Mugpi - a bit more about me than I can squeeze into 160 characters.....

Martin Mugpie... it's probably obvious thats not my real name, but when I started using Twitter I soon realised that the only way I felt comfortable tweeting what I really thought and felt was if the people reading my babble didn't know the real "me". As none of my real life friends were on Twitter, I went in seek of new contacts and now have a group of good twitter friends I'm in regular contact with. If you're not one of my twitter friends already, hopefully you will be soon. : )

I am a 46yo widowed father of three (girl/boy/girl who are currently 9, 12 and 13... though they do keep getting older!). Sadly my dear wife died of breast cancer in 2007 (even over three years on it still seems surreal writing that, like it's about some bad dream). She was diagnosed in Sept 2002 - our youngest was 21 months old at the time. She bravely fought that terrible disease for one month short of 5 years and though she was extremely strong and brave, with never a complaint, she finally succumbed in August 2007 (after it had spread to her liver).

Why Mugpi? Some time ago I described myself as "the mug who runs round after the kids like a blue arsed fly" and changed my twitter avatar to a mug. Since then I've regularly changed the mug picture to reflect my mood, a recent event or just to amuse myself (here is a run through of some of the mugs I've used in 2009).

Most of my time is spent in the multiple roles of single dad, bread winner and cook/housekeeper/cleaner/laundry service/taxi driver/childrens' entertainer...I won't go on! It can be hard work at times, but the four of us try and have fun too. I suppose we know we can't change anything and that we have to make the best of a bad hand.

I don't have a lot of family support (both my parents are dead and my two brothers emigrated to Oz many moons ago), but I muddle through most of the time. One thing I miss now I'm single is someone being there to talk with and to sound off to. Whilst it's in no imaginable way a substitute, I find Twitter to be somewhere where I can offload my thoughts, worries, feelings and angsts. If I put half of what I write on Twitter onto my Facebook account, my friends would think I'd seriously lost the plot! (I keep my Twitter contacts and real life Facebook friends totally separate.)

My current favourite pastime (not that I have a lot of time for much frippery!) is geocaching (see www.geocaching.com). To me it's the perfect combination of technology, the internet and most importantly, an outside fresh air activity we can enjoy as a family. Some geocachers are numbers obsessed, but personally I prefer to use it as an excuse for a family walk or to explore an area we've never had a reason to visit before. I've lost count of the number of new (though not terribly far away) places we've been to since I accidentally discovered the "secret" geocaching world late in the summer of 2008.

My other interests? I enjoy the odd night out with my mates (though this is easier said than done nowadays). More often than not though it will be a glass or three of a good red wine while watching a decent movie on the box. I like to follow F1 and though I'm usually only casually interested in football, for some reason I go football crazy when the World Cup is on.

Well that should give anyone interested enough to have read this far a flavour about me. I hope it didn't send you to sleep!

Happy tweeting!

Mugpi

PS You can catch me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/mugpi