Addictive personalities

I'm definitely an addictive personality type. Computer games were designed for Addictive personalities. Now I'm not a gamer so I don't have the hard core gaming plant. I have a machine that runs Win2k (The best product that MS ever stuck their sticker on) on a 1gig processor and 512 megs of ram with an old 64 meg Nvidia card. So I'm not your counterstrike/Quake3/Castle Wolfenstein type.... At least I didn't think so until a couple of years ago my son gave me a copy of Dungeon Seige. The result was disturbing.

I have a good mate who is a gamer, RPG's and all that and I used to chuckle into my beir-sticks when he would disappear offline for weeks on end after finding a new game. (With Jagged Alliance II it turned into months IIRC) Anyhoo suffice to say I laugh no more. The first taste of Dungeon Seige saw me disappearing to my Pooter room for hours on end and I swore that would never happen again.

Unfortunately, I discovered the expansion pack to DS and as you can tell from my recent blogging frequency, the addictive personality reared it's ugly head. I'm not sure what's more disappointing, the fact that I weakened or the fact that Game expansion packs are obviously like movie sequels, second time round sux.

Of course this has been made possible by the weather. The wettest July on record has translated into an equally soggy August. Everything is wet, you can't dig because there's nothing but mud underneath. You daren't wheelspin because the wheels will break through to the mud and the truck and trailer will start acting like Torvill and Dean on a very bad hair day.

Consequently I have done bugger all for weeks while Doddery and the maintenance boys are up to their eyeballs... in mud... what else?..... And what am I doing: Killing monsters and demons and saving the virtual world of course. Well up until a day or two ago that is... Then I packaged the game up and sent it to my son, Ha! revenge is sweet! ;).

Yesterday it was getting metal onto a track up to an airstrip so that the fertiliser trucks could get to the bin where the Topdressing planes load up. A truck and trailer got stuck up there requiring the bringing in of a 25 tonne Dozer to drag him out. An exercise which will cost the Cocky over a grand. As opposed to a couple of hundred bucks for a bit of maintenance.

Spreading metal on farm tracks is not for the fainthearted or inexperienced. The tracks are generally narrow, rough and usually slippery in this weather. My mate in another truck was spreading on an uphill section of the track, without warning, the load shifted to the back of the truck in a big lump facilitating what can only be described as a wheelie. Not particularly unusual on this sort of job, but the wrong actions at this point can have bad consequences. Slam on the brakes for instance at the wrong moment, or putting foot on clutch, can result in broken front axles as the front of twenty tonnes of truck come slamming down from two and a half metres up. Best move is just ease the throttle off and as the metal pours out the back; the front will gently drop back to the ground. Of course the truck is still travelling straight ahead at this point so you just have to hope that there are no corners in your immediate future. My mate was a relative newbie and this was the first time he'd had the front of the truck grasping at the sky but he handled it well... even if he did look a little bleached in the face afterwards.

The only real downside was that I didn't have a camera!

Bugger!