Recognition

Someone recognised me on the train earlier today, saying I was part of his study of savants and synaesthesia a few years ago. I hope it was an interesting study - if I knew about it at the time, I've well and truly forgotten it now. But you might say that's a good omen for the upcoming competition, if not for the fact that as mentioned yesterday, I've done absolutely no training at all and so can't expect to get any kind of results there.

On the other hand, apparently a typhoon is due to hit Korea at roughly the same time as my plane, so it'll be a fun journey.

Return to Redditch

Actually, it's hardly worth this quick return, because tomorrow night I'm jetting off to Seoul for my first memory competition (as a competitor) since whenever it was that I went to Canada. April? In any case, that was also the last time I did any memory training except for playing on Memory League. I've never gone to a competition with so very little preparation before, so it should be fun!

Then after that, I have various people trying to convince me to go to Denmark, Germany and Austria over the next few months for more memory championships (two internationals and one world - big events of the kind I've always preferred!), so I'll have to see what I can do about that. It's not a money thing - I'm now officially debt-free again, and overpaid, so the main difficulty is refraining from handing in my notice and living a life of unemployed luxury again - so much as a getting-time-off-work thing. I can maybe arrange my remaining holiday days to accommodate most or all of them, but it'll take a bit of thinking about.

Also, why am I intrigued by an email I got from a recruitment agency today, about a job as a finance analyst with a salary slightly less than I get at the moment and based in Leicester? It made me think "ooh, that looks quite nice, actually", when what I should be looking at right now if I want to change jobs at all is something mindless and stress-free that pays much less. I have no idea how my mind works, sometimes.

Residences

I'm in a student hall of residence in London again - the same one as last year, in fact. And I'm sort of 90% sure I'm even in the exact same room I was in last year, too! Or at least one with the same kind of stains in the same kind of places. Or maybe they just make them all identical like that.

Anyway, it's only a flying visit to the MSO this year, because of the flying visit I'm making to Korea later in the week. We've had the Marathon Memory today, which all went well, and then tomorrow it's Natural and Speed. I'll write about it at length, if I ever do get the time...