According to Roger, Timeline will be forced upon the naysayers on 12th May; that's next Saturday, and that will be the day that I think I shall bite the bullet and say goodbye to Facebook. I know I've said it before, but I've lost a lot of things off the Internet over the years; places that I spent just as much time as I have on Facebook and I've survived without them.
It will have consequences; I won't be as in touch with my close friends and family as I have been - the one really good thing about Facebook - and, of course, my blog will take a MASSIVE drop in hits, because 80% of them originate through links posted through Facebook. I doubt I'll embrace Google+ or one of the others suggested by various friends, because I really can't be arsed. I think I'm of an age now where if I want to be in contact with people then I'll email, phone or visit them - with one or two I might even use that antiquated postal system that still exists out there in the real world.
I still look at this Timeline shit as the recent big 'fuck you' from Mark Zuckerberg, who I'm, sure wanders around all day with a trouser-busting erection at the belief he is the most powerful twat on earth. It looks like it was designed by a blind fish with learning difficulties and as I'm pretty vague and ambiguous about wanting to display much about myself, then I can't see the relevance or purpose of it. It's just a insidious way to use people and target them with all the potential advertisers.
Besides, all that my news feed has become is a stream of You Tube clips, cute pictures and banal status updates (one of the reasons why I've only updated my status about 6 times in the last year) and to think some of my friends have been baffled as to why I've not joined or embraced Twitter.
It will mean that I will end up taking a hiatus from Scrabble; I won't be fixated by Bejewelled Blitz and um... Well, I shall miss playing Scrabble. I might become a little more isolated than I am already, but I can't see that being too bad. Yes, I'll miss out on some stuff, but I expect some of my friends will keep me abreast of any interesting situations, developments or links.
I will, of course, look into the information about Google Chrome users being able to activate something that allows the old interface to remain, but I used Social Fixer the last time Facebook changed against my wishes and all that did was slow up my PC and that isn't a good thing even when you have a lot of RAM and a fast processor.
Bad Week Gets Worse
Despite being immersed in my own woes and with depression lurking at my seams; I'm all too aware that everyone else has shit in their lives and that will ultimately affect me.
One of my best friends discovered that his girlfriend of 10 years has been cheating on him, destroying all of the plans they had made and leaving him feeling dejected, rejected and justifiably unhappy. This good friend and I share a mutual friend - someone who had been a constant in the wife's and my life for many years. He pretty much disappeared off the radar about ten years ago, opting to swap his then life of alcoholism, drug abuse and generally not looking after himself for a career living out of a trailer, working on narrow boats and keeping as far away from Northamptonshire as he possibly could.
To discover this morning that he has terminal lung cancer - at 45 - and the doctors are talking about how long he has rather than what chances he has is quite upsetting. This is a guy who was the wife's 'unofficial little brother' and someone we took in when his family - a notoriously rubbish shower of shit - didn't so much as disown him as just airbrush him out of their lives.
2012 is rapidly turning into yet another utterly crap year and it's not even half over yet.
Seasonal Enigma
Yes, it's like winter out there. We probably deserve it. I mean, picking fully-formed and tasty raspberries on Christmas Day is pretty unique and sitting in the garden with my shirt off during the middle of March is pretty unusual. But, the weirdest quirk of our enigmatic and thoroughly undependable weather arrived on Thursday night and then again on Friday.
The wife had taken the dogs down the garden for their 10pm piss break and when she came in, she wandered upstairs and said to me, "There's a present for you by the toaster." I looked at her slightly puzzled and she just smiled.
I went down and into the kitchen and was faced with a fully formed parasol mushroom, about the size of a cricket ball. It was free of insects (wrong time of the year for them) and quite possibly the best example of one of my all time favourite mushrooms I've seen in a long time. It was growing in one of the borders! It is either about 7 or 8 months late or 4 months early; but it's obviously been fooled into thinking it is now the autumn again.
The next day, I got home from work and decided to have a little look-see; you never know there might be more. And there was. Except it wasn't another parasol mushroom, but a big fat juicy agaricus silvaticus or scaly wood mushroom - basically a wild and tasty version of the shop bought chestnut mushroom. It is also at least three months ahead of its usual schedule.
The last time something freaky happened with mushrooms was back in June 1997. Me, the wife and the bloke I mentioned earlier who's split with his girlfriend, were down the Mill Road fields on the outskirts of Wellingborough. For those not familiar with it, if you drive out of Wellingborough and head towards Finedon, there are a bunch of fields backing onto the river that are just pasture land and therefore a pretty good field mushroom home.
That year the summer had not even got to the stage where it looked like it was going to arrive. It rained, it was unseasonably cold and I was wearing wellies at midsummer because the ground was so wet.
We spotted the mushrooms from about 200 yards away. You couldn't miss them, there were hundreds and hundreds of them - field and horse mushrooms the size of dinner plates. We ended up filling 3 carrier bags and a wicker basket with them and when we got home we had picked over 10lbs of fresh wild mushrooms and had left probably another 30lbs because they were either not perfect specimens or had started to go over.
I have no allusions that if I went mushrooming this weekend I'd find much, if anything, but, you know, I might keep half an eye on some of the usual places I find them!
Hunting
There were THREE jobs I could go for in the paper this week. That's three more than there has been for a long time. None of them are a perfect fit, but all of them pay more than I'm currently getting and offer me the chance to use my abilities, rather than not, as is the case at the moment.
As it will be a stormy and horrid day on Monday, I shall spend a few hours filling out application forms and hoping that I get the chance to get away from my current job which I feel has turned into a living nightmare...
Stuff
- NAO has been on constant rotation, but I was listening to some Bach at work.
- I have largely been underwhelmed by just about everything this week.
I think everyone hates Facebook timeline.
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