I began writing this blog at what I had anticipated was going to be a very busy work period in my life, if you don’t know me then you probably don’t now what I do professionally for a living and without knowing what I do this wont make sense so now is apt to tell you a little about myself. First of all, as a pre-cursor, this is what this week has entailed.
Monday:
Drove to York to start a week of work at SOCS, arrived at the workshop and went over the custom LED strip which had been built for Cirque’s move to Madrid with Zarkana, in the evening went to the gym and rowed 10k in 44minutes.
Tuesday:
Worked with Karl going over the point hoist electrical drawings updating and modifying things.
Wednesday:
Drew up the panelwork for the track power & point switching cabinets for this current job we are working on, also updated the electronic interface board for each winch cabinet. In the evening went out for steak with everyone who is working together, English Canadian Australian & Chinese, its a good mix 🙂
Thursday:
Spent all day modifying drawings & updating drawing to the electrical drive cabinets, non stop working with the designer, electrical wiremen and other freelancers like myself to get things moving. Went to the gym at Weatherby leisure-centre, almost couldn’t get in because of the rude woman serving behind the counter didn’t believe we hand been before without been ‘official members’, eventually got in, rowed 10k in 44.44mins
Friday:
Collated the patch & schematic for an LED system comprising of around 600 Schnick Schnack B50 LED panels, spread over an arena size area, fully pixel-mapped and controlled by Artnet. Finished work, gave Joe a lift to York train station and drove northwards home.
Friday night:
Popped in Dance city to catch up with my friend James and others to socialise for a bit, now currently writing this!
So, as mentioned earlier, that maybe doesn’t make too much sense, so a little about me from almost the beginning.
IN THE BEGINNING
I was born on New Years Day 1980, Andrew Coates, Son of Jennifer & Alan Coates, younger brother to Dianne & Janice Coates. I grew up in a small village outside Newcastle called Burnopfield. I expect my childhood was very similar to many other counterparts around that time in that area. I played with friends, got into scrapes, messed around in the local woods and had a healthy fascination with trying to climb things such as fences and trees.
I guess school was also standard, there was a good mix of friends and  enemies, we got picked on by the older kids and thus passed this onto our younger counterparts when we eventually became the older kids, I guess thats some form of twisted karma?
Memorable events from ages 0 to 11 are…….
Sitting next to a garden gnome on the Isle of White whilst on holiday with my parents and getting my picture taken (That photo is still arround somewhere and I have no idea why I remember this)
Getting a very stern smacking and telling off from my Dad after climbing up onto the back of the sofa during December sometime and opening all of the windows on the advent calendar which had been placed “out of arms reach” to retrieve all the tiny plastic figurines hidden behind the doors.
Building tree-houses and dens in the local woods with friends and coming back to find that 2 weeks of hard work over the summer holidays had been trashed by someone. Undeterred we rebuilt a underground hide which blended into the pine needle covered forest floor which was almost impossible to find. The weekend later  we returned to find what looked like someone had stepped onto the roof of our den and fell in the big hole we had created leaving some shredded bits of denim jeans and a bit of blood, oops!
Kissing Anna Lucas in the corner at the bottom of the Yard whilst the rest of my class watched and possibly cheered. I remember it been allot of peer pressure to do something which at the time wasn’t very nice (due to age, not due to Anna, she was lovely, and a good friend who I have not seen since arround 1997! wow!).
Leaving Burnopfield Primary school age 10 to move onto the big scary place they called Tanfield comprehensive, where good live lessons were learned.
PAUSE: I dont want to make each blogpost too long so I think I’ll stop here for this one, I guess ive just set myself up to write a brief overview of ages 11 to 16 next!
Has this week been a good week? Yes i think it has!