thursday 3rd december 2009  @  00:22 and today i feel like utter crap. i managed to keep it together til about lunchtime and then spent the afternoon driving the porcelain bus. not sure what triggered it, but i suspect the veal cutlet i had at the don by tower bridge. tbh the fried egg and cheese toastie i had for breakfast this morning may have been a contributing factor. what with william being ill over the weekend (heavy cough and a bit of vomiting), and now hayley's convinced that she's going to get "it". whatever "it" is. so i haven't been allowed to touch either her or william this evening, and she's skipped dinner and is sleeping on the sofa. post comment | link

wednesday 2nd december 2009  @  23:34 music  :  sade - like a tattoo my boss told me i had to take two more days off before christmas to reduce the number of leave days i have left to carry over to next year. but everybody's already got their christmas holidays booked so it was a bit of a squeeze. i ended up taking yesterday and today off, even though we're swamped with work at the moment (eg my teammate worked 7am-2am on monday, and i did 9am-2am on friday). yesterday was meant to be spent doing stuff around the house, but william had been quite poorly over the weekend and wasn't quite ready to go back to nursery, so i played nurse. he's better today and back at nursery. yesterday, i headed into london to meet up with georgi, who i see online occasionally but haven't seen in person for years. i have this odd relationship with london - i love that there's so much to do and see, but i hate actually going there. it's a brilliant horrible place. i got to basingstoke station in plenty of time only to discover that the car park cost £6 (i only had £4.70 in my pocket) and that it wasn't "off-peak" until 4pm. back when i was working in newbury (circa 2002) the station car park was off-peak after about 10am and cost £1 for the day. mental. at least i didn't have to walk all the way to the ticket office to buy a ticket and all the way back to put it in the car - there was an option to pay by phone (for an extra 20p). and the ticket machine wouldn't let me buy a travel card for the tube and because i spent several minutes arguing with it, i missed the 10:41 and had to get the 10:57. bastards. also, frost! my car's windscreen was iced over yesterday morning, inside and out. inside is particularly not good. i thought i'd left all that behind when i sold the polo. while driving to the station i noticed that the car's ambient temp reading was hovering between 1° and 2°c. i should have known it would be cold because the night before i stepped out to put some stuff in the garage and noticed the garden bathed in the light of the full moon, and not a cloud in the sky. i should really take wu tang clan's advice and dig out my scarf at some point: as the train went along, my laptop kept picking up wi-fi hubs in houses along the track. and i saw a van with the name TOPMARX printed on the side which reminded me of this sketch: i hung out with g and his lab partner peter in one of the studios at ravensbourne, watching/listening to them put edit a documentary project. they'd done a bunch of foley work so we talked about the qualities of gravel and, oddly, mid-nineties pop music (started by peter's spice girls earworm). 1 comment | post comment | link

wednesday 4th november 2009  @  23:35 music  :  james brown - good good lovin' one of our neighbours noticed we were having some work done last week and came over to ask if andy could cut a couple of bits of wood for his fish tank. andy went over there and discovered that this guy has several massive aquaria and is obviously a fish nut. he said he'd do the work for free if he wouldn't mind coming over to look at our goldish graham, who's been looking a bit unwell lately - moping around in one corner of the tank lying on his side. turns out we haven't been cleaning up properly. we change 10% of his water every now and then but haven't given his tank a good going over for ages. he lent us a gravel cleaner and an air pump to get some extra oxygen in the water, and it's looking much better now. graham still hangs around in the same spot but he's more upright now, which is good, i suppose. i went out today after work and bought our own gravel cleaner and one of those magnetic algae-scrapers. goldfish are supposed to live for up to 30 years (the record is 43!) though the lifespan is shorter for aquarium fish. we've had him about five years and he's approaching the limits of his 60-litre tank but hopefully he'll be good for a while longer yet. 5 comments | post comment | link

sunday 1st november 2009  @  21:01 music  :  missy elliott - scream subject  :  thanks andy! for a while now, our patio has been getting lumpy and wonky. it's a decent patio and was laid well by a previous owner of our house (who i randomly met a couple of years ago when he interviewed me for a job and spotted the address on my cv - i turned it down, not enough money) but the underlying clay soil constantly expands and contracts and has pushed the concrete base up in a few places and down in others. this means some slabs are wobbly and others stick up and present dangerous edges for people (william) to trip over (when running about like a nutter). so we've been talking about either digging it up and replacing it, either with a new patio or with wooden decking. hayley's work colleague big andy heard about this and offered to put down some decking on top of the patio, and to do it cheap. the thinking is that we'll have moved house in five years so it only has to be good enough to last that long, and the wood should be flexible enough to move with the ground a bit. even if it goes wavy, at least there won't be any sharp edges like there are now. i was a bit sceptical but we bought a shitload of wood (five packs of 20x 3m boards) which has been sitting next to the house for a few weeks waiting for a suitable schedule window. it was half-term this week, and andy spent three days in our garden measuring, cutting, drilling, and screwing, and he's done a bloody good job. ( a couple more ) william loves it; he's been going outside at every opportunity and just running back and forth across it. 6 comments | post comment | link

monday 19th october 2009  @  21:59 music  :  mr lif feat akrobatik - inhuman capabilities sister update: she finally replied to my parents' email about the water bill. and told them that she's set up a redirect on her post to the flat so they can send it there and it'll find its way to her new place. and she didn't give any hints as to where that might be. so it looks like she doesn't want to be found. i can't decide if i want to try and make contact (and if i succeed do i tell her she's being a dickhead or just find out how she's doing), or if i should just let her go. part of me wants to let her make the first move, but what if she's doing the same and waiting for me? my parents are so worried about her that they're thinking of hiring a private investigator to track her down. i guess i can't send birthday or christmas cards any more (well, once the redirect runs out). this fucking sucks. 1 comment | post comment | link

monday 19th october 2009  @  20:30 music  :  sly and the family stone - you can make it if you try subject  :  so take off all your clothes after i stubbornly (and cheaply) wore my coat indoors while working from home all last week we've finally relented and turned the heating on. but the kitchen (where i work) is still freezing during the day. neither of the radiator valves have proper knobs on so i don't know which one is inlet and which is outlet. i don't want to mess with it until i know which is which. hayley's solution was to turn the house thermostat up higher. one of us is an engineer... :P post comment | link