bignoseduglyguy

Fortysomething

In the early '90s, there was a show called 'thirtysomething' on television in the UK. I never watched it but, in 1994, the title provided the inspiration for a weekend of fun and games I arranged so some of my contemporaries, various family members and hangers on could celebrate the fact that we had said goodbye to our twenties. In a nice turn of events, I have just had a call to say that a few of those present have now arranged a similar weekend to mark the start of our 41st years on the planet. In three week's time, I'll be taking a leisurely drive home having spent the weekend staying at the Hilton Moorside Grange and having eaten a fine Sunday lunch at The Waltzing Weasel. I reckon that even I can justify one posh weekend every 520 weeks.

Casting stones

My good friend Chuck has written a starkly honest and though-provoking post entitled 'sometimes christians irritate me...' on a difficult quandary he faces. Chuck is, amongst many other things, the man behind FlockHosting, the Christian web hosting service he formed "to help spread the gospel and share God with others". Yesterday, he was asked by Person A to ban Person B from a chatroom he administers on Person A's behalf because Person B had transgressed/slid back/been unChristian in the eyes of Person A. From my admittedly agnostic point of view, Chuck's faith is, ostensibly, the same as Person A's (and Person B's for that matter). However, the way that Chuck practises that faith in his daily life would seem to be more than a little different to Person A, for it would seem that Chuck's faith tells him that banning Person B from the chatroom is an act of condemnation, something not in keeping with the ethos he personally subscribes to.

I was prompted to comment on Chuck's post because, as the agnostic husband of a Christian partner, I have encountered my fair share of lecturing, persuasion and 'encouragement' from those who seek to turn me into a 'suitable' - for suitable, read Christian - partner for my wife. Despite this, I count a fair number of Christians (amongst other faiths) as good and treasured friends and acquaintances. It was just such a couple that I and SWMBO spent yesterday evening with, having take-out food and discussing emigration possibilities, as they're from North Island, NZ where we have considered emigrating to. As we discussed the reasons for looking for a different type of life from the one we have at present, we found it interesting that many of my reasons were entirely compatible with a 'Christian' point of view; namely seeking a sense of community, amongst people who have sound moral and ethical values, where there is a supportive, nuturing atmosphere for kids and folk care for the environment & those less able amongst them. I said I wasn't surprised by this as I have always believed that one is able to espouse what are held to be Christian values without being a Christian, a point of view that some Christian friends agree with and which others vehemently do not.

Going over the issues contained in Chuck's post has prompted me to wonder why I/we feel the need to append a faith to such things; why I am happy to talk about Christian values (or Islamic or Buddhist values for that matter) as if they belong to others by dint of their faith alone; why I genuinely embrace and cherish things like a sense of community and caring for the environment yet I have previously shied away from stating it more clearly. Perhaps I do so for fear of being branded as a happy-clappy, sandal-wearing, Bible-toting nut like the those who seem to be drawn to using 'their' religion, as distinct from their faith, as some sort of 'sword of truth', using it to divine right and wrong in the lives and actions of others and then judge them by the results they find.

The upshot of all this cerebral activity is that I realise that, as with a good many things in my life, I care little for the judgements and pronouncements of others, which is not to say that I do not care about the judgements and pronouncements of others. Smallmindedness, selfishness and bigotry of all kinds should be challenged where they are met. However, on a quiet Sunday in February, it's enough for me that I know my own mind, my place in things and where I fit in other's lives.

Wordplay

Scanning the feeds this morning, my interest was raised by the title of one of grahame's posts: Lost Consonants which, as he points out in his piece, was the name of a great series of one-frame photo montages by Graham Rawle that have run in The Guardian over the years. In recent months, Rawle has deftly switched to a new series called 'Vowel Movements' which are equally funny. This week's features a couple in a passionate embrace on a sofa with the woman holding a Tupperware pot of small green leaves - the caption reads: Susan yearned to feel her lover's sweet c(a)ress

All this is particularly pertinent as, amongst other things, I am currently reading Lynne Truss' Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. Although I was initially attracted to the book by the title and the premise, it was the vast range of opinions in it's reviews that sealed the deal for me. Believe me, folks don't feel luke warm about this book. Some adore the brittle humour and up-tight fuming that come every time the author finds another case of poor punctuation. Others despise Truss' proto-pedant lingua-fascist approach, railing that, in this world of email and txt mssgs, all lower case and no commas is just fine. What makes me laugh is that those who castigate Truss in their reviews display pretty much the same fervour in slamming her as she does in decrying bad punctuation. QED as one (anti) reviewer wrote.

Like a hole in the head

The Law of Sods continues to plague me, even as I recovered from my near-death experience yesterday. Today, it would seem that the God Of Personal Digital Assistants was scrambling around the dustier corners of his particular realm when he suddenly found an ancient scroll, wherein it is written:

And lo, just when the poor sod has recovered his composure and is of a busy frame of mind and much in need of organisation of the handheld kind, it is dereed that thou shalt make his Personal Digital Assistant screw around something rotten with much mulching of data and hosing of schedules.

And once the Personal Digital Assistant has screwed him around something rotten for just a little too long for his liking, it will then similarly affect his laptop whilst synchronising the aforementioned bollocksed data.

As you can probably tell, today wasn't great - bad stuff tends to happen when one is busiest and today was a corker.

Update 25/02/04 - 1930hrs

I'm so glad she doesn't look after my PCs any more. For those who've read this far and are truly interested, I suspect that a corrupt Memo database was the issue. A clean install of the desktop and data files minus the suspect stuff seems to have sorted it all for now - fingers crossed.

Let's celebrate!

My smallest and most charmingest sprog has just now burst through the door and wished me a "Happy Can Pake Day!"

Somebody is out to get me

I know it is a perennial bugbear that surfaces in blogs every day but it seems to take the littlest thing to nudge me off the rails when it comes to posting regularly. I thought that I had got back into my stride proper recently yet a combination of things have conspired to make it easy for me not to bother posting my little gems. Having had time to reflect during my week away from work, I came to realise that, recently, I have let my organisational efforts slide and am up to my neck in projects and tasks I need to manage better - at home as well as at work. Therefore, I have been really busy re-implementing my own brand of Getting Things Done on my Palm and PC which, in itself, has diverted me from the web and blogs and such. This frenzy of activity, including a really stupid 14 hour session in front of the screen with hardly a break, has now brought about a recurrence of my RSI/CTS/Tenosynovitis which I have managed to keep pretty much at bay for 15 month, give or take a twinge. Not content with that, the Gods of SNAFU put the kibosh on my having an easy first day back at work (and, therefore, getting home early to blog and do family stuff) by arranging for the brakes on my Volvo to fail whilst exiting the motorway near work this morning. A combination of luck and half-remembered cadence braking techniques from my racing days allowed me to bring the car to a halt i) upright, ii) facing the right way and iii) without ruining anyone else's morning...but only just. I drove the remaining few miles at a sedate pace and with my body arched so just my shoulders and backs of my knees were touching the seat, for fear of what the Brown Trouser God might have delivered. After an inspection of my (pristine, as it turned out) underwear and various telephone calls, I waved goodbye to the Volvo as it went off for repairs. My company meanwhile, in response to this incident and perhaps keen to stop me pressing the issue (or charges for that matter), came up with a great plan - they gave me a souped-up, alloy-wheeled, body-kitted and spoilered limited edition Chrysler Neon RT on loan until the Volvo is repaired. Given that my commute home was a lot quicker than usual and I couldn't hear the radio above the squealing of tyres and thrashing of cambelts, I think it's safe to say that it is a bit faster than the S40. I therefore surmise that my lease car department might be under orders to provide me with the means with which to ease myself off the planet. So, if there are no more posts after this, you know what happened. Or it might just be my RSI playing up.

Killer fish of Dagenham

And, in a piece of late news just in, it appears that all of London is doomed as a massive shoal of killer piranha the size of Belgium is seen heading up the Thames. Or maybe it's just that a seagull has dropped a piranha onto a boat near Dagenham. I always get those two mixed up. Still weird though.

It's Noodle Time, er, time.

Having had a ding-dong with SWMBO, I vented my spleen in a productive manner all afternoon, by slinging all manner of crap out of the spare room which doubles as my 'computer womb'. Gone are the manuals without discs, gone are the discs without manuals, shredded are the PDF print-outs for downloads I abandoned long ago and ditched are the cables for peripherals I can't even remember. Two black bin bags worth of ephemera have been sacrificed to the Wheelie Bin God. The reason for the clearout is that, more than year after implementing my own version of a well-known task management methodology (see posts 112, 115 and 116 for details), I am still prone to accumulating crap. Whilst I am usually the first to pile heaps of invective on such 'systems' and 'methods', I have to say that I have found this particular brand of common sense (for that is what it is, under the wrapping) to be useful in getting me to focus on the right stuff at the right time. Anyhow, all this is a diversion from my main theme and will be explored more fully at a later date (note to self: add task to list). All this action has given me an appetite and so it is with an eager tum that I have accepted an olive branch of peace from SWMBO. Knowing that food conquers all else in my world, she has suggested that we go out for noodles, scooping up our Friend Who Is a District Nurse and her godchild on the way to swell the raiding party to eight. Our destination, as usual, is Noodletime, a cracking Chinese noodle bar of the 'stack 'em high, sell 'em cheap' variety that serves good food and has a friendly atmosphere. Searching the web for reviews like the ones at itchy london and restaurant spy to support my assertions, I came across this great comment on the UK skateboarder's equivalent to the Michelin Guide, The Knowhere Guide, which says it all: "Noodle Time is great - you can stuff yourself from arse to beak and still spend less than a fiver". Nuff said.

The Home Front

Taking a week off work is all well and good but it does take its toll on spousal relations. I started the week well with a few chores and tasks, like T-Cutting as much of the the car-scrapes-bollard damage out of the 806 as is humanly possible, without once referring as to how it got there. To do that would have been self-defeating as it was my fault. Instead of parking the 806 in the street, I parked it in our off-street bay which has bollards either side, thereby ensuring it meet it's predestined fate when driven out by another unnamed party. Having said that, as it gets closer to the end of the week and I relax, I find that I have spent the last few days faffing around with lots of things but accomplishing very little, not that I necessarily want or have to 'accomplish' stuff. This last point - the simply pleasure of faffing around - was stressed to SWMBO this morning during one of our periodic and tiresomely tediously 'you don't understand me, I don't understand you' arguments. These arise because she is somewhat 'task-driven' to say the least, whilst I am less so at home as I have my fill of such things at work. Whilst we are both essentially tidy people, I am happy to tolerate/live with untidiness far longer than SWMBO who displays a need to control her environment more than I. Having said that, I occasionally vent about the lack of my identity in the flat because, as the one who is at home the most, the flat is more a reflection of SWMBO's taste than mine. I have heard it said that this is common in women who give up work to raise families, because the home, along the family car, shops and schools become their 'workplace' and it is natural that they wish to create an environment that they are comfortable in. Whether or not this is actually the case I couldn't say, but certain elements seem to point in that direction. For instance, I am perfectly happy to let the kids run riot on occasion as kids enjoy living for the moment and do not perceive the resulting mess as chaos, simply the by-product of having fun. I'd rather let them spend the day like this and slave-drive a tidying-up session at the end, whereas SWMBO simply sees tidying-up-as-you-go-along as the more sensible method to employ. Although I can see the (grown-up) logic in this, I just don't think kids 'work' like this. Kids are creatures of 'the here and now' genus and we should revel in their lack of convention and constraints, their total absorbtion, their wonderment, their logic and their imagination. Re-reading this, I am aware that it might come off as an anti-SWMBO rant. This wasn't my intention when I sat down to write this post, I was more interested in why we (and I'm sure millions of others) tend to disagree on the same subjects repeatedly and I'm pleased to say I have found the reasons, if not the answer. SWMBO feels hard done by with her lot in Life, tries to the best of her ability to be the best Mum in the world as well as run the house, do the bills and keep the family together and can't understand why I don't see what she's about. On the other hand, I tend to feel hard done by with my lot in Life, try to the best of my ability to be the best Dad in the world as well as hold down a job that pays for it all without feeling too guilty about spending 12-14 hours a day doing so and can't understand why she can't see that. Now I have that sorted in my head, I just need to work out how to deal with the fact that SWMBO thinks I am a bigamist geek who secretly married my PC specifically to spite and spurn her in favour of hours online in the spare room. Maybe I'm just one of those people who looks guilty all the time.

I've been around a bit

I've visited the counties in yellow. Which counties have you visited? made by marnanel map reproduced from Ordnance Survey map data by permission of the Ordnance Survey. © Crown copyright 2001.

Found whilst wandering through Andy Yates' blog.

Idle thought whilst hanging up laundry

Idle thought whilst hanging up sprog's laundry

Why do celebrities go out with other celebrities instead of well-balanced normal folk like us? I mean, I suspect that we have all secretly imagined at some time or other what life would be like if we met and took up with . It's one of those things that sneaks into your head for a few second's unreal consideration before you shake your head and carry on doing what you were doing before it snuck in. Conversely, I wonder if whilst the rich and famous are endlessly dating/sleeping with/being a 'significant other' to other B-listers, they're secretly having fleeting thoughts of meeting people like me or you and cleaning out rabbit hutches, sorting the recycling and hosing off poo-caked knickers with the shower hose. I suspect not but until Helen Hunt, Ellen Barkin, Hollie Hunter, Cameron Diaz and Carrie-Ann Moss* ring to confirm or deny exhibiting this behaviour, I'll keep an open mind.**

*These were just the first to spring to mind. Believe me, I'm shameless, shallow and not the least fussy so the list is breathtakingly long. Strange that this thought occurs just a week after hitting 40 and whilst SWMBO is away. It is entirely possible that her influence, when present, is stronger than I had previously allowed for.

**No rants please - this was just an unbidden thought which I have put out there so enough, already.

Gone in a flash

My faithful 128MB CF card has just 'retired' itself. Last night, I took some shots to accompany a review I'm writing for Happy Palm. This morning, I tried to insert the card into the reader and it wouldn't push home. I retracted the card and the two halves of the case came apart. Bum. After a session with a tube of SuperGlue, all looked to be ok but, even with a little gentle persuasion, it was still not seating properly. A look inside the card reader, which is front-mounted in my tower, showed a bent connector pin, which I suspect was caused by glue-blocked hole. Judicious tweaking with the plastic toothpick from my trusty Swiss Army Knife soon had the pin back in alignment but the card still wouldn't push home. Not wanting to risk knackering my reader anymore than I had already, I stuck my bottom lip out and clicked over to dabs.com and bought another, along with some CD-RWs. And folks say that home computing isn't sexy and exciting - pah.

For the geeks out there who still have room on their belts despite carrying their PDA, pager, triband GPRS enabled video camera phone, Rayban case, Ventolin inhaler and adrenaline shot, I found this little object of desire on the Victorinox site.

My whack has been Googled - apparently

A certain Jack Mongrel mailed me a while back and I have only just found the mail. It was brief and to the point - JM simply wished to make me aware the my blog had been Googlewhacked - namely, that they had found that elusive Google query (two words - no quote marks) with a single, solitary result. In my case, the query was the curious but charming 'comestible catflap'.

Idle thought whilst washing up

Is Martin Sheen the only actor to have played both the US Chief of Staff and the US President?

sysadblog

An old colleague of mine and fellow motorsport enthusiast emmathesysad has got a new host, begun blogging in earnest again and has plunged into the world of template tweaking and site building. She is seriously off-kilter and prone to blogging about lip gloss but I'm sure it's just a phase. See for yourself at Crazy little thing called life...

Oat Takers

Ugh. Despite being morally and ethically opposed to any physical exertion on Sunday (beyond bashing a keyboard and lifting a coffee cup), I was up early this morning along with Sprogs 1, 2 and 4 to take SWMBO and Sprog 3 to Paddington to catch an early train to Worcester. A couple of times a year SWMBO takes a long weekend to unwind, so she can have time away from the Sprogs and try and forget that she's married to me. This time SWMBO is taking Sprog 3 as they are visiting her godmother, who is the very cool Reverend Who Wouldn't Do Church if She Wasn't One. After a tearful parting (sadness on the kid's behalf, utter joy on SWMBO's) and forgetting it was Sunday, I steered a course for Portobello Road Market as I wanted to visit De La Fuente's (see archive here) to stock up on morcilla, chorizo and pancetta. Finding it shut, we deciding to cut our losses and headed for our regular Sunday morning hangout, Greenwich Market instead. Upon asking the kids where they wanted to eat breakfast for a treat, there was much debate followed by a pronouncement.
"Oat Takers" said Sprog 1 with certainty.
"What?" said a puzzled me.
"OAT TAKERS!" said Sprog 1 emphatically.
"Where?" I couldn't for the life of me grasp what she was on about...until it slowly but surely dawned on me that she meant Ottakers the booksellers, which has a cafe inside. After almost crashing the 806 through laughing too hard, we parked up and ended up in The Meeting House cafe instead, where we had a 'We're not missing Mummy - yet' breakfast. Afterwards, we wandered around and then into Essential Music which is in the covered market. Whilst the three Sprogs grooved to the ambient electronic trance groove playing on the shop's system, I snapped up Dido's No Angel, Brand New Heavies' Trunk Funk and a slice of dimly-remembered youth thinly disguised as the recent import compilation, New Order International. With a quick stop to pick up a rotisserie chicken, fresh corn on the cob and a rental DVD, we're now back home and ready for a white trash afternoon of arses welded to the couch and chicken fat on our chins.

I'll be calling from the Dark Side

As related in my posts over at Happy Palm, my boss Steve finally got sick of my whining and bitching over my ailing Nokia 6310i. I have been pretty happy with most of my previous Nokias (8 to date) and the 6310i has been a great Bluetooth partner device for my Palm Tungsten T3. BT is pretty essential for me now, not only for connecting to my T3 but also for connecting to a wireless headset whilst on the road - especially in light of a recent change in UK law regarding mobile phone usage in cars. However, the 6310i has also been the least reliable of all my phones with frequent episodes of unannounced switchings off. If I hated my job, this would be a blessing but with a bunch of folks around the planet relying on me to be available 24/7/365, such technical anomolies are not what one wants.

Having spent 18 months living with an iPaq Pocket PC which runs a Microsoft operating system, I was less than excited when I heard that the only equaivalent or upgrade replacement I qualified for was an Orange SPV E100 with no BT - Orange being the only real option as my company is linked to them. Before I left the office yesterday for a week's hard labour (otherwise known as half term or school break), Steve's PA told me that the E200 on order for me was on it's way.

Just as I was about to groan ungraciously, she pointed out that the E200 is BT enabled and the upgrade was as a result of job performance for the last year. As this was an unbidden and very much appreciated gesture, I decided not to mention my issues with the Pocket PC OS, though to be fair, the phone's OS is in fact Windows Mobile 2003 for Smartphone, not the old PPC OS. A glance at a review confirmed the woeful battery life rumours but I am determined to be upbeat and enjoy the positives, like the camera, the colour screen and the MP3 player. No really, I am.

Finnish fun and frolics

If you always secretly thought that Glastonbury would be so much better if it was far closer to the Finnish/Russian border, Ilosaarirock 2004 is the festival for you. I have never been once in its 33 year history but my good Finnish friend Urge, former network troubleshooter and defiler of Northern Line waste bins, is the festival website's English translator and a member of the organising team. Having seen first hand what she and a tall Dutch accomplice once did to the tables (and the waiters) in a small tapas bar, I am in no doubt that the event will be one hell of a party.

Hedgehog hedgy-money

Celebrity spotters and autograph hunters, take a tip from me. Partake of a little small game hunting in Uist in the Outer Hebrides this summer and you could be joined by Sting, Sir Paul McCartney, Twiggy, Joanna Lumley, Sir Tim Rice and Watership Down author Richard Adams.

It's that old Devil called Love again

Ah, Valentine's Day, the day for lovers, romantics, florists, chocolatiers, the greetings card industry and European rugby fans. As I have just mentioned in a comment over at Speaking as a parent, which I came by via zed's blog, the opening day of the Six Nations has been lent an extra frisson this year by SWMBO. Whilst I only watch the odd club rugby game these days, I try to make sure that I watch the international games and tournaments that England contest. So it was with that awful 'pit of the stomach' feeling, it has just dawned on me that, despite the fact that England's game is not until tomorrow, I might not see today's opening games. A few weeks back, SWMBO caught me off-guard whilst arranging a lunch date with the Out-laws. As she often complains, I was too engrossed in my online activities to offer more input than the odd 'Yes, darling', 'Uh-huh' and 'S'fine by me'. So this one momentary lapse now means that my fate today is sealed. Today, I shall be mostly dining at the admittedly great Tas Pide Anatolian restaurant. At a table booked for the same time as kick off. With SWMBO and the sprogs. And the Out-laws are coming (and paying) too. I'm off to programme the video which, in itself, is always an exciting adventure with a far from certain outcome.

Crumbs

I've never been troubled by SWMBO's spending habits until now but it appears there may be cause for concern...

Surely, for this price, I could get Jamie or Delia round to bake it in person?

In a nutshell #2

My present-to-myself turned up today and my new leather PDA case from Nutshell is a handsome and fine thing. A well-thought out and rugged design that has been made with care and an eye for detail. Simple pleasures.

Dear Angela Wetcher

dear angela - thx 4 the txt mssge you txtd 2 my cell infrmng me yr abt ur nu fone number. 1 smll prblm. i don't know you.

The Apple at the bottom of the barrel

You now the phrase 'It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy'? It has. I have a friend called Chuck. He's a decent guy. He's a good friend. He a law abiding citizen. He's a regular churchgoer. He helps folk for the good it will do, not the buck it will turn. Yet when he tries to order a new a new iBook, this happened, after which this occured, then this followed by this, which was eventually topped off by this. The man has the patience of Job.

Hmmm...

When all is said and done, it has been proven to be an even bigger anticlimax than the quiet and uneventful minutes that followed midnight on January the 1st 2000. The vast majority of the world's computers carried on computing without so much as a blink of an LED to evidence the much-heralded Y2K meltdown. So it is that, in much the same way, I have slipped into my 41st year on the planet without the onset of the Male Menopause or the first sign of Male Pattern Baldness or plunging into a Mid-Life Crisis or anything else that demands Heavy Capitalisation. Instead, my passage past this milestone in my life has consisted of going to a friend's party, sleeping, going out out for a pizza lunch, staying in for a DVD with SWMBO and sprogs, staying in for longer when 10 friends turned up, sleeping again, going out again for beer and noodles, sleeping again and then waking up & drinking tea in bed whilst opening cards. All of which I have thoroughly enjoyed in a contented all's well with the world kind of way. In a reply to a birthday email from the Brother With The Organic Farm In France (not to be confused with the Sister Who Lives Near Zurich), I wrote:

If I am truthful, and there's no reason not to be, I'm probably more at ease with who I am than at any other time in my life thus far. Life's far from perfect but, wild dreams aside, I'm pretty happy with my lot at present. SWMBO and I continue to work at being good parents (and good partners with the little time left over) and, looking around us, we seem to be faring better than a lot of folks in riding out the inevitable storms.

That I find myself happily writing this amuses me a lot. Because I am a senior manager in a multinational when I trained to be the actor I'd always wanted to be from the age of six. Because I'm married with four kids when, in the never-ending aftermath of the trainwreck of my parents' divorce, I swore to avoid those very things at all cost. Because the stand-out-from-the-crowd white mohican'd, pierced and studded punk of then has become the blend-into-the-crowd cropheaded Joe Public of now. But mostly because I like being me, which wasn't always the case.

Enough.

It was only a matter of time until the comments in my blog fell prey to the spammers. However, like most of those blogging on MT, the installation of MT-Blacklist, the Movable Type anti-spam plugin has helped me cleanse the existing spam and guard against future attacks.

All this was made painlessly simple and ridiculously easy by the ever-smiling provider of inestimable help and support that is my buddy Chuck. bignoseduglyguy.com is hosted by his excellent hosting operation Thrust Networks and if you think I am saying this because he's i) a friend and ii) he hosts me for nothing, you are i) right and ii) wrong because I just recalled I am way overdue with my fee! Chuck, I'm heading over to PayPal now so please don't pull the plug....

A social wh-url

SWMBO threw a surprise party for me last night. So what? Well, she also threw a surprise party for me a year ago, her thinking being that, as I was turning 39 then and not 40, I'd never suspect that she would throw a surprise party like I would if it was my 40th. Which she just did and I didn't so it was a very successful double bluff - or something. Last year, I was tricked because I was told we were off out for a curry at Zeera after a quick drink with friends. This turned out to be a gathering of a few score of friends, colleagues and acquaintances that had been in on the joke. I eventually had that curry one month later.

Fast-forward a year and I am watching the tail end of About A Boy with SWMBO and the sprogs when the entryphone buzzes. I buzz in the same couple, Herr Doktor and HeadTeacher, who were the decoys last year and we open a bottle whilst I read their card and thank them for my gift. Ten minutes later and our Croatian friends and their kids turn up (with a great present) and we open more wine and I joke about what a coincidence this is. Five minutes on and two high powered barristers who masquerade as our chums in their off-duty hours also drop by. Not only does the penny start to drop at this point but, because we have a tiny flat, the living room is starting to resemble a pre-Glasnost Moscow apartment in some Channel 4 documentary. Further arrivals, in the form of another couple and a friend who is taking a break from server reboots and maintenance around the corner, only serve to add to the fun. Much food and many drinks were consumed and a good time was had by all.

With a party on Friday, lunch and a party yesterday and the pub and a meal with friends later on this evening, I'm having the kind of fun that I could only dream of as a teenager. Maybe (social) life does begin at forty.

Pizza Huh?!

Had a weird but funny experience yesterday. We went out for a family meal at a local Pizza Hut to celebrate my imminent slide into middle age. A very solicitous waiter showed up to the table, gave us the menus, set the condiments straight, brought clean cutlery, got a kid's chair and brought drinks. All of these were accompanied by me or SWMBO acknowledging his efforts with a 'Ta' or a 'Cheers' or a 'Thanks'. After he took the food order, he turned and lent towards me.
"Could I politely ask to to do something for me?" he said.
"Sure...?" I said, swapping quizzical glances with SWMBO, leaning away from him and wondering WTF he was going to say.
"Would you please stop saying 'Thank you' so much? You're embarrassing me."
"?" I thought.
The result of this exchange was that we spent the rest of the meal sniggering whilst trying not to say 'thank you' to this guy, which is a lot harder than you might think, as most of us are parentally programmed to do so when folks do stuff for us. Instead, I managed to use a 'Great' with a smile most of the time, 'Uh-huh' accompanied by an eyebrow raise and upward nod on a few occasions and even the odd 'Fine' was thrown in for variety. In case you're wondering, I didn't tip - because it is, after all, just another way of saying 'thank you'.

Downtime

Today is the second day I have been off work sick and I am not enjoying it. However, I have alleviated the boredom with the following:

FOOD: A very satisfying and chillied-up version of Tortilla Soup similar to this one.

FILMS: Whale Rider, a truly superb NZ movie about the continuance of Maori traditions in a changing world and The Man Who Sued God, a lightweight but funny vehicle for Billy Connolly.

BOOKS: For work, I'm reading First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently which is highly informative and a significant cut above most 'business and management' books. For pleasure, if that is the right word, I'm reading Fast Food Nation: What the All-American Meal is Doing to the World, a gift from SWMBO's cousin who works in healthcare in the States. Although I have eaten a fair amount of fast food in the past, I'm less inclined to do so in the future having read three-quarters of this engrossing and disturbing book.

MUSIC: Dido's Life For Rent - soaringly simply and clearly complex, it's is superb listening.

Game glut

Time to kill? Mouse finger itchy for action? Head over to Orisinal.com for games of all types.

There's no such thing as bad publicity

I am, by nature, a curious animal so I occasionally have a wander through my referrer logs to see who has been linking to my site. Normally, most of my non-search engine related traffic tends to be referred from folks writing about PDAs or Williams Syndrome, subjects which feature prominently in my index page meta-tags.

So you will understand my surprise (as an apolitical kind of bloke) when I found that my Isle Of Dogs page has been linked to as a reference source by John Derbyshire, a columnist for the right wing National Review Online, in his piece on the Summit of the Americas. After reading the article which displays Derbyshire's highly condescending attitude to those who, like myself, live in the Isle Of Dogs area, I find myself in the uncomfortable position of being both mildly flattered and rather more worryingly dismayed.

Whilst I am sure that very few readers of the article will click through to my site, let alone believe that I have the same political standpoint as Derbyshire, I'm not sure that I want to be linked to the NRO's site. On the other hand, the thought of Bush's brain-dead minnions being piped over to my den of low-grade dissention and depravity is more than a little amusing.

Staying with amusing, I also note from my statistics page that the top search string bringing folks to my page is 'Victor Meldrew'. Using Google, I note that by simply referring to the comedy carmudgeon in a previous post, my blog ranks as No.7 in returned hits for the name. As some who know me believe that Victor is a close approximation of what I will become in old age, prehaps this is not entirely inappropriate.

Eid Mubarak

Whilst dozing my way through a love Sunday lie-in, I could hear, over the kids watching TV, a lot of activity in the street. Not giving a lot of thought, I dozed off again. I awoke a little while later to hear SWMBO opening the front door which was accompanied shortly after by the smell of spicy food. The penny finally dropped and I realised that it was Eid ul Adha - The Festival of Sacrifice and our neighbours had brought us a gift of freshly cooked samosas and sweets to enjoy.

Sadly, and whilst I'm agnostic, the enjoyment will be tempered by the tragedy of the deaths of those observing the Hajj in Mina, Saudi Arabia.