Mid Year Ramblings

So here we are, at the half way point of the year - do we feel that we have actually achieved anything as another arbitrarily defined unit of time inevitably begins to slip from our grasp?  Probably not.  Which is why I try not to be goal-orientated in life - it will only end in disappointment.  Far better, I find, just to take things as they come and have some vague idea of what, ideally, I'd like to do in the coming months.  The trouble with having goals is that life has a tendency to intervene:  this whole year, so far, every plan I've made has been blown off course by a series of unexpected events, from leaking hot water cylinders to collapsing beds and back-stabbing mattresses, each of them has forced me to revise my plans.  Not that this has necessarily been bad: I now have a fabulously comfortable new mattress which has transformed my sleep patterns and I'm in the midst of assembling a new bed, both of which I would have kept putting off implementing if not for the bed and mattress incidents earlier this year.  Similarly, following the water cylinder incident, my kitchen ceiling has never looked better after being repainted to cover the water stains, the rest of the kitchen is shortly to receive a much needed repaint, also as a result of the damage caused by the leak.  Again, tasks I would have kept putting off.

My spare room is also nearing the completion of an overhaul forced on me by water damage caused by that storm damage to the roof the other Christmas and the subsequent penetrating damp caused by the council's ivy blocking my guttering and sending rainwater straight down the outside wall.  Again, it had needed doing for years, but I just kept putting it off.  Hopefully, this renovation will pave the way for me setting up my model railway in the spare room again - something else I've found excuses to put off.  None of these things were goals I set myself at the beginning of the year, but I'm glad to have done them.  Indeed, if I had set them as goals, I'd probably still have been procrastinating over them now, halfway through the year.  It's been the same on other fronts in my life - I've continued to catch up with a fantastic number of obscure low rent movies, mainly accident.  Most of them I didn't go looking for, they just turned up by happenstance as I was trying to find other stuff.  Which is the best way to discover things - planned searches take all of the mystery and fun out of it.  The same applies to holidays - I've never understood those people who plan their holidays down to the last detail.  My ideal holiday involves just drifting around somewhere, seeing what turns up and what I stumble across.  Much more interesting, believe me.  Speaking of holidays, I really need to work out when I'm going to take this year's long Summer break.  Anyway, I've rambled long enough on the evils of goal-orientated existence.  I'm going to bumble around a bit and see who is in the pub...