A few years ago I was living in Scarborough. One day I was walking the long way up from the beach to my house, a route I didn’t normally take, and passed a tattoo studio. I turned back and had a look in the window and thought to myself “I’ve always wanted a tattoo…” It was about then that I realized I had 20 quid in my pocket and that I was less than a foot away from someone who would happily take my money to stab me with an inky needle.

So I went into the studio and had a look at the various designs on the walls. I didn’t actually like many of the designs and those that I did like wouldn’t have suited me. So I pointed out a design to the tattoo artist and asked him to change it a bit. He did, and then proceeded to ink it into the side of my right leg.

Sometimes I wonder at my own impulse buying habits.

Soon enough I left without my 20 pound note and with a tiny picture of a bat. That is the small, flying rodent kind of bat; I’m not big into cricket or anything like that. If I had looked at the design a bit closer I would probably have noticed the uncanny resemblance to both the Bacardi logo and the Bat Signal. But I didn’t, so other people have been reminding me of that ever since.

Now one thing I must mention about this tattoo is that it hardly hurt at all. As it was being tattooed onto my leg I could feel it but no worse than someone scratching me with their nail. The most painful bit of the whole experience was when I pulled the masking tape off that was holding on the pad of protective gauze. That hurt. Took a few hairs off my leg.

Over the two years since then I’ve generally forgotten that I’ve had a tattoo at all. It isn’t in a place I can see clearly so it is only when people point that I even remember it is there, and sometimes it takes a while to cotton on to what they are pointing at. Do I regret getting the tattoo? Not at all… just that it looks a bit lonely.

Some people say that tattoos are addictive, that once you get one you will want more. I guess it could be true. Since getting a small bat on my leg I’ve always wanted another animal to keep it company. I was toying with the idea of getting a tiny moth to go beside the bat for it to either eat to or keep company… but really what I wanted was a gecko. And as geckos are most known for clinging to things that are at weird angles to the floor, I thought the best place to get it would be the sole of my foot.

A tattoo down there would be quite unique and always hidden, as long as I kept my shoes on or kept myself the right way up with them off. Even though I kept my eyes out for gecko designs in every tattoo parlor I happened to be walking past I never did come across any. I even looked on the Internet for designs to print off but even there I didn’t see any I really liked.

Then, after doing a swift deal on various electric and gas cookers for my new house, I was left with £50 sitting on a table. I could have very easily put it back into my bank account or spent it on something useful, like a bed. Instead, just one idea kept popping back into my mind… “Why not get that tattoo?”

Now, if you ever “sort of” want to do something but are very much in two minds about it, the best thing to do is tell lots of people you are going to do it. That way, if you don’t go ahead with it, you are not only letting yourself down but lots of people will know you have failed at something. And point and laugh.

Knowing this I went on a specific course of telling lots of people I was going to get a new tattoo “sometime this week”. Of course, the more people I told, the less I actually wanted to go ahead with it. Even so, last night I told 5 members of my immediate family that I was going to get it done. In my own mind, that made me pretty much committed.

At this point I had just one problem: I didn’t have a final design for the tattoo.

There was nothing else for it, I got out some pencils and paper and started scribbling. After a bit I worked out the type of thing I wanted and it turned out not to be as small as I imagined. And not a gecko either. I settled on a generic lizard shape, solid black except for a stripe down its back and beady eyes.

This morning I woke up at the normal time after having a dream about… well, not about getting a tattoo, though I must admit it would have made for a better story. Saturday, the last day of the week that I could get a tattoo done so it had to happen today… It might seem like I’m hamming this up to be more of a big deal than it actually was but I really was apprehensive about how much it might hurt. Things always hurt a lot more when the memory of the pain is fresh… I wasn’t really convinced that my first tattoo was as painless as I thought it was…

At about 2pm I realized I was being a complete wimp. It couldn’t hurt that much, right? If it did, why would people get tattoos in the first place? I stuffed the 50 quid in my pocket, jumped on my bike and within 2 minutes I was at the tattoo parlor. I showed my design to the receptionist she told me it would cost about £40. I sat down in the waiting area and flicked through some design books. One was full of Japanese lettering, every name you could think of and many rude words. I looked up my name but it seems that the Japanese don’t have a symbol for the sound “L”. The nearest they have is “Ru”. I certainly wouldn’t want “Ru-Ka-Ee” tattooed on my arm, no matter what language was used.

I was called into the studio area and a huge, hairy bear of a man asked me where I wanted the tattoo. I said “on my foot” and I saw him flinch. At the time I didn’t take much notice of that flinch but I should have. As I sat down I asked if it could be done on the sole of my foot but he said the design would just wear off if it was put there. I settled for putting it on the side/top of my foot instead. He soon swept his beard out of the way, smeared my foot with 20 different types of antiseptic ointments and creams and jellies and sprays and stuck on the transfer that had been made from my original design.

He fixed a needle into a vicious looking contraction, something straight out of a horror movie autopsy scene, and brought it to my foot. I braced myself, all of a sudden…

“This,” I thought to myself, “is the most painful thing that has ever happened to me…” I guess I’ve been quite lucky in the serious injury department. I’ve broken a few toes and had a few stitches in my time but all of those put together were nothing compared to this!

Every time the needle went over a bone in my foot, which was pretty much all the time, my foot would start to shake, juddering from the nerves. I guess this wasn’t much help to the tattooist, he probably found it quite annoying. I sat there, subjecting myself to about 15 minutes of continuous pain… and I could feel myself going into shock. I’ve been in shock before but it normally accompanies some sort of sudden injury, which takes up all my attention, but this time I could sit back, relax and feel my body doing strange things out of my control. My hands started shaking, my stomach started turning, I felt a bit faint and my mouth went very dry.

The whole job was finished quite soon. The hairy man wiped my foot off one last time and I said I was happy with the final result. He covered the tattoo with a sheet of cling film held in place with cellotape to stop my sock sticking to the scabbing skin (this time I was sure removing the tape would be the least painful part). Then looked me in the eye.

“You know,” he said quietly, “the feet are considered the most painful part of the body to ink. I didn’t mention that beforehand in case you didn’t want to go ahead with it. Well done.”

“Um… thanks, I guess.” I mumbled back.

I put my sock and shoe back on and returned to the receptionist. She gave me a small “tattoo care” card in exchange for £45 pounds. I left the shop, got back on my bike and was home in two minutes. The whole experience had taken just under half an hour in total.

Once I got home I removed my shoes and socks and peeled off the cling film. I got my camera and took a photo:

(a little lizard on my foot)

To see what people thought of my new tattoo I posted the photo on the b3ta.com message board Most people seemed to like it, and there was general agreement over the high pain levels involved in having tattoos inflicted on yourself.

For the next 5 or 6 hours I still felt pretty queasy. Certainly no appetite. And there was a constant throbbing pain from my foot. It is now about 10 hours later and I must admit it doesn’t feel bad at all, there’s a slight stinging sensation if I touch the skin, but that’s about it.

No sweat.

So, is it worth that much money and pain to have a little picture, which I must admit has no meaning to me, inked onto my foot?

No. Not at all. But then, why not? It’s something to do.
]]> http://www.lukeburrage.com/blog/archives/673/feed 0 http://www.lukeburrage.com/blog/archives/643 http://www.lukeburrage.com/blog/archives/643#comments Thu, 11 Feb 2010 01:55:21 +0000 admin http://www.lukeburrage.com/blog/?p=643 I just released a new novella-length piece of science fiction. You can download it for free over here.

Enjoy!

A bit of background:

I was going to start editing a novella I wrote last February, called “Monster Story (working title)”. It got good feedback from my first readers, but they knew and I knew that it could be much better. It sat on my hard-drive for months while I worked on other projects. Meanwhile I thought long and hard about it, and realized that to get it to the point where I’d be happy with it as a novella, I’d have to re-write huge chunks of it, rather than just do edits.
To make sure I had everything worked out in my head, I thought I’d write my notes down as a dialogue between three characters. Imagine a director, a producer and a script writer, sitting in a room, trying to work out the details of a new movie project, almost from scratch.

The format is no accident, as I’ve recently read and reread the Raiders of the Lost Ark Story Conference, which is the transcript of the first story meeting between George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Lawrence Kasdan (the script writer) for that film. It’s a great read, especially if you already know and love the Indiana Jones movies. And who doesn’t? They come up with loads of great ideas, and quite a few bad ones too, but you see why the good ones made it into the final movies.

I was wondering if I could be just as creative as Lucas, Spielberg and Kasdan combined. How’s that for setting a lofty goal?

So I thought, “If this works, it could be a fun creative writing exercise, and if not, at least I’ll have a good set of notes for the Monster Story rewrite.” And to make it more interesting, I gave the different characters different motivations, and story to play out between them over the course of the conference.

And so I began. It’s now less than four days later, and I finished a 35,000 word manuscript, which is just as long as the original “Monster Story” novella! Yet I think it’s a much better story. And it’s a much more interesting way to tell the story too.

I decided to edit it and release it online right away. Why not? It’s an experimental piece of fiction, but one I think works. The style of writing, which is nothing but dialogue, but not a script as such, is something I’ve done many, many times in the past. It came very naturally. No wonder I knocked out 10,000 words a day for three days. It has an energy I really enjoy.

And now that I’ve got the story locked down tight, even if it’s from the point of view of a movie script, I’ll probably write a longer and more traditional novel, the definitive version of “The Monster Story”, before the end of the year.

Clicking on the map will take you to the sosauce.com trip page where you can zoom in and out stuff. Also, the trip starts and ends in Punta Arenas, number 1 and 8 on the map. This means a loooong journey just to get there.

Yes, I’m returning to Antarctica! It is, by far, the most amazing place I’ve been to while working on cruise ships. Last time I managed to get off the ship and get up close to penguins on the islands and mainland of Antarctica. I even have a stamp in my passport! This time the ship will be doing what’s call “Scenic Cruising” which means it doesn’t stop, and nobody gets off. I will, however, try my best to wangle my way onto the zodiac, which they let off the ship so the photographer can take photos in spectacular places.

Either way, I bough myself a new zoom lens, so I’ll try to do as much wildlife photographs as possible. I hope to photograph:
whales
penguins
orcas
seals
various birds

And, as you can see by the map, I’ll be back in the Falklands again, for the forth time in the past year, so I’ll once again do my traditional walk and see if the bird families have grown up.

Other goals for this cruise:

- Write. Or, more specifically, edit Combat (working title) and Monster Story (working title). Combat won’t take too much, but the ending needs to change. Monster Story needs more work, and I intend to break the story into two parts. From the feedback I found that people were interested in the back story, but I skip over these events in the novel. What I’m going to do is write the “getting to the planet” story as a stand alone novella, and explain the entire story there. Then Monster Story will become the second novella in a sequence. I always had one more story to tell in the same universe, so that could become part three in a trilogy.

- Shoot video. I just released my International Juggler 2009 video. It’s now 2010, and this year’s video will continue in a similar way, but with a twist. It’ll have more structure.

- Read and record SFBRP episodes. I’ve decided to try out audio books, mainly because I wanted to get a copy of The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, and audible could deliver it in minutes. Planning ahead means I could have ordered it from Amazon.com, but I’m not that clever.

- More video. I want to record some shaky footage of me in Montevideo and cut it into the Panic attacks video.

- New podcast. I’m thinking about starting a new podcast, where I release one per trip, telling stories and generally giving my thoughts about things I see and do. It’ll be called something like “Luke Around the World”, which is a crap pun, but sort of catchy. However, I only intend to release the podcast if I think it’s any good. Look out for that in a few weeks.

I think that’s about it. I’ll try to upload photos as I go.

This is the culmination of 12 months of traveling and juggling. The see the page on my website that explains pretty much everything about the video.

I was at a party back in 2001 (or maybe 2002), and I found a Shakespearean Fridge Magnet set. A play would have been too long, and I’d have run out of tiles. A sonnet, on the other hand, was just about the right length. It even conforms to the rules of sonnet writing. According to wikipedia:

A Shakespearean, or English, sonnet consists of 14 lines, each line containing ten syllables and written in iambic pentameter, in which a pattern of an unemphasized syllable followed by an emphasized syllable is repeated five times. The rhyme scheme in a Shakespearean sonnet is a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g; the last two lines are a rhyming couplet.

It even sort of makes sense.

This is a song I started writing on a beach in Ireland, back in 2006. I only just finished it today. One of my goals for 2010 is to write and record an album’s worth of songs, so to get myself into the project I decided to actually finish writing this one.

Here are some lyrics:
Watching the sun go down
Pretend there’s no one else around
Sitting Hand in hand
Pushing toes into the sand

And the birds skip out of reach
As the waves break on the beach
And the wind is blowing free
And sun kisses the sea

And there’s a whisper, hardly heard
It’s wonderful
Wonderful

A reflection in the eye
Of the sun at the edge of the sky
The blanket keeps the cold at bay
It’s the perfect way to end the day

As the sun dips out of sight
And the evening turns to night
And the clouds part overhead
And the stars shine down instead

And there’s a whisper, hardly heard,
It’s wonderful

Walking home now in the moonlight
There’s no hurry as the night’s sublime
Shooting star seen close to midnight
Make a wish, and make it good
Make it right
Make it count this time

Time is on your side
Time, time is on your side

And then finally fall asleep
And the dream is good to keep
And the dawn begins to break
And two lovers stir and wake

And there’s a whisper, hardly heard
you’re wonderful.

There are three main types of three club combat.

1.
The first is group combat, where it’s just a huge melee of jugglers, and it’s every man/woman for himself/herself. You can play this with three people, 30 people (at small juggling events), or 300 people (at the European Juggling Conventions). With a small number of people you can have “first to five wins” sessions, which makes it more interesting than just playing a series of one-off games.

At the larger events, during the “official” tournament, to counter the randomness of action in the large, crowded games, we have four rounds of open group games, then take the winners of the four games and put them into a four person final.

In 2009, I got through to the four person final, but was knocked out by Jochen, another Berlin juggler, who was the overall winner. This was the size of the match in 2009:

Here’s a video of the forth round of the four open games at the EJC in 2008. I went on to win the four person final:

But at conventions it’s not all about the “official” games; the more interesting sessions take place late at night. As soon as one game finishes, the next begins! And as you can play as long as you want, and drop out at any time, most nights the combat sessions last four or five hours. I and many others often play for over three hours at a time.

2.
One on one tournaments (or “Celebrity Fight Nights”) are events that normally last an hour and a half. Eight or twelve jugglers are invited to take part, and it’s knockout tournament, sometimes with group stages for the first rounds. This event is good entertainment for the audience, as the competitors play up their characters, WWE style, but the skill on display is as high as it gets. I’ve yet to win an EJC title, but have taken second place in four out of the last five EJC tournaments. I’ve lost to Jay Gilligan (the best player from America) twice and Jochen Pfeiffer (the best player from Germany) twice. Winning at the EJC is one of my life goals for 2010, although both Jay and Jochen will probably be there. Come to think of it, of the 20 or so Fight Nights I’ve played in, there have only been half a dozen individual winners. Jay Gilligan, Jochen Pfeiffer, Aaron Greg (from Canada), myself, Manu Laude (France), Florian Marienfeld (Berlin)… maybe one other person who has slipped my mind.

Here’s me and Jochen in the final round at the EJC 2009. We meet in final rounds quite often, and I’ve yet to beat him.

3.
The last kind of combat is Team Combat, where jugglers go two on two or three on three. There aren’t that many team events organized, as group and one on one tournaments are much easier to plan, but if you have four or six jugglers, team combat is by far the most interesting and tactical form of combat. Here’s a video of me and Flo vs JJ and DJ. It’s a few years old, but is the best breakdown of what can happen during a team combat match.

Combat is one of my favorite things about juggling, and juggling is my favorite hobby, as well as being my job. It has absolutely no use in a real fight, but it is a very complex and stupidly high skilled martial art.

1 – Work and travel:
1.1 – Keep working on cruise ships, though structuring the my time away better than last year to maximize time in Berlin/with friends/doing my own thing.
1.2 – I already know I’ll be visiting, on various cruises, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, India, and Dubai for the first time, along with a few other places. I may be going to Antarctica again too.
1.3 – On top of work travel, spend some frequent flier points and travel home from various gigs independently. In this way I hope to spend a week in New Zealand, and a week in Japan.
1.4 – Release my International Juggler 2009 video, the one I’ve been working on for the last year, which features me juggling in every country/place I visited.
1.5 – Shoot, edit, and release International Juggler 2010, a similar video as above, of all the places I visit in 2010. I have some ideas about how to make this different/better than the 2009 video, but I don’t need to think about that too much for the next few weeks.
1.6 – Go to Poland. I live really close, but have never been. What’s up with that?
1.7 – Go to the Berlin, British, and European juggling conventions. And a convention in September/October too. Maybe the Turkish again, maybe another.
1.8 – Spend four to six weeks in New York. I’ve visited the city for a few weeks, but I want to get to know the city better. I hear so many people from there talk about it, and I want to experience it all first hand.
1.9 – Maybe, if I can sort the dates right, I might go to DragonCon, to nerd out with the scifi and podcasting geeks.

2 – Juggling:
2.1 – Keep improving my solo shows and performing skills.
2.2 – Work on my Room show project, a juggling theater show. I plan to have all the set building work complete by March, and 20-30 minutes complete by May.
2.3 – Perform a short version of the Room Show at the Berlin Juggling Convention in June.
2.4 – Have an hour show finished by October, and put on a series of shows in my own home for invited audiences.
2.5 – Finish other juggling routines I’m working on at the moment.
2.6 – Run the British Young Juggler of the Year show for the sixth year. Also do a series of online workshops for those taking part, in attempt to raise the quality of the acts. Nobody has won a Gold Award yet!
2.7 – I’m in charge of the Open Stages at the EJC in Finland. That means seven or eight nights of zero stress and easy work as my superior organization skills result in everything running smoothly, and every night’s show rocking. Or so I hope.
2.8 – Generally rock out playing combat.
2.9 – Beat Jochen in the final of a Fight Night 3 Club Combat tournament. I’ve won a tournament we both entered before, but I wasn’t the one to knock him out.
2.10 – Release some more Juggling Podcasts.
2.11 – Release some interesting juggling videos on YouTube (I have a few good ideas).
2.12 – Juggle 9 clubs for 19 passes each with Pola.
2.13 – Also, depending other work commitments, I might enter Britain’s Got Talent. If I do have the time, the final decider will be the question “Will this cause me any stress at all?” At the moment I have very little stress in my life, by design, so I might as well keep it that way.

3 – Writing:
3.1 – Keep writing for this blog.
3.2 – Finish editing and release (and decide on final titles for) on my two works-in-progress novels: Combat Story and Monster Story. Completion dates: January and March.
3.3 – Have another run at Human Danger (working title), the novel I began but didn’t complete in 2009. I have a feeling this will be a longer-term project than just this year though.
3.4 – Research, outline, and write another novel I’m giving the working title “Arc of Life.” It’ll be a fantasy novel set in a world of strange creatures and magic. My fiction writing style at the moment is very much a “just get on with the plot” kind of thing, which means a lot is packed into a very small package. This works well for near-future science fiction thrillers. Writing fantasy set in a strange new world with a completely different history and landscape than our own will hopefully force me to concentrate more on descriptive scene-setting writing, rather than character, dialogue, and action.
3.5 – Start work on the final novel in the Minding Tomorrow world.
3.6 – Do an audio recording of one of my novels. As long as I keep my novels short, this could be a good way to get more readers/listeners. I’d need to buy a new microphone though.

4 – Podcasting:
4.1 – Keep reading science fiction novels and reviewing them for the Science Fiction Book Review Podcast. I also plan to review any fantasy novels I read.
4.2 – Be a guest on other podcasts. I know I’ll be back on the SFFaudio podcast at some point.
4.3 – Doing some more Juggling Podcasts. I really miss the interviews I did with other jugglers.
4.4 – I’m thinking of starting a new podcast about traveling. I enjoy posting photos here on the blog, but I see and do lots of things that I never write about here. For example, I have a lot to say about a place like Punta Arenas, but it’s not the kind of thing that would work as a blog post. I’m thinking of doing a trip-by-trip podcast, or just saving up enough observations and stories and experiences to fill 45 minutes, and releasing it whenever.
4.5 – If I’m going to do this, I’m going to buy a portable mp3 recorder with a mic attachment, so I can record easily while hiking across a city or up a hill.
4.6 – Thinking about that last point, what I should actually do is see if my iPhone would work just as well, as then I need to carry one less gadget.

5 – Photography:
5.1 – I have no plans for my photography. It’s the only hobby I have which has no performance aspect at all (I even podcast about my reading), so there is no pressure to do anything at all. I’ll just keep carrying my camera, and keep improving my skills and artistry.
5.2 – But I will try to keep posting photos to my blog.
5.3 – And I’m going to buy a new zoom lens, because the autofocus on my current (really shitty) zoom lens is broken.
5.4 – And I’ll probably buy another two or three camera bags.

6 – Music:
6.1 – Write an album’s-worth of new songs and record them by the end of the year.
6.2 – Write the music for Room.
6.3 – Buy a five string bass guitar and learn to rock.

7 – Other goals:
7.1 – Get better at speaking German. I plan to hire a personal tutor, as regular classes don’t work with my schedule.
7.2 – Try to spend a few hours a week in the gym whenever I’m on a cruise ship. I spend way more time than that in the bars, and in the jacuzzis, and eating, and other unhealthy things. A few hours in the gym will help me keep my fitness levels up.
7.3 – Spend more time with friends.
7.4 – Make new friends.
7.5 – Have sex.
7.6 – Maybe buy a new laptop. This macbook has served me well for almost two years, but I’m doing more and more music and video and photo editing, and it’s struggling a bit. I think I’ll buy a full spec 13″ MacBook Pro, and upgrade to a solid state hard drive for super quick load times.

8 – Consumption of entertainment:
8.1 – Catch up with Dexter.
8.2 – Watch more than the first episode of Battlestar Galactica. I’ve had the season 1 box set in my cabin(s) for the past eight weeks, and haven’t watched a single episode.
8.3 – Play more Natural Selection and, if it is ever released, Natural Selection 2. I might need more memory for my PC though.

I think that’s about it! The most important things to me out of all these are continued success with my job and the Room show. Unfortunately these two are at odds, as one requires me to travel, and the other requires me to be in Berlin.

Or maybe, looking at it glass full, the two goals create a balance, so when I’m not doing one, I should be working on the other.

Or maybe, if I work hard enough, the Room show can become my job by the end of the year, and then I don’t have to worry. So, if I have nothing to show for the Room project by April, you have permission to slap me hard.

And so, after making a list of all I’ve accomplished in 2009, and seeing how long it is, I’m very proud of my productivity for the year.

In the Win Column.

Work and travel:
- Got a lot better at performing. I got some really good compliments from people who saw me perform my show on a cruise ship back in 2007, and now again in 2009, and they said I’d really improved. This makes me feel good.
- Earned more money than I’ve been able to spend.
- Visited about 45 countries and territories, including many countries I’ve never visited before 2009. For example, I’d never visited Africa before 2009, and now I’ve been to Tanzania, Kenya, Morocco, and Egypt.
- Had really good summer trip to France, Spain, and Portugal.
- Did some good shows at street show festivals in Germany and Austria.
- Made an awesome video of me juggling in all the above countries, a video I’ll be releasing in January. I’ll release this very soon.
- Attended TAMLondon.
- And of course, while it isn’t a “productivity” or “accomplishment” thing, I’ve met loads of people along the way and made many new friends.

Juggling:
- Playing lots of combat.
- Did no performing or hosting at the Berlin convention. This was the plan, and I managed it for the first time in five years.
- Organized the British Young Juggler of the Year competition for the fifth year in the row.
- Hosted a good show at the EJC.
- After wanting to go for the past three years, I finally got to the Sundance Turkish Juggling Festival. I performed my full show, exactly the same as I normally do it for non-jugglers, and it went down really well. This means a lot to me, as I never want to make juggling acts for anyone else but me, and if I enjoy it, I think both juggling and non-juggling audiences should like it too.
- Created four new juggling routines and acts. Most importantly, these acts use juggling equipment I already carry in my case. This means I’m progressively taking less equipment for more minutes of material.
- Released loads of videos on YouTube, including magnet juggling, air bounces, squeeze catches, act videos, and more. Also I released a few 10 minute workshop videos about juggling.

Writing:
- Started yet another blog, and kept posting without many breaks.
- Released my first novel “Minding Tomorrow” online for free, as an eBook. I got loads of great feedback about it.
- Completed two other novels, though I’m still editing both of them. I should release them both over the next few months.
- Started writing a third novel, and while I didn’t complete it, I did learn a lot.
- Wrote a load of articles and workshops for the Kaskade magazine.
- After a year of reading, thinking, and studying, wrote my first Higher Biblical Criticism essay.

Reading and podcasting:
- Read about 40 novels.
- Reviewed all but one or two of those novels for the Science Fiction Book Review Podcast.
- Joined other podcasts as a guest, including the Friday Night Party Line, The Sofanauts, and SFFaudio. This is always a lot of fun, and I’d like to do more in the future.

Photography:
- This has become much more of a hobby for me in the past year, and I’m becoming more and more impressed with the images I’m capturing.
- I kept a photo blog at the EJC and the Turkish Juggling Festival, both of which I really enjoyed.
- I’ve had quite a few images picked for the sosauce.com photo of the day.

Music:
- Wrote six or seven songs.
- Recorded four music tracks.
- Bought a new guitar.
- Performed my very first solo singing and guitar playing set.

In the Fail Column.

- Back injury put me out of action for two months at the start of the year.
- Getting dumped by my girlfriend in August.
- Only having gay men hit on me since I’ve been single.
- Spending too much time away from Berlin, which means I don’t see as much of my friends as I’d like, and the projects I work on at home suffer.
- Not improving much with my German speaking skills, even though I can carry off simple conversations.
- Not progressing very far with my Room Project, a new juggling theater show that has been in the works for two years now.
- Not winning the Fight Night 3 Club Combat Tournaments at either the Berlin or European juggling conventions. I lost to Jochen in the final both times.
- After winning the 3 club combat in the official EJC games in 2008, I only came third in 2009. Come to think of it, I might have won the BJC games combat, but can’t remember.
- New Years Resolution: learning to touch type. I didn’t do this. I find the hand position on my laptop too difficult, as I end up resting them on the mouse pad. And also there’s this really hot spot under the heel of my left hand…

Also, left over from mine and Pola’s “10 Personal Juggling Goals for 2009″ list that we did in the end of 2008 Juggling Podcast, here are some that we failed:
- 9 clubs, 18 passes each.
- Motion tracking routines. I worked on this a bit, but the return on investment probably isn’t very high.
- Host shows together.
- Perform on cruise ships together.
- More Juggling Podcasts.

Meanwhile, in 2009, I’ve been enjoying:
- The computer game Natural Selection.
- The TV show Dexter.
- Watching Tennis and American Football.
- The following podcasts (in alphabetical order): Astronomy Cast, The Bible Geek, The Bugle, Collings and Herrin, Fighting Talk, Filmspotting, gadget, GeekNights, The Good Atheist, In Our Time, Little Atoms, Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo, More or Less, Norman Centuries, Point of Inquiry, Richard Herring’s As It Occurs to me, Science Fiction and Politics, SFFaudio, The Skeptic’s Guide, Skeptoid, The Sofanauts, This Week in Google, This Week in Photography, and Writing Excuses. I listened to other podcasts, but not every episode, and not regularly.

So that’s my showing for 2009! Tomorrow I’ll post my goals and plans for 2010 and the years ahead.

What Mount Osorno looked like back in March:

Yesterday I took a walk around Punta Arena, the southernmost city in Chile. Man, that is one ugly place to visit! I took a few photos, but it’s hard to find an interesting shot. I may talk more about it in the future, as I’ve not yet moved the photos over to my laptop.

When I got back to the ship, I was feeling tired, and not very hungry, so I decided to have a bit of a sleep. When I woke up, I had to rush to the toilet for a series of diarrhea blasts and vomit lunges. Yup, the gastrointestinal norovirus struck me down.

Funnily enough, when I went to the Christmas Eve crew party, found myself in a huge room on deck three, surrounded by 500 crew, all hugging each other and kissing each other (on the cheek), and I turned to someone (I can’t remember who) and said something like “Wow, this place is a swirling morass of norovirus vectors.” Statement = true!

So I was quarantined to my room for 24 hours. And I took pills and got an injection in my arse. And at nothing but a plate of rice in all that time. I couldn’t concentrate on anything, not even opening my eyes long enough to watch a film. I couldn’t read either, though that might have been down to my current book not being very good. So all I did was lay on my back, try not to think about crying, crying, sleeping, and dreaming.

I had one of those weird dream-within-a-dream dreams. Some strange things happened, but when I woke up I everything was fine, and Pola was next to me in bed, and I was back in Berlin, and life was good. And then I thought “wait a moment” and woke up for real. And I was in my cabin, alone, single, a good 12,000 km from Berlin, sick, and starving hungry all at the same time.

I did, however, feel a lot better this morning, and I spent the day thinking (good thoughts), sleeping (with good dreams) and writing (see previous blog post).

Due to the quarantine, I missed visiting Ushuaia, and having a Christmas steak dinner with the production show cast. That’s a real pity, but I’ll be back in Ushuaia in January. I’ll aim to eat steak then.

Here’s a photo from the last time I visited Ushuaia.