Happy Birthday to Me

Yesterday was my birthday. Thanks to those who remembered. Don't worry about it to those who didn't. It gives me a perfectly good excuse to forget yours.

I had a great day. We were having a new bay window fitted from 10 until about 3, so I got out of bed to let the blokes in and then grabbed the paper and a couple of mugs of tea, leaving them to get on with it, while I headed back to bed to open my pressies. I got a TomTom 920 from Nikki as well as a couple of other pressies that were actually surprises, since I haven't been hinting about them for 2 months.

When Nikki and I emerged a few hours later the windows were mostly done, and after a couple of phones calls to and from the family and a delicious lunch of cheese, I pottered about with cleaning the pool filter for 3 hours. Nothing better than an afternoon in the sunshine, lifting huge, incredibly heavy, soaking wet, cartridges coated in algae to make me feel like I'd earned the delicious birthday lasagna Nikki had cooked for me. A couple of nice glasses of wine and a healthy bowl of three kinds of fantastic sorbet finished off my day wonderfully.

Valentine's Day

Hope you had a great Valentine's day. Spring has not quite arrived in H-Town, but we've had enough sunshine that my pepper plant got fooled into producing these in time to spice up our evening.

Playboy

It's Friday night, the wife's out of town and I'm bedding a cute bunny:

Brighton Album

So off we went to Brighton. A walk along the seafront, past the strangely beautiful shell of the burnt out West Pier to the Palace Pier. A quick wander around, a poke of chips for energy and then back to the car for the short drive to Hove to visit Stuart and Sam and of course, Maddie and Jack.



Or, check out the full album.

London Album

Finally, the album from London. At this rate, the photos from Brighton and Stornoway will appear in March and July respectively. Sorry Lizzie, this may not do your homesickness much good. Most of the photos are from the London Eye, but there's a few others, including a couple of the astonishing Battle of Britain Monument.



As usual, you can go to the full album for bigger versions of the photos.

Letters

Dear Popular Science Magazine,

I like you, you're a good read, you appeal to my geeky side, but listen, you cost $5. I bought you for a 70 minute plane ride yesterday and had finished you with 15 minutes left. 55 minutes of entertainment for $5 does not seem like good value to me. I could have bought a book for $10 that would have taken me days to read. I could have rented a movie for $3 that would have lasted at least 90 minutes. It's not like I skipped a bunch of articles either, I read them all, the whole magazine, in 55 minutes. You know what happens when you're on a plane and you've got 15 minutes to kill and you've finished your magazine? You end up reading Skymall. And that, is a terrible fate to suffer.

Yours sincerely,
Ian


Dear Skymall,

I notice with interest that your business model has changed since the last time I was forced to read your magazine. You've gone from selling useless crap that no-one could possibly want, except maybe those who are brain-addled from hours of boredom, to selling mostly useless crap that no-one could possibly want, with a little bit of useful stuff mixed in. Good idea, but here's the problem with the new strategy - I'm not living on the plane. I expect to get off it at some point. Probably, before whatever I ordered from your catalog arrives, I'll have had a day or two at home to think about whether I really want to spend $44.99 on a 1GB Micro SD card. I might even have visited a shop or two. Maybe even my favourite shop in the whole world, Fry's Electronics, where they're selling 1GB Micro SD cards for $14.99.

Yours Sincerely,
Ian

P.S. If you've ever had anyone buy the Helmet Hero Camera System, please let my brother know. His solution involved an old light mount, a nut, a bolt and a washer, so I reckon, if you're flogging a 3 MP camera glued to a crash helmet for $169.99, he might be quids in.

A Lovely Day in Brighton

The seafront in Brighton. Doesn't look like the sort of freezing cold place where an otherwise hardy individual would catch pnuemonia or the flu or something and be sick for New Year and a week afterwards, does it?

London, Aye?

The Thames from the upstream Hungerford footbridge*, looking towards the London Eye and the Houses of Parliament.

______
* Fine, the Golden Jubilee Bridge if you're a stickler for that sort of thing

Gallows Hill

Nikki and I on top of Gallows Hill, Stornoway harbour and the town itself behind us, New Year's Day, 2008.

We're Home

Those of you that check Twitter already know this, or at least know that we made it as far as immigration, but we're home. It was a good trip, despite too much booze, catching the most deadly flu since the Spanish one and being in bed at 1am on New Year's Day after 2 (two!) beers.

I have photos. They will be posted. Eventually. Hope you all had a Happy New Year. Sadly I didn't make any resolution about blogging more often, so the current pathetic rate will be maintained for a while.