Fantasy Football: Arghh

It's back to the new EPL season, the first weekend of which was overshadowed by Britain's unexpectedly good medal haul in Beijing. After being out of touch with the Premiership for the better part of last year and most of the transfers over summer, I completely bombed the first weekend of Yahoo! Fantasy Football through a mixture of injuries, poor choices, and unfamiliarity with the new layout. Anyway, I'm sitting cozily at the bottom of the table, a real positive start to the season.

Couch potato eventing at -7 Beijing time

The Olympics is owning me. I eat, sleep, and breathe live text updates. Because of a horribly twisted confluence of technology-related circumstance, we cannot stream anything from anywhere in a time when all of the biggest television providers are raving about their 100s of hours of live coverage now available online. The rest of England, however, must be streaming every second of the Olympics because our connection speed is horrendous. Live morning finals for the convenience of the American public and us sitting in that awkward timezone between Beijing and the eastern seaboard have conspired to leave me fighting unconciousness for the rest of the day.

Having been inspired by the swimming feats in the Water Cube, I finally hit the gym last night. It was a really good feeling for the first six hours while my body was in shock from the sudden onslaught of exercise; less welcome was the ravenous hunger that made up all hours between breakfast, tea, lunch, tea, and dinner today, and even less welcome, the deluge of guilt following my high-calorie cravings, all of which have finally been sated after a huge KFC dinner. In the words of the immortal Donald Duck, "Ah phooey."

On other fronts, I am getting better at foosball and will one day beat the German and the American.

One idiot always starts it

I've just seen the fourth "please return my power pack" email go out to all London staff in as many days. It's anarchy, I tell you. Times are desperate when you have to remember to unplug the adapter and lock it away. I wonder who started the chain - look at all the victims! We've also taken to hoarding those spiral bound notebooks. As part of the cost cutting regime, office services are refusing to restock. Word on the street is that you can get one if you know the right people.

Our gym and swimming pool look amazing - much better than I initially thought, so I think a one-off payment of £40 is great value. I promise to start exercising already. In my head, I've got an hour's long run-cycle-swim thing, but we'll see what materializes, probably just some splashing and then more eating. I'm ever the optimist.

My sister has kindly gotten me my Christmas party dress already, and only RM80, which is like £0. No lah, but definitely way less than what I'd have had to pay if I'd got it here, and it's pretty. Nothing is better than finding an amazing dress for very little money.

Weng is crushing heavily on his accounting tutor who apparently looks like Kelly Brook, which does very little for my self-esteem as I am starting to look like the Pilsbury dough boy's Asian sister, char siew pau girl. He has also studied the length of her necklace very closely, started explaining his observations, and then struggled to talk his way out. Needless to say, he remains at the far end of my dining table/couch/imaginary stick.

I almost bought the CFA level 2 study notes today. Almost. I'm in a firm full of masochists as I am not the only one talking about it already. I feel incomplete without having an exam to study for, but that'll be another £200ish that I won't see for at least a year, or potentially longer.