Electric Quaker II

Ah… Evening Duty…

…Apparently the one time of the week when I manage to get a post done!

Well, now, life here moves on apace. Last week I got ill with a stinker of a cold and got sent home, and spent a couple of days sleeping. Ruth’s birthday happened, however, and a huge pile of family turned up (I say huge, because it was. Ruth says it wasn’t, because it didn’t feature sundry cousins. Such an approach to families baffles me; where I come from – and bear in mind my immediate family is about four people – sundry cousins, of which I have many – are left to fend for themselves). Still, there were about fourteen people (as I say, masses), and it was all good fun, fuzzy headaches notwithstanding.

It’s suddenly got a lot colder down here; I need to fix my gloves up and get some decent dubbin back onto my hat; the lousy weather last month stripped it all off, which is annoying. The practical result of this is that my knees have started playing up on a regular basis again. I figure now’s the time to get the buggers properly sorted out, since the lack of any impact from ibruprofen is starting to worry me a bit. And, of course, it’s actually quite tiring to wake up with knees that feel like they’ve got knitting needles run through ’em sideways, and not shake the feeling ’till you go to sleep at the end of the day…

At the weekend, Friday being nine years since what I still mentally pigeonhole as ‘the Accident,’ Ruth & I headed up to Newport to visit my mother and sister, and generally did Shropshire-y stuff, including Stokesay, which was cool, and a bit of a mooch round Much Wenlock, with it’s amazingly cool butcher (seriously, Christmas Eve you get people queueing up from two in the morning so they can get in when the guy opens at six…)

The plan only really went wrong when we tried to come back, burdened with the computer (on the grounds that it’s silly to let it mothball) and Arriva predictably buggered the trains up. That, combined with the sodding obvious fact that if you run about privatizing a railway network what you get is No Co-Ordinated Timetable meant we didn’t have seats booked for any of the journey and we stood for about eighty miles, i.e, the whole trip from Birmingham to Didcot, crammed into a baggage car like, uh… people crammed in very tightly in uncomfortable trains, and still trying to safeguard a large-ish computer and pile of luggage.

My box, as many of you know, is this cool bastard (but from Overclockers, not the other guys). This seemed to confuse people somewhat; as the Arriva train (finally) pulled into New Street, a guy who’d been sat with two youngish boys, and casting me strange looks, came over and said something like

Him Hi, uh, I’m sorry to butt in, but what is that? [pointing at case]
Me Er, it’s a computer.
Him [to one of the boys] O! You were right! [pointing to other boy] He thought it was a musical instrument…

…so that was a bit random, and faintly cool.

Now the thing’s down here, of course, it needs a new monitor (Robin eloped with my old CRT one) so I’m getting a new one, hooray! DVI and everything, ‘s very nice…

I can do that because I’ve got paid. I like getting paid. I now have to stick to a budget. I like this a little less.

Went to first Panto audition, yesterday; looks like it’ll be entertaining, which is good.

Getting tired of typing, now, and the readers are looking troublesome. Signing off…

Edit – 01/11/06; 1749h:
If you’ve not seen today’s Home on the Strange then make sure you’ve read this storyline and then go read the latest episode; had me laughing as quietly as a could for ages, that did…