Great News Everyone!

After the Tory party failed to make huge strides in the recent by-elections there are mutterings of a recall and replacement of David Cameron as leader.

Which seems overly harsh to me, as expecting Conservative victories in the Labour heartlands seems unlikely to say the least. Voters who were protesting against Labour were much more likely to go Lib Dem, and indeed that's what happened.

But with any luck this will lead to the return of the massive infighting that destroyed the Tory election chances for the last 10 years, drag the party back rightwards (where their base seems to be steadily aging/shrinking) and produce a sea-change in the make-up of UK politics.

Ok, make that "with a _lot_ of luck".

The view from my bedroom window

Safely down in the Lake District - despite the terrible rains of two days ago everything seems to have returned to normal.
There's no wi-fi in the cottage, so my only method of communication is my phone, which I've deliberately left sans email client. A week of sunshine, scenery and walking is my only option. Alas!
I will undoubtedly write the occasional epistle, but won't be able to see any replies you send me. For the next week the internet will be write only :-)

Sun 22/07/2007 14:07 22072007072

Things that stress me out.

I've finished Harry Potter, and lack anyone to talk to it about so I thought I'd see if I could link up Dad's laptop to my phone over bluetooth and then use that to get to LJ and see what everyone else was saying about it.

45 minutes of playing later I came to the conclusion that his laptop doesn't actually have a bluetooth dongle in it. It took me that long because I've never used Vista before and never tried to set up bluetooth before, so I couldn't tell if I was just missing some setting.

Having given up on that I decided that installing his Father's Day present (Company of Heroes) would be fun - I've not seen it, but I'd heard good things about it. I got as far as the first of the install screens and it asked for the serial number. Checking the back of the manual I discovered that the serial number space was entirely blank.

Which just left me feeling tense, stressed and on edge, which I know are three different descriptions of the same thing but I want to be sure I'm getting my feelings across here...

I hate things not working. I'm sure that a lot of my computer skills stem from my experiences as a teenager, when I'd break something and then be totally focussed on fixing it for the next hour (or two, or eight) until I'd got it working again and the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach had gone away.

It all ties back in with my love for order, reason and organisation. With wanting to understand why things are the way they are and exert some control over them. I want the world to work the way I expect it to. And when it doesn't I want to be able to understand either what I did wrong, or where my understanding is lacking.

None of this is as bad as it was. Nowadays I have the world firmly (if fuzzily) divided into things that can be argued and things that can't, as well as into things that I've heard the arguments over 500 times, and things where I might hear a new argument. I no longer feel the need to understand (and thus feel a measure of control over) everything. And by and large I feel much happier because of this.

All of which notwithstanding I'm not going to be happy until I've got the damned game installed and working.

Addendum

As I can't edit the previous post from here, I'll add this in here. If you're reading this in reverse order you may want to skip down an entry or two to see the first part...

One of the reasons I messed up a relationship or two is directly related to the stress I feel when something is "wrong"or "broken". When someone comes to me and says "X is really stressing me out"it taps directly into that part of me I've honed into a problem-solving machine.

And then when I can't solve it (and let's face it, most people problems can't be fixed quickly, and almost certainly can't be fixed by anyone other than the person actually having the problem) my stress levels rise. Which is fine in the short run, as I can wave it away or just live with it, but in the long run it tends to cause my underlying stress levels to get higher and higher.

The obvious response to which is that I'm just not someone who deals well with being friends with people who are stressed all the time, and certainly not with relationships with them. Relationships, of course, are even worse because I then feel a sense of responsibility/duty of care, which magnifies the feelings of powerlessness and makes me feel worse. Which then causes me to back way off as a coping mechanism.

I'm much better at this kind of thing than I used to be - which is probably one of the reasons I'm happy to talk about it, or am even reasonably aware that I do it. But I'm not sure it's something I'll ever be entirely over.