No more excuses. It’s time to get back to writing. The question is what should I write about? The excuses? Sounds like a great idea to me!

“Mawidge”

Almost a month ago I lost the ability to tick the “Single” box on official forms and insurance quotes. Yes, I have been bitten by the marriage bug. It has has a characteristic and pathognomonic appearance, presenting as a band of silver or gold coloured metal on the left hand ring finger. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. I haven’t written about it at all, mainly because I was tired after the fact and just wanted to spend time with Sarah.

It may be cliché, but it was hands down the best day of my life to date. There’s no feeling quite like it, and having so many friends and family to celebrate it with us was incredible. The sense of achievement, too. We did so much of it ourselves, and had a lot of help from family and friends in the week running up to it. It was far from stress free, and definitely not the easy option, but everything came together on the day and it was all worthwhile. And we got to sabre some bottles of prosecco. What more could you want? Hotdogs? Pie and mash? We had it all.

That was the good. The not-so-good is that we’re still living in our respective countries. Cardiff hasn’t gotten any closer to Cornwall. We still have the weekends, but we’re hoping for an upgrade from a 2 in 7 marriage.

I See Dead People (No, really)

Ask me what my job is, and for the next month or so, I’ll tell you I do post mortems. As part of my histopathology training, I’m spending the month doing daily post mortems, trying to establish cause of death in cases referred to us by the coroner. These are mainly cases of sudden unexplained death in the community, and it’s up to us to find the reason the person died. It’s a fascinating job, a completely new skill set to master. I have seen the consequences of a wide variety of diseases while working on the wards, but to physically see the effects on individual organs and organ systems is amazing. Think Gunther-von-Hagens but less morally dubious. Where do the bodies come from Gunther, huh?

This month is exceptional. Ordinarily I would only do one post mortem a week, with my main job involving diagnosis on the microscopic scale. I’ve settled in to the Cellular Pathology department, but there is still a lifetime’s worth of learning ahead of me.

New HQ

My Cardiff room is finally in order, and eventually I will be productive. I’ve got the laptop dock I was using during my research job hooked up to my 40 inch TV, which is now pretending to be a monitor. It works surpisingly well considering it was a cheap model purchased from Tesco a few years ago. I’m yet to produce any videos in Cardiff, but that will have to be remedied. Ordinary Decent Gamer Halloween Special, anyone? I’ve also been playing the re-released Shenmue 1 on the PS4, in preparation for the release of the third game. More on that later.