And . . . relax

Friday comes

and Friday goes

If you swim with sharks

best count your toes

"What an odd start", I can hear you saying, "there is a chap who needs the weekend if ever I have read one", you continue.  There is, of course, a reason for starting like that*.

I am reminded of that Roy Lichtenstein take off of the guy painting a picture, with his mum looking over his shoulder.  "What are you painting dear?", she says.  "It's kind of abstract mum", he replies.  "That's nice dear", she concludes.  In fact, I am further reminded that my sort of third band, maybe second depending on your counting method, which was called That's Nice Dear.  We were nearly the next big thing, but it turns out there was not much call for acoustic abstractism in the music business in those days.  Oh, and I also went off to Australia for six months, thus making band practices a bit tricky.

This weekend we have a "meal for eight" on Saturday night, but otherwise the family intends to get reacquainted with each other in a warm and relaxing environment.

Have a good weekend, and maybe do something a bit abstract this weekend, as long as it does not frighten the horses or cause offence to Lithuanians.  Talking of Lithuania, and mixing in a bit of football, I see my club, having just been through several years of turbulence, and starting to bottom out and look to the future, is in trouble again, with one of its owners having a warrant issued for his arrest by his home country of Lithuania.  Pay Up Pompey, Pompey Pay Up may well become the chant from the terraces.


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* standard comic fare to introduce an idea to which you return later in the piece.  Being as I am in my abstract phase, I plan to introduce it, then leave it dangling with

And . . . relax

It is Friday already.  Horray to that.  Euro Lottery tonight.

But enough of this pipe-dream, back to reality.  LO's first day at work today, which really does mark the end of the summer.  The Maggots are out with the outlaws for the middle of the day, although they are both not feeling 100%, which is not a good start to the busiest term of the year.  For anyone who has children, I know I am singing to the vicar*, but illness-induced childcare is a nightmare for the parents, and we do rely heavily on our extended network of friends and family to fill in wherever possible, but it can be a hand-to-mouth existence that does nothing to improve the stress levels of busy working parents.

Otherwise, we have a fairly quiet weekend, where I will do a bit of DIY, a bit of quality time with the maggots, and an evening out Saturday to friends for dinner.

I hope you have a good weekend also.



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* or is it preaching to the choir?

And once again we find ourselves at Friday

I am glancing out the window, and the scene before me resembles something akin to a third world country; or Manchester.  It is absolutely tipping it down, and I definitely cannot see the hills. 

On the home front, the tiler has now done all the extensive preparation, and will be laying the first stone today.  The mayor has popped in with his trowel as is the law when any first stone is being laid, and Ladbrokes have also popped in to offer odds of three-to-one that it will not be finished by Christmas.  Meanwhile LO is at work, the kids are at school, and the weather has stopped Papa from starting on the outside painting.  Add to that a complete absence of milk, and you have what can only be considered a "disaaaaaaaaster dahhling".  How is a chap to get through the day without interruptions and coffee?

This weekend will see some more ticking off of tasks on the long to do list.  I have finished the carpentry for the boxed in soil pipe thingy in the downstairs bathroom.  This is a fat pipe to waste height that is a building regs essential part of the drainage or something, and we have chosen to box it in, but take it to the ceiling and the bit above the top of the pipe (with a fetching little hatch-like shelf concealing said pipe) has shelves, so that it is both use and ornament.  The plan is to paint it in with the walls so that it just looks like part of the room, so one inch MDF has done the job handsomely, wood I got pre-cut at the suppliers to the width required for the shelves (200mm since you ask).  With a bit of two-part wood filler (my new best friend, expensive, but the biz) the seams are seamless and now it is painted, it is as if it has always been there.

We have David and Samantha over on Sunday, which will hopefully be sunny, and we are very much looking forward to doing something that does not revolve around the extension, other than that we will be using said extension for the visit.

Have a good weekend, and speak next week.

And . . . relax

So we find ourselves at Friday, and a chap is looking forward to a productive day working from home, enjoying the short commute and at the end of the working day, ready to start the weekend as soon as is decent. 

But wait, what is this, alarm clock set for 0530 hours, work shoes, shower and shave, what's going on here then.  The answer, my friends, is that I have been called to a 3 hour meeting to discuss the non-functional requirements for my new project with a cast of millions.  If that means nothing to you then I salute you, and can only imagine that your yin and yang are in perfect harmony.

NFRs (as those in the business like to call them) are one of the more tedious things to develop, as are most of the important bits of a project.  Throw in a group of ten people to discuss and agree them, and you have death by committee on a topic that the Death Eaters have for breakfast.  Don't they say that a camel is a horse designed by a committee?  Well, we can expect a right donkey today.  No doubt we will be tabling a number of issues, fridging a whole bunch of others, putting our toes in the water to test the lay of the land, and running plenty of things up the flagpole to see who salutes.

I wish you a good weekend, whenever it may start, and ask you to think of me at around 1515 hours, as the very life force begins to dribble out the end of my shoes.

We weren't expecting that

We had a call from our uncle the builder, let's call him Bob, last night, in which he confidently informed us that he would be starting on Monday.  We weren't expecting that.

We are not frantically finishing the clearing of garage, study and utility room, about 80-90% done, and removing all the decking from the back, now 100% done.  Just need to finish the study, get the computer and chair in the loft ready for a weekend of destruction.  David and Samantha are coming over on Saturday, and David has volunteered to arrive early and help do some clearing of the utility/study/garage area.  There will be much removing of cabinets, for safe storing in my parents' garage, and we also hope to do some bringing down of stud partitions.  Now that we are going the Bob the Uncle route, this will be a more hands-on (and lower cost) option, so anything I do is stuff we don't need to pay Bob to do, and we do have our eyes on a number of furnishings that will finish off the room nicely, but for which we need some of our budget to be left over once all the structural stuff is complete.  Now, I am an avid fan of Grand Designs, and I know that the budget and time line always goes over, and I know that when we interviewed at the start of the build, we will make assertions on timescales and budgets that will be blown out the water, since that is how the show goes.  About half way through we will want to give it all up, but by the end we will proclaim that it was all worth it, and we hope never to do anything quite so stupid every again.

Having said all that, we are very much wanting to control the finances, and that means for us using relatives, paying day rates and generally taking it a stage at a time.  The goal is for Bob to complete the brickie duties, up to first fix, when my father-in-law, let's call him Bob the Second, will take on the work from first fix to completion, being his own plumber, and being related to a carpenter in his brother, my uncle-in-law, and with Bob the Second lining up all the specialist resources as needed, drawing from his large circle of fellow tradesmen, all of which will be personally vetted by Bob the Second, which I think is just the ticket.

I am off to do a day's work now, with the aim of finishing on time ready for the next phase of project strip-it-out, which will continue all weekend.  I hope to give you a thoroughly good update early next week.

Until then, be good, be safe, and think of my poor little office-boy hands.

Something for the weekend sir?

Another successful week, I believe, albeit one that was not without its stresses and strains, but then that is the lot of the modern information worker.  Too much information, not enough meaning.  Sometimes too much talking, not enough information.  Even worse is too much posturing and not enough talking.  There, in three sentences, is Darwinian theory applied to the information worker. Am I talking too much???

This weekend I have some important tasks to do.  I put my old/current shed on eBay last Sunday, in a rash move to apply some pressure to get me to empty it, in preparation for the new shed's arrival.  

It is currently on eBay with 108 watchers, a record for anything I have ever sold.  History tells me that the majority of these may well be rubber-neckers, but I only need two or three to have a real interest - and judging by the questions and phone calls and, tonight, a visit - for the bidding to go quite nicely.  I am at sixty two notes right now, with two days to go, so by my reckoning there will be a bit of action over the weekend and thank you very much.  Doing a bit of research, there are lots of second hand sheds of similar or worse condition and construction to mine, that are in the one fifty to two hundred bracket with time on the clock, so I am actually quite hopeful that it will make a few bob, which will help to fund the laying of the base, which I am paying someone to do.  I have thus far always felt funny paying someone to do something I could do myself, but with life getting busier, I am starting to do that a bit.  In this situation I am only on the wobbly edge of my abilities to do it anyway, at least to do it properly, and by the time you have paid for sufficient materials to make a base four inches thick and ten feet by fourteen feet, I think the difference between doing and paying is not so great anyway.

I am also going to be insulating under the suspended floor of our ground floor, so have a garage full of lamb's wool insulation, so I need to move that temporarily to the 'van to give me room to migrate the shed stuff to the shed or the tip, so I can then take the shed down.  Actually, to be precise, I intend to leave the shed up until the eBay buyer has seen it, so they can help take it down and therefore understand how they will need to put it back together again, but it does need to be empty, hence my weekend challenge.

We are also having a dinner party for eight on Saturday, so I will need to reserve some energy to be my usual sparkling witty self, or more importantly to ensure I stay awake beyond nine o'clock.

I hope you have a good weekend, speak next week.

One small word, one big problem

Not been much to report this week, so I have been rather quiet.

As the weekend approaches, I have a lot of things to try and close this week, so things are busy, but manageable.

As for the title, the small word in question is "nit".  Maggot 1 has got them, and the little suckers are very hard to eradicate, as anyone who has experienced them will confirm.  We are now on a daily "wet comb" treatment for the whole family, which means using a nit comb through conditioned hair.  The fine-toothed comb gets most of the little suckers, and the conditioner makes the hair and scalp slippery so the little darlings cannot hold on with their evil claws which are on the end of each of their six evil legs. 

For those who like to know the details, the following passage describes all you would ever want to know about head lice and nits, and it may well be telling you too much.

Head lice are wingless insects. They are grey or brown, have six legs and are about 1 to 3mm in length when fully grown (the size of a sesame seed). Female head lice lay eggs that are smaller than a pinhead and these attach to your hair close to the scalp. The eggs hatch about seven to 10 days later. Young lice are called nymphs - it takes about 10 days for them to become adults and capable of laying new eggs.
When lice hatch they leave empty shells called nits attached to the hair. Nits are white and you may mistake them for flakes of dry skin. Unlike dandruff, nits stick to the hair and you won't be able to remove them with normal shampooing.

So, in summary, there is a new generation of lice every 10 days, and if you do not remove every single egg, they can stick around for much longer than is entirely healthy.

The hardest thing is that the mere mention of "nit" has the unfortunate effect of making you itch, all over, but particularly your head.  Now I have wet-combed myself and it seems I do not have any infection.  However, try telling that to my itch gland.

On that note, have a great weekend, which I hope is considerably less itchy than ours is likely to be.

A weekend of quality time

LO is off with, um, can't remember what pseudonym I have previously given to her, so let's call her Female1.  Anyhow, LO is off with Female1 to a day cookery course in Corfe Castle, to learn to cook fresh pasta.  I cannot wait to be the guinea pig for all her experiments.

I am therefore looking after the maggots.  I intend to meet up with Male1 later for lunch, then swimming.  Prior to that I will be taking Maggot 1 to tennis, and nipping in to town with Maggot 2 to get his nursery picture, which is in for mounting and framing, and to get me a pair of swimming goggles.  My last pair got lost at the pool.  I can only guess that there is a fair old current in the pool and they are, as we speak, blocking some outlet vent, or more likely being worn by a pool cleaner.

In the meantime, us lads are all together, and planning maybe a quick game on the Wii.  The game chooses itself really, since it is one of the few that meets the requirements of a) being playable by 3 people, and b) not causing massive arguments.  Actually b) is always touch and go, so we will have to see.  Anyhow, the game will be Fifa 2009, although we actually play a secondary game on there that is 8-a-side football with little kid-like characters, mostly because we can play on opposing teams, and that does reduce the arguments by an order of magnitude.

In the evening, Male1 and Female1 are coming round for dinner.  That even could mean a lot of work for me, but actually Male1 has cooked a thai curry that they are bringing round for us all to share.  If he can only bring round 2 crates of beer and a couple of bottles of red, he will officially be the most perfect guest of all time.

Have a good weekend, enjoy any sunshine you can find, and speak again Monday.

So there you are

I have been looking for Friday all week, and now I have found it.  Another week over, and a bit of progress made, but definitely time to go home and see my family.  I am not even sure what we are doing this weekend, but I don't care, I would just like to be sleeping in my own bed and spending some time with the family.  

I did manage to go shopping one evening, with the big shops open until 8pm.  Got myself some of them there long short things for my summer holidays, and a little present each for LO, maggot 1 and maggot 2.  The emphasis on little.  Sent a text last night mentioning it, and realise I have set myself up to fail.  However much they are preparing for something "little", I imagine that the "little" that they are going to get is somewhat "littler" than the "little" that they have imagined.  We will all try to laugh it off at the time, but I expect to be left in no doubt that my card is marked.

I hope your weekend will be as good as mine is definitely going to be.

Enjoy the sunshine.  I hope to be in the (large) paddling pool with the maggots, maybe a little lie in the hammock, and participating in whatever activities we have planned or make up over the weekend.  Ah, bliss.  ttfn.

Another week, another challenge

Another week is nearly over, and I have a whole bunch of new challenges.  I have been up in London for four days and three nights, and that does take its toll.  To put it simply, I miss my family.  I also cannot continue to have three courses at every meal.

Work is hard right now.  I should be grateful I have a job, and mostly I am.  I should also be grateful I am doing a job that, in the main, I enjoy doing.  I am certainly very glad that I do not pluck chickens for a living, or any other kind of job that is based on doing the same boring thing over and over and over.


However, man is never content.  Give me a million, and I want two.  Give me a nice watch, and I want an iPhone.  Give me a pair of ladies underwear...  Sorry, that must just be me.  I find life in the City a hectic, frantic, crazy time, with people everywhere, and no time of day or night whether there is not at least one group of suited beings drinking alcohol.  Do these people not have jobs to do?  They obviously do, to pay for the flash suit and the expensive lager, but it is a job that is obviously heavy on expense-paid lunches, heavy on networking, but light on clocking in and out.  Good on them.

The weekend draws near, and I for one am very keen to get in to it and enjoy some R&R. This weekend we have friends over for the night, and a new cub to be invested. Should be a good one, and with the weather likely to hit the high twenties Celcius, it has the potential to be a great couple of days.  I hope you enjoy yours, and we will speak again next week. 

As a final note, you should check out Golfy's blog.  It has an amazing YouTube clip watching a hand draw a series of cartoons to tell a story of what motivates people.  It is quote a remarkable video.