Somehow I can’t summon up the energy to go to bed yet, despite feeling very tired. So instead of doing much else, I’ve been browsing the net, and watching You Tube, and generally lazing about. And in doing so, I’ve come across this: a story about a deer, which decided to wander into a hotel.

The article starts off as such: “A video has been released of a deer wandering into a hotel lobby in China on Tuesday” – but then, just when you’re picturing a beautiful deer on an incredible mission, perhaps tentatively sipping its drink, or wandering around in a timid manner, it explains, very abruptly, that it was then shot.

I suppose it’s the quickest, easiest, and safest way to deal with such a situation. But I still found it quite funny how abruptly the theme of the piece changes. Perhaps I’m just tired enough to find humour in some strange things.

Regardless, I hope the adventurous deer is now safe and sound back in its favourite forest.

Today, I went to see the NFL at Wembley, and it was exceptionally good fun. This comes despite a very one-sided result, too, which is good.  

I was hugely excited on my way to the game, and at the time I wasn’t exactly sure why. I have been before, so the stadium is nothing new to me – indeed, I went to the NFL game last year, where the Chargers were defeated by the Saints, so it wasn’t my first live NFL game either. But there was something about it that made me more excited than I have been before, going to a game.

Perhaps it was all the different shirts, dotted about the various stations, and flooding onto the train. All sorts of colours, all sorts of teams, as people showed their support of the sport itself rather than a specific team. Perhaps it was the energy of an excited kid on the seat to my right rubbing off on me. He was bouncing up and down, and calling out every team he saw with tremendous glee. It was his first game, and he was loving every minute of it.

Or perhaps it was the fact that I had the opportunity to watch Tom Brady and Randy Moss play. I knew that if Moss caught one touchdown, he would move to second place on the all time receiver list behind Jerry Rice. I knew that Tom Brady is already being considered one of the best ever, and so long as he stays healthy, he still has a long career ahead of him.

Whatever it was, I was excited. And I had an absolute blast. It was great seeing old friends, and drinking together, and chucking a ball around together before heading in. It was wonderful to watch the pre-game warm-ups, seeing the players catching balls, and the quarterbacks demonstrating perfect spirals. It was brilliant, all of it.

Already, I’m looking forward to next year.

It occurred to me a little bit earlier that I haven’t blogged any further on my work, and my office. Which is not very good, considering I have moaned about the cleanup before, about the moving of things, and the updating of things. I wrote about how I hoped it would be nicer, when it was all done; I hope things would be able to run a bit more smoothly.

Well, thankfully things are running very smoothly. On the work front, that’s mostly due to our new business broadband. We had initially been worried that, with limited business sdsl availability in our area, we wouldn’t be able to go for the ideal internet connection, but in the end it worked out. The new internet is not only a lot faster than our previous one, but it doesn’t seem to disconnect as much either. There were times before where you could be working, and out of nowhere, and apparently for no real reason, you would get cut off. As long as I haven’t just jinxed it, it seems to be the case no longer.

We also updated our telephones, which was almost as needed as the internet fix. Mostly this is because our phones were the most out of date things in the office. Probably even more out of date than Jack’s Tottenham shirt, which is yellow and very, very dated. Now our phones can do all sorts of fancy stuff. It is a little bit like these new voip phone systems, and can do a lot more than just serve as a telephone. Fancy stuff.

Tomorrow is the big day. Wembley. The NFL, over here in England. So there is a lot to look forward to, and I’m growing more and more excited by the minute.

Whilst I was browsing the news a little bit earlier, I came across a few unusual and interesting stories. Interesting for different reasons, too.

Here, in something that I find somewhat strange, but at the same time quite funny, a man has been arrested for being naked in his own home.

Apparently he had just rolled out of bed, and had decided to head to the kitchen for a cuppa. A parent and their kid walked past, saw everything, and were unsurprisingly a little bit shocked. But how can this person get arrested when he is in his own house? I very much doubt he was putting on a purposeful show, as the police seem to be hinting at, because if he was there would be no denying it. And why were the looking into his kitchen in the first place?

Strange, how the law works sometimes. And speaking of the law, here’s quite an amusing piece. It is about a chair that has been dubbed the drink-driving chair. It is motorised, runs on a lawnmower engine, has a very intriguing steering wheel, and it looks like a very comfy drive indeed. It’s been seized from the previous owner, who was a great many times over the legal limit, and is now set to be auctioned off by the police.

And yes, I am currently just envisioning myself driving along the road in a sofa car. Perhaps not with the drink; I wouldn’t want to lose the car to auction, and I certainly wouldn’t want to get an 180 day jail sentence, but it would be a lot of fun to kick back and zoom along. At the top speed of 20 mph...

I spoke to a friend earlier today who is looking to claim whiplash insurance compensation. Earlier in the week, he was in a car crash – although by all accounts it was more of a bump. Someone apparently drove into the back of his car at the traffic lights in town ... he was slowing to a halt, and the car behind somehow hadn’t realised the lights had turned red, and just trundled into the back of him.

It seems that the man who did the crashing was more than helpful though, and it looks like everything is in place for the insurance stuff to be sorted out. Which reminds me, there is an article here that claims a significant amount of people don’t realise their options when it comes to things like this. I stumbled across it the other day, and I must remember to send it over to my friend – he would hate it if I informed him afterwards that he missed out on an accident claim or something.

I can’t think when I’ll see him next, though. He was going to come to the NFL game at Wembley this week, but he has just dropped out, and the unfortunate  problem when people live all over the country is that you rarely get to see each other face to face. I’ll have to have a dig around to see if I can find his email address, I suppose, although I can’t remember ever getting it off him.

And now there are only a couple of days to go before the game. I’m beginning to look forward to it quite a lot. There was an article in The Times about Tom Brady, and it just reinforced that he and top target Randy Moss will be two players who it will be pretty fantastic to have seen play, after they have retired. Yes, I’m looking forward to it quite a lot!

The San Francisco 49ers have announced that Michael Crabtree might start in their upcoming game against the Houston Texans. Now, at the beginning of the season this might not have been such interesting news: after all, this is Michael Crabtree we’re talking about, widely considered the best wide receiver in college football the past two years, and a player who some considered to the best player in the entire 2009 draft. Prior to the beginning of the season, it would not be surprising to see him in the starting line up. Indeed, it would perhaps be expected.

Coming a quarter of the way into the season, though, it is very interesting news.

Crabtree held out until early October – he was, by a very long way, the last rookie to sign with his team – signing 5 games into the campaign. And the 49ers have been looking good, too. They’re off to their most successful start in a while, beginning the season 3-2, and they currently sit atop the NFC West. Josh Morgan, whose spot Crabtree will be taking, has had some success, too.

The team is coming off a bye week this week, and their players have been allowed to travel home to be with their family – all except Crabtree, who remains at the practice facility getting up to speed with the offense. And poor old Morgan has had to stay behind to help him learn the position. He is literally teaching the man who has walked in and taken his position.

A low blow, perhaps. And an interesting move all together: it shows other players that you can hold out and not suffer any consequences. But then, it is Michael Crabtree we’re talking about here. He is one of the most explosive, prolific and hyped players to come into the league since Reggie Bush.

I think if I were Mike Singletary, I would play him too.

Earlier today, I decided to take a look at a bit of mortgage news. Often, it’s something that I quite like to do, every now and then, in an effort to keep up to date with how things are looking in our current climate. With a bit of Googling, you’ll find that there are some handy sites out there for just that sort of thing; you can sort of glance over the main headlines without needing to spend too much time reading anything.

I was quite interested to see that some of the news was quite positive stuff. There is an article here suggesting that mortgage rates are rising – indeed, rising for the first time since August, which is good to see. It might be a “small move”, but baby steps are always going to be needed with something like this.

Certainly, I think that if I were in the market to sell my house, or looking to be selling any property, I would be starting to smile again. It is a good sign, because although there have been a few of these incidents, where things start to look good momentarily – often they are just that: momentary. Hopefully here, things can keep moving forward.

Now, it is time to kick back, relax, and watch a bit of the NFL, I think. Currently Tom Brady is on track to break the single game passing touchdown record. Unless they take him off, of course, which they probably will do considering the horrible conditions they’re playing in. I’m not usually the biggest fan of the Patriots, but when you have Brady in your fantasy team, having him throw 5 touchdowns in the 2^nd quarter becomes slightly more exciting.

There is a curious article here on Thorpe Park, one the UK’s biggest and most famous theme parks. It looks as though there have been some spooky happenings recently, but whether there is any real basis for worry there I’m not sure.

When I first saw the headline, my first thought turned to the idea as an idea for a story: it would be the perfect scene for a Graveyard Book style story, and I didn’t really click on expecting to find anything too serious. Perhaps someone had been spooked by some kids messing around; had been subject to some strange prank. But no, it seems that managers at the park are so scared that they have called in somebody to perform an exorcism.

It sounds like, for whatever reason, employees were fiddling around with a Ouija board on the Saw ride, and afterwards a number of spooky things started happening: lights flickering, footsteps being heard despite no one being there – that sort of thing. It all sounds very fishy. I haven’t been to experience the ride yet, but wouldn’t flickering lights be part of what makes the ride scary in the first place? I find it strange (but quite interesting) that the suits have deemed it necessary to try and exorcise any demons or unwanted spirits.

I’m quite tempted to take a trip there and check out the ride to see if it’s still even spookier than usual, although I suppose by now Rev Fanthorpe has sorted it all out. I suppose it’s possible that one or two of these spirits from the alternate dimension escaped his cleansing, though.

I didn’t get to look up the news of yesterday, like I was planning on doing. I ended up heading to Colchester for my friend’s birthday, playing drinking games, and sleeping on someone’s sofa. It was like being a student all over again. But yes, it means I’ve had a look through Friday’s news stories today instead – and there are quite a few. And quite a few of them are very interesting, too.

There is a theme to two of the more interesting pieces. Mostly because the stories that more immediately struck me were of a similar theme, although the two of them are still very different. The theme that they share, though, is motherhood: they are both slices of what makes the bond between mother and child unique and magical.

Firstly, if your heart is in need of warming, there is a mother here who has woken from a coma after hearing her baby’s voice. Quite moving, no? But then, what about this: a newborn baby fell through the toilet of a train, landed on the tracks, and survived. The mother promptly jumped out of the window (people thought that she was committing suicide, and I suppose that would be my initial reaction, too), but it later turned out that she had pulled a James Bond move and rescued her baby.

On one hand, we have the power of voice; the power of that connection between mother and child. And on the other, that connection, that bond, is demonstrated in incredible fashion. Perhaps they should consider moving mother’s day?

There is not much more that annoys me, than being called by your service provider about deals and offers. And, frustratingly, it seems to happen to me quite a bit. When I was at university, it was Virgin – they called me on a number of occasions about some sort of package where I could get television and phone included, whereas I only had the broadband. The thing is, it is rather easy to cancel broadband when you finish the year and move out – but the phone, and the TV is another matter. And then you have to consider the fact that there is always a minimum contract agreement, which would go on far longer than my tenancy.

And now I have been called by BT, offering me some supposedly fantastic deals on their new BT home phones. I have been using BT here for a while now, and they have been okay. The internet is sometimes quite slow, we sometimes get stung on the occasional phone bill, but for the most part they have been okay. But that doesn’t mean I want to get called about new phones. If I want new phones, I can shop around for them myself.

There are so many specialists and websites, and shops out there – places like this telephone system website – that make it so easy to get that sort of thing anyway, that now more than ever you don’t need people selling you things down the phone. It’s the same with internet. You have telecoms and the like, but more than that, you have television adverts, you have the internet in general: you can use the internet to research the internet, and find the deals you want. If you want sdsl internet, you can research and get sdsl internet.

So rather than go through the process of turning them down, I simply hung up. And after the day I’ve had today, it felt quite good, too!