And it's about time.

It's taken months, but I finally had a conversation today that I've been trying to have for a good while now. And I only had it with one person instead of three. But, it was useful and gave me a good starting point for talking to other other two people.

It's not stopped being frustrating though. To learn that some things in work are simply outside of your control, despite being told otherwise is HUGELY frustrating.

But now that it's been clarified, I can go to the relevant people and put my cards on the table - I want things to change. I don't know if it's too late to change things for this year, but I also don't see how the people involved can refuse me.

I have two days to work on writing an email that'll hopefully kick off at least one face to face meeting.

Blast from the past.

Spotted on Tinder this morning: DSC. Swiped left, obviously.

Also spotted - extremely cute girl. Super-liked her.

Talky time.

JB and CC called round last night. I initially thought independently, but I subsequently understood that JB wanted CC to be there. Who knows why? JB has always been a little weird like that.

I've been asking JB to call round for ages. Ever since I moved in, to be honest and she always promised to, but never made any plans.

However, the two of them were here for over an hour or so and it was nice to have visitors and have a bit of chat.

CC was talking about getting back into her fitness regime again after her recent trip to America. She had mentioned the possibility of joining a gym previously, and this was brought up again, though brushed over in favour of her non-gym things - she's does various things about four times per week).

I'd entertained the gym idea and had spoken about it with USHW, though my confidence issues always made me reticent about doing it again. However, there's a local gym that's quite cheap that's tempting. If I could get a personal trainer for a reasonable price, then that may well seal the deal. However, I was paying GC almost £30 per hour back in 2006, so I've no idea how much they are now.

While the house isn't crippling me financially, it's certainly tighter than it was this time last year. Financially, my plan of joining a gym and perhaps seeing a PT a couple of times a month for regular checkpoints might not be do-able. It's potentially £100 per month that I can spend better elsewhere right now.

If CC brings up the gym thing again, I'll look into it, but she'll be doing all the running for this and I'll only agree if the price is right. I'm hoping that, within the next two weeks, my phase one of decorating will be complete and that should mean I can at least get back to my yoga routine that I did a few years ago.

I enjoyed that, was motivated to do it and managed to lose 10 lb in about 10 weeks with a couple of small dietary tweaks as well. Perhaps I should give that a go again and maybe only go down the gym route if the yoga doesn't pay off?

After all, I now have a couple of previously unused rooms that now need furnished with an eye on larger-scale works around the rest of the house.

Tonight's £130 million jackpot would come in handy right about now.

The online dating game.

A few weeks ago, I was messaged on OK Cupid. According to the site's algorithm, we were very well matched. According to her profile, when I went to browse, it appeared that the site had actually gotten something right. And I'm not just talking about her likes and dislikes... her style of writing, word usage etc. is very reminiscent of my own. That's, in case you hadn't guessed, A GOOD THING.

I wasn't getting a lot of reaction from her photos - she's pretty, stands out, tall, curvy. Usually, none of these things would put me off, but I just wasn't getting that vibe off her the way I had in the past with people like CB, for example.

Still, both of us are, according to our respective profiles, looking to meet new people outside of dating, so I replied. My messages were, quite frankly, not very good. I managed to be closed off, without really meaning to. To be fair, she seemed to be the same. But we still managed to swap a few messages over a few days.

It went quiet over a weekend, she changed her profile picture,  I sent a message to try and re-ignite the conversation and she hasn't logged on since. At the same time, she removed all her pictures from her recently re-activated PoF profile.

That's two women in the past two months who've cancelled/archived their profiles after talking to me.

Only for the OKC girl to pop up on my PoF feed last night.

Ho hum.

It's meant to be fun, right?

There's one girl I told USHW that I'd message... and I will, as soon as I can think of an opening message because, typically, she says nothing in her profile of any worth and I refuse to send just "hi".

It's the little things.

While things have been good recently - being more engaged and busy at work has helped a great deal -  Mondays are still Mondays.

However, my day was made by a simple text message.

"Looking forward to seeing you again next week. I've missed you."

It was from KfW2. Of all the close female friends and non-platonic friends I've had over the years, few, if any, have exuded the warmth that KfW2 gives off. And you know she means it - it's not an empty platitude.

Even AM and QC1, supposedly two of my closest female friends for near fifteen years, never seemed to convince me when they said something similar. In fact, can I remember them saying anything like that? Oh, AM has, but that's another story.

Maybe that's part of my confidence issues rather than anything that AM and QC1 did wrong.

Influence.

I've often mentioned my inability to talk to new people, but that I'm unstoppable if I am comfortable.

Case in point: a few months ago, in a departmental meeting, I challenged some company/HR policy with our CEO. Without going into detail, I suggested that if he wanted the mentality of the company to change as he claimed, he needed to kickstart it and I suggested a few things that I thought might help.

Roll on to today, and an email came out from HR that announced that one of my ideas was being implemented. I wasn't named, of course, but everyone who was at the meeting with the CEO sent messages, semi-jokingly congratulating me.

I'm not going to claim that it was a life changing idea. It wasn't and neither is it a big change, but it will be seen that way by the employees. However, without my intervention and subsequent badgering of my management hierarchy to follow up with the CEO, I firmly believe that the policy change would not have happened.

When I suggest that to my managers, they look blankly back at me.

Idiots.

This is about the fourth time that I've done something like that that has had a company-wide impact with no reward from anyone. It's about time I blew my own trumpet.

A knock on effect from this is that it becomes easier (in my head anyway) to walk to and/or from work. If the gym thing doesn't pan out with CC, my place of work is around 2.5 miles away or roughly an hour's walk.

Weekend roundup.

I spent the weekend chasing S. He had a friend over from London and the entire weekend was spent around hosting her and her friend. That's not a criticism, by the way, just explaining how it was. On Thursday, we were meeting for a few drinks and some pool. However, S didn't phone until after 10 PM by which time I had given up on the idea of going out (plus I had work the next day).

A similar thing happened on Friday, with the phone call not coming until well after 11 PM.

It was Saturday before the stars aligned and S was organised enough to do stuff on time. FC was out, as was GM and Sports Girl. SG had been in contact a few days before.

"Oh, I've missed you, it's been so long!" she declared.

I didn't type it out directly, but my reply implied that our lack of contact was her fault. And it is. SG and GM  have been socially invisible since they got together as a couple, around six months ago. FC gets to see them sometimes, but only because of sporting connections.

It was no surprise to see that, when SG and GM finally showed up on Saturday, that they never made any attempt to mingle with the people that S had invited out. It looked to me like GM wanted to, but SG never let him go for one second the entire evening.

I was also semi-expecting a message from CC. It was her birthday as well on Saturday and she was out with a few friends. I suggested that if she let me know where she was, I'd buy her a drink if I were close enough. That message didn't come, however.

KfW2 had promised a phone call as well. She's been a little down recently and I was hoping for a chance to chat and arrange our adult afternoon out. Via a few text messages though, she told me she was busy, but she will try and call soon. Hopefully we'll get something planned for within the next few weeks.

I text CC on Sunday morning. She had gotten drunk the night before. I noticed on Facebook that she was out with a girl that I'd previously matched with on Tinder. She'd de-activated or un-matched before I had a chance to message her though. I've never mentioned that to anyone, apart from USHW, so that may be something to consider, though my only previous attempt to meet someone through a mutual friend, CB, didn't yield any results. To be honest, cute Tinder girl is an outside bet anyway - her distance and family situation are not deal breakers, but certainly obstacles for me to overcome.

I also spoke with CC about exercise and she re-iterated her plan to join a gym after holiday (coincidentally with the cute Tinder girl), so that may be something that kicks in at the start of next month.

Hello.

Today got off to an interesting start. Sat on the bus on the way to work, who should I see at a bus stop on my route, but the cute, foreign, girl who works at my place? I think I've mentioned her in passing on the blog before, but a quick recap, just in case: she seems quiet, I don't know what age she is, I don't know where she lives (or rather, I didn't... I vaguely do now), she doesn't seem to go to our monthly work events and, a few years ago at the work Christmas party, I got her onto the dance floor to dance for a while, despite her being a stranger. We haven't had a proper conversation, and it's only reasonably recently that I actually found out her name.

She gets on the bus. She has a choice of seats available to her though she chooses to sit beside me. I panic. Well, not panic. I have a dilemma. She's barely looked at me since the Xmas party (though I had her laughing then, but a connection never developed) and I don't even remember her making eye contact with me at any time since, but it seems impolite not to at least acknowledge her presence. Do I take out my earphones and talk to her or continue looking out the window and listening to my Spotify playlist of music from films?

Good manners get the better of me and I remove my headphones.

I make a few statements and ask a few tentative questions, mainly around her living locally and getting the bus.

She replies, but they're brief... a few words at most. Is it shyness? Is she simply not wanting to talk?

My destination stop approaches (presumably hers too), so instead of trying to coax a conversation out of her on the short walk to the office, I cut my losses and walk to my local, regular coffee shop instead of heading into the office with her.

Ho hum.

Out tonight with S and his unrequited love. She's a good laugh, so I am looking forward to it. KfW2 has also said that she'll phone or call round tomorrow. I'm looking forward to that, too.

Plans.

My plan was that, after getting the weekend out of the way with FBS, D etc. that I'd chat to KfW2 about arranging an afternoon out. I know she enjoys our time together as much as I do - she said as much to me the last time we were out, so it's not a chore. It's just a matter of logistics - arranging babysitters etc.

However, she's a little down in the dumps at the moment. Her eldest has literally just left for university, possibly never to return to the family home (at least permanently). I often think that people like KfW2 and her eldest have a closer bond than others, because KfW2 and the father of her eldest are not together and boyfriends have been and gone. For a long time, while she's never uttered the phrase, it was just "the two of them against the world".

While she might well need one of our afternoons out, it seems inconsiderate to suggest it. Why? I don't know. We had a tentative agreement that we'd do it after the university upheaval, so it's not as if it'd be unexpected and our window of opportunity to have such an afternoon our is rapidly closing.

I'll leave it a few days and suggest something then.

As far as other plans go, CC is off on holiday next week. When she returns, I'm hoping to have a chat with her about joining the local gym that I've talked about previously and possibly engaging a PT for a bit. Maybe not multiple times a week, but perhaps a couple of times per month, just as a milestone kinda thing. I did it with GC years ago and noticed an improvement in tone, upper body strength etc. and that was just going to the gym maybe once per week and not really altering diet and seeing GC once per month. Even doing my yoga on a daily basis a few years ago, a few people from work noticed a difference after three months.

CC is talking about going to the gym at least twice per week, with some home stuff (my yoga), seeing a PT twice per month and making small changes to my diet (portion management, cutting out some stuff like bread and crisps and eating a little more healthily), then I would hope to see real changes.

I'm also hoping to have a chat with her about maybe doing stuff together to meet new people. I don't know if CC is actively looking to date/meet people (she seems happy enough with her lot, but then again, I probably do to her) or if she even has issues meeting people. I fail to see how - she's an attractive woman, decent body, and personable, so unlike me, I could see her getting plenty of offers.

We meet again!

KfW2 has always been intrigued by my circle of friends. Specifically, that I'm still in regular contact with people I've known since primary school - G is one of these people. While I wouldn't claim to be friends with another guy, we were in pretty much every primary school class and secondary school class and even ended up working for the same company for a while. In my early twenties, I played in the same football team as another primary school classmate.

Why the sudden talk about primary school? Well, Facebook has been very active this weekend with talk of another reunion. I'll probably go, though these things are really of no interest to me. I'm already in contact with the few people I want to be, the one or two people that I would like to talk to (including my first real crush), I'm already friends with on Facebook. The only missing person is one girl I had a minor crush on.

It all depends on dates and venues, though they're likely to be local.

Just... stuff.

BR and G have been and gone and, as predicted, it was a drunken one. It was good to catch up along with M and MM, though the second night out with G never happened. It's a shame, but G's communication these days is poor. I'm less concerned that I didn't get a second night in the pub and more concerned that he couldn't have sent a quick text message rather than FP and myself being left in the dark.

Ho hum.

Sadly, MMBF and E3 never appeared. I was never going to pull them, but a man can window shop and they are cute. The only other piece of "news" is that one of our old school friends, a loud girl who I don't particularly like, got talking to me about meeting people and dating. I ended up telling them about my online dating experiences and the results, that I did want to meet people and that I wasn't that interested in people with kids, but admitted if the chemistry was there. I was about to launch into my theory about how online dating encouraged box ticking and how people seemed to be unwilling to meet people without finding out if there was chemistry by meeting, but we got side-tracked by G's arrival.

I doubt anything will come of it, though loud girl did suggest a blind date, which I avoided agreeing to.

It was a good night. That's that one ticked off. Next up - FBS, D and Friction Guy this coming weekend. I also have KfW2 and a night out with S's unrequited love before the end of the month.