Busy, busy, busy

This month's theme, it seems, is busyness. I'm going to be extremely busy on every front, and things don't look like they're going to let up any time before the 1st of November. At which time they'll probably still be quite busy, but maybe not as busy as my current busy state. Work's busy, the band is busy, my life is busy... busy, busy, busy.

As I said, it's something of a theme.

As per usual, I'm not going to talk about why work is busy, or any of the marvellous plans I have to complete the assigned tasks on time. Let me just say: it's very busy, and I'm planning. Oh, I have such lovely, grand plans...

The band are playing at events in Falkirk on both Friday and Saturday, both this week and next. Saturday of this week is particularly notable as I'm going to be the guy in charge. A chance to flex my PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWER, I think. Additionally, this may well be an opportunity to shmooze some local dignitaries, and perhaps arrange some fundraising gigs over the winter. While all this is going on, we also have our first committee meeting of the year on Tuesday, at which I once again will have to make use of PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWER in the chairing of the meeting. It will be important that what I said about "not just talking about all the fundraising we could do, but actually getting on and doing it" actually gets put into action. And we're also learning lots of new tunes for next year, both for regular use and for competition purposes.

It's quite busy.

As a consequence of the band being in action over the next two weekends, my weekly RPG has had to be cancelled. This is somewhat unfortunate. However, when we do get back, we should be shortly finishing the Warhammer campaign that has been running these past months, whereupon we will start a test game of D&D 4th Edition. This should be interesting - I have deep misgivings about the new system, but am determined to at least give it a fair assessment.

And then there are my so-called leisure activities. See, in order to fit everything in to my absurdly packed schedule, I have to schedule such things as reading books and watching TV with the same rigour as everything else. So...

In fiction, I have just finished "Krondor: the Betrayal", which was a decent book but definately not the author's best work. The next book on my list is "The Pale Horseman" by Bernard Cornwell, which is a good read thus far (but then, I'm only 14 pages in!). I should get that mostly read by the end of the month, I think, after which it's "Twenty Years After" by Dumas (because I do sometimes read actual literature).

In RPGs, I'm currently reading "Barony of the Damned" for Warhammer, which will be followed by the third book in the "Castle Whiterock" set, followed by the "Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting", and then the fourth book in the "Castle Whiterock" set. This probably doesn't mean much to many people, but this might: that's about 550 pages of reading, of which I'm hoping to complete at least 300 by the end of this month.

In TV, I'm all caught up on "Prison Break" and "Bones", and am only two episodes of "Heroes" behind (the BBC - I believe American TV is slightly further ahead). "South Park" starts this week, and I've decided also to give "Fringe" a go, despite hearing some bad things. So, that fills up a good five hours a week, which is rather more than I can really spare. Additionally, I have five movies on my Sky+ box that are waiting to be cleared (something I really want to get done - I've been too far behind for too long). The plan there is to watch all those movies by the end of the weekend, and then move into a maintenance mode.

The diet proceeds apace. Last week, it looked like I might have hit a plateau, but now it appears that I may have broken through it. The diet has now passed it's 30-day trial, and will proceed onwards. I'm now a little over a quarter of the way towards my target, which is pretty good going, I think.

And not-quite-finally, there is THE BIG ONE. As we know, the last remaining undone item on my (public) annual to-do list is the purchase of a house followed by a move into said house. About six months ago, I decided to wait-and-see what house prices would do in Falkirk over the following six months, which proved to be a wise move. House prices in Falkirk seem to have dropped rather sharply this year, meaning that a property that was sitting right at the limits of what I thought I could afford a year ago has dropped about a third of its value. (It's still right on the edge of what I can afford, but that's due to the credit crunch - previously, I was constrained by the amount I could borrow as a multiple of my income; now I'm constrained by the deposit I could afford to put down.) Add to that today's significant drop in interest rates, and things are really starting to come together nicely.

And that's where things stand at present. Naturally, with everything this tightly organised and scheduled, something is bound to happen any moment to throw my schedule out of alignment. I dread to think what that might be.