August 2004 Archives

Ahhh the joy of Bank Holiday weekends (non-Brits should see also: public holidays).

There's something relaxing about knowing that it's Sunday evening, just after midnight and there's no work tomorrow. Actually, Bank Holidays were much more "fun" when I was working as they meant an extra day off and a lie in on Monday morning - now I'm on a semi-permanent vacation it loses a bit in the translation.

Suffice to say that although it's time off I'm still sitting in front of my PC in the early hours of the morning knocking out PHP scripts for the various web projects I'm running while I have the time.

Still I spent the afternoon lounging around - sat through the movie Battle of Britain (a classic) and slept through half of S1m0ne, which wasn't what I was expecting at all.

Oh happy days :)

The ever present shadow of life(tm) keeps getting in the way of my ability to keep my blog up to date - don't you just hate it when that happens ???

Given that I am currently in semi-retirement (see also made redundant, not working full-time and should-be-taking it-easy-for-a-bit) I should, apparently, have a golden opportunity to kick back a little and spend some time watching the world go by. However, this doesn't seem to be the case.

In the last couple of weeks I've built furniture, moved it around, taken it to pieces, rebuilt it then decided to go out buy something different becasue it didn't like right in the first place.

I've also been to Germany to see my very good friend Emanuel get married and to experience some of the most extreme weather I've ever seen whilst standing on my own two feet.

Added to this is a recent two-hour pitch for some freelance web development work and necessary household chores and the opportunities for taking it easy have been severely limited. Still, it's all been good fun !!

For the next couple of days I'm in self-imposed holiday mode, during which time I expect my XBox to see some serious action and my attempts to teach myself Flash continue - even during downtime I can't leave the damned computers alone :)

I am officially a broken man. My fingers are broken, my arms are limp and the back is killing me. Have I been through hell and back the last week or so - maybe. Have I suffered so that others might benefit - possibly.

Have I been doing DIY ?????? You bet your sweet gluteous maximus I have.

Over the past few days I have built chairs, bookshelves, the units for a walk-in wardrobe, the shelves for the units for he walk-in wardrobe and much more besides. It's been quite good fun really but I now (substantially) ache just about everywhere.

I have noticed a couple of things though:
1. No matter how hard you try to keep the house clean and tidy while you move in there's some sadist cardboard dropping troll somewhere who always manages to fill the stairs with waste materials every ten minutes (no matter how hard you keep an eye on it cardboard, like tribbles, multiples exponentially).
2. The degree of cunning with which Tom the cat plans his toilet breaks on my new bedroom carpet far outweighs his lowly status as smelliest cat in the Russell household.

Still, on the up side the place is looking quite swish now and with help from friends, relatives and the bribing of various tradesmen to lift things up the stairs we are going to have one seriously swanky home in the next two weeks.

The only other thing to do is to find the time to sit back and enjoy my new broadband connection...