE. It's going to be a long, slow, painful process by the sounds of things, and there really isn't a damn thing I can do to hurry it along. Be like the water, yani... flow around the problems and find the right path... you can always drown them all later...

On the topic of "people I'd like to drown", I realised something yesterday... something not great, and something that I would have realised earlier if I'd stopped and thought about it.

I just signed a twelve month lease (this is not any kind of news, I've been fussing about it for a while now). I haven't been on an official lease for some time... but neither has anybody else in my building, whether they've been here longer than me, or five minutes. And that means that EVERYBODY in my building just signed a twelve month lease (because you would think if they were going to just leave, they would have done that already)... which means that I have to put up with these useless, idiotic, inconsiderate neighbours of mine and their army of brats for another YEAR at the very least. That's not one of those thoughts that warm the cockles of your heart... it's more the type of thing that wakes you up screaming at three in the morning...

On a completely unrelated topic...

I've mentioned before that where certain movies and teevee shows are concerned (and occasionally books, but not so often), it's not really that difficult to turn me into a big weepy blubbery mess (or at the very least to get me "all faklempt"). I mean, I'm not sobbing during episodes of Top Gear or anything, but certain shows just get to me. The new and improved Doctor Who is one of those shows (yes, yes, I love the new Doctor Who, I'm a big nerd, this is no kind of surprise to anybody). And usually Doctor Who season finales are the kind of episodes that make me tear up.

Last night's episode wasn't the finale, but we're in the home stretch, so they're ratchetting it up. It had me alternatively sobbing my eyes out (seriously, I cried for almost forty minutes straight) or sitting with my fists up to my mouth (to fend off what, I'm not sure, the story maybe) or yelling at the teevee or all three.

I fully acknowledge that my body most likely took advantage of the fact that I was getting all teary to let go of a lot of other built up tension and emotion that had nothing to do with Doctor Who... but it doesn't change the fact that I was a basketcase for the whole episode.

Bloody Doctor Who... bloody Rose Tyler (oh how I love Billie Piper though, she's magnificent in EVERYTHING from Companion to Call Girl)... bloody Catherine Tate (which is interesting, because I'm not really fussed on her comedy show, but she's great in Doctor Who, which just proves the old adage "comedy, hard... drama, easy")... bloody Russell T Davies (damn you Davies, damn you to hell... so long as you don't stop writing Doctor Who episodes like this one)... and the really annoying thing was that it was all an "alternative reality" story, and I knew that the whole time, so technically none of it really happened (and yes, I'm aware it's a teevee show and none of it REALLY happened, shush).

Bloody teevee show... I can't wait for next week's episode!

Speaking of "bloody people"... Bloody Tom and bloody Eddy... they both made comment on yesterday's sauna adventures post about me writing a book based on (I'm assuming) my slutty adventures... which of course got me thinking about the whole thing.

Now, I know I can string a sentence or two together (even if sometimes I forget to make that sentence stop when it should), but I gave up any delusions I'd ever had about being a "real" writer ages ago. I'm no Tony, I'm not even an Alex...

Plus (and this is an element of self-justification which I only thought about late in the process) Adelaide is WAAAAAY too small... even if I made some of the stuff up...

Interestingly enough, even though I can never seem to tell a short story here on the blog, pretty much everything else I've ever written (and completed) has been pitifully short. And the stuff that's longer never really seems to have a decent plot, or in the one particular example I'm thinking of it had plenty of good moments, but I could never actually nail down the singular unifying and driving plot that would have made the whole thing hang together.

There are ways around that, I could try writing something in the vein of Michael Thomas Ford, short little "essays", each on a different topic, but my writing is never intentionally amusing enough to pull that off.

For the record, I'm not digging for compliments on my writing or the blog, I know what I'm capable of (and not capable of), and I'm okay with that (mostly).