The climb can kill you long before the fall.

So I’ve been without facebook at work since last Friday. Without going into a diatribe about the hypocrisy of banning it while smoking breaks and endless ebaying are seemingly encouraged, it means that my downtime where I gather my thoughts will have to be spent in different areas. Like this one perhaps. I read through my stated plans for the new year and have the following to say in response.

Last Sunday I bought myself the debut Manchester Orchestra album, I’m like a virgin losing a child. I got a couple other things, but I haven’t even bothered listening to any of them yet because this album is that good. Part of what motivated getting this was that they have a new album just released this week. I haven’t gotten around to getting it yet, but will when I find myself in need of new music. I find that I don’t want new music as much as I used to, and most of what I get is new albums from bands I already like. I’ve bought Thursday‘s new album which was very very good. The Appleseed Cast also had an excellent offering. I still need to get some Kevin Devine albums. As far as new (for me) bands I really like, Minus the Bear, Arcade Fire, This Town Needs Guns and Manchester Orchestra are about it for the last 3 years. My musical adventures have decreased similarly; I went to see one of Rachael’s friend’s band play the other week and hopefully will see something later this week but all in all, I’ve become the old person set in their ways. Most things I hear just sound generic and derivative and I fear that I would attribute the same damning adjectives to much the music I like now had I heard it for the first time now. Having said that, I’m like a virgin losing a child is the best thing I have heard in years, or at least I think so right now.

The last couple months I have been trying to learn a new system with one of my bridge partners. Loosely speaking, a system is an agreement between a partnership of what certain bids mean. For example, Standard American (of all flavours) is characterised by 5 card majors, which means that to open the bidding in Hearts or Spades, you need to have 5 of them. Your partner and opponents can then play accordingly. This new system, Precision, is characterised by a strong club and weaker opening bids in the other suits. I like this system for many reasons:

• The first one being that you can open the bidding with fewer points which both blocks the opponents’ bidding and also conveys to your partner almost exactly what potential you have with your hand.
• The second one being that the strong 1C bid is, despite what people say, pretty immune to disruption as you have already given your partner an indication of how good your hand is, no matter what the opposition says.
• The third being that the opening 2 bids have a variety of useful meanings; multi 2D for long majors allows for those lovely 5-5 hands to be highly disruptive and the 2NT showing minors elicits internal cackling every time.

Our results have been very good with it but I (we) need to learn the system better to capture its full potential.

My plans to train more were initially thwarted by my old club moving its training days to bridge days. Bridge won out. However, I recently started running with some guys mostly from work and have been getting stronger. I recently sold my magic collection, hopefully I will be told an amount soon. It was quite freeing doing so, it was a lot of what I thought about for quite a while but not really much at all recently. I look forward to putting that money away for a house deposit.

Life is still pretty good, very busy which is good else I teeter into dangerous territory where I start to think about Things. I haven’t had as much time to see some people and not enough motivation to see others but I suppose that could always be said.