I've come to the conclusion that I need to sleep less.

Bally well hello readers,

Have you noticed that I am already taking longer to add new posts? This is what I feared would happen, but I am endeavouring to combat my laziness by writing this fascinating new instalment!

The handing in of the notice went swimmingly. On Monday morning I happened to glance into the managers office through the open doorway, and caught a glimpse of my note of resignation lying opened in prime position on his desk. A bit cowardly I know, but at least now the wheels have been set in motion for my swift exit from Number10 bowl.

On Monday evening, I reluctantly said that I would cover for reception between 7pm and 8pm (after already having worked a 10am - 6pm shift), whilst the rest of the staff had a meeting. Apparently it was less important that I be present since I will be leaving in a few weeks. Yeah, my arse. This induced a whinge from my girlfriend Lisa, who decided that she couldn't wait around at my house while I finished work (I was originally meant to finish at 6pm, you see), and so the air turned sour for a bit because I was disappointed that I wouldn't see her for the rest of the evening.

Anyway, all that is rather uninteresting, but alas these kind of adventures for the dull make up most of my life at present. I mention it merely as a backdrop to today's events and to fill you in on the last couple of days in the life of danneh aitch.

Today I finally got properly underway with my practice routine for the German Open Cube Championships on April 22. Man, I am so slow these days! That is the trouble, you see, when you have more than one hobby. It was great when I could really concentrate on speedcubing, I was lucky enough to concentrate on it for more than 3 years, and master it to a very high degree. For those of you not "in the know" speedcubing is the art of solving Rubik's cube style puzzles very fast. But these days I have so much stuff to do. Recently I endeavoured to become a top Scrabble player. I studied hard, learned the 2 letter words, learned all of the 3 letter words, studied 1000 top high-probability 7 letter words (known as bingos), leanred the JQXZ 4's, 5 vowel 7's, the list is huge! And it paid off. On March 18th I won my first Scrabble tournament, with 5 wins out of 6, and I am officially currently ranked 512th in the UK, and rising! But the downside to this is that the time spent on learning words and working on Scrabble strategy and playing games was time that wasn't spent on cubing. It's so much more fun improving at something than simply practicing to maintain your current standard. With cubing, I feel like I am in a bit of a rut, there are so many more people these days who get very fast very quickly, and it is quite demoralising to be just behind the pace all the time. But I can't complain I guess, it's a lot harder being at the very top than near the top. For example, I placed 17th at the Rubik's World Championships last November. 17th in the World. And I don't think I will improve from that, at least while I have lost the motivation and determination to improve.

But even now I have stopped learning words for a while, because I am having much more fun improving my tenpin bowling! Time spent bowling is time not spent learning words or studying Scrabble strategy or playing games or cubing.

So I have reached the conclusion that either there needs to be more time in a day, or I need to have less sleep. And since the former would be rather difficult to achieve without serious consequences, the repercussions of the latter would be far easier to overcome I am sure.

I would love to be the top dog in all of my chosen games/sports. But I just have to accept that it will probably never happen. And whilst I am trying to keep up 3 hobbies, I am not managing to improve dramatically in any of them.

What should I do?

That's all for this extremely diaryish entry into my blog, but I just needed to get that off my chest :) I guess I will write something more obscure and arty-farty literaryish to keep Matty happy, another time :)

Night night,

Danneh.