You Never Give Me Your Money

A good week – aren’t they all ? I discovered emoiticons in the blog.

 

Worked monday through wednesday which wasn’t too bad. There might be changes afoot in the org. which means I might have a chance at a different job.

 

Definitely won’t be doing that M.Sc – I simply can’t afford the €5k a year and even if I could I’d sooner go back to college to study film scoring (not business!).  I’m not bothered.

 

My mate Thomas from Pugwash ‘phoned. We had been playing phone-tag for a couple of weeks. Always good to hear from him – a talented guy and I can live out my fantasy of being a real songwriter and musician through Thomas. The album is coming out soon and he’s given me a little dedication on it for some help I gave on a song. That means a huge amount to me – a validation of my abilities as a musician. It makes up for not playing piano on the actual track (long story there) when we were in Abbey Road last year. I really hope it works out for Thomas and that when he’s hugely successful he won’t forget me
Unfortunately (or is that fortunately ?) the deal with Andy Partridge’s APE record label is dead in the water. Given what I’ve heard I think that’s a good thing.

 

Wednesday I left the car in for some minor bodywork [while away on holidays some little shit decided to relieve the car of it’s mercedes ‘star’]. The star itself was only €20 but over the past couple of years various idiots in supermarket car parks took slices off the corner bumpers and mouldings on the car. Put the whole lot in for one claim and because I’ve got no-claims-bonus protection it’s only costing me the €125 excess

This meant that I had to commute home using public transport using the Luas for the first time – a very pleasant experience. 20 minutes after jumping on board (I’ve gone all travelogue haven’t I?) it dropped me off in St.Stephen’s Green and I strolled around from the east side of the green to the north side where an ‘express’ bus ( the 37X if you’re interested) arrived only 5 minutes later. Got me home about 45 minutes later. Now , in fairness this is about the same as a bad-day commute via car. I don’t know if I could do the public transport commute thing really – well , it’s not going to be practical as I’ll be back to doing school-run for the girls this year with Ben going to a new school.

 

I took Thursday & Friday off because it had been so enjoyable last time and with the kids going back to school in a few days I figured it would be good to be at home. Thursday was a difficult day – spent the morning doing domestic finances and the periodical "are we living beyond our means" discussion. Sharing personal finance is not something I’m comfortable with but let’s just say we’re very cautious and despite our nice house and two cars we’re not as flush as perhaps some people would think. We’re not exactly living on the streets either.  All is well.

 

Back to Atlantic Homecare for some proper exterior wood paint so that I could do the windowsills upstairs. That and some sandpaper discs to fix two sticky doors. Val had a go at some homemade pizza and if the kids are anything to go by it was a success. Tried watching 24 Hour Party People but didn’t get to the end.

 

Friday was wonderful. We took the kids into town on the bus (see ? – I’m making a habit of this) and after some noodles in Wagamama hopped on the Luas (I’m getting the hang of this now) out to Sandyford to pick up the car.

 

Very pleased with the work done and the advice given on how to fix up those annoying little chips in the bodywork and the type of stereo/phone kit I’d like in the car.  Turns out that there’s a Pioneer head unit DEH-P70BT that plays radio, cd, wma, aac, mp3 files and has an available iPod interface plus it has a bluetooth interface so you can partner with a compatible phone. Now this is good because I don’t want to change my current Nokia because the connection to the phone has changed and the installed car kit I have isn’t compatible with modern day Nokia phones. Bah. I do like the idea of the whole lot being integrated via bluetooth though. That’s the gadget-freak in me coming out again.

 

Ben woke us up Saturday morning vomiting. Nice. I surfaced from bed a few minutes later and walked downstairs… barefoot… straight through a pool of vomit at the bottom of the staircase. Lovely.

Val headed off into town at lunchtime to meet her mum while I monitored an improving Ben (funny how 6 year olds bounce back so well, Alan Partridge would be proud). Ali & Heather did the bike thing with their friends while I painted the upstairs window sills (at last!), did some rust treatement to a few chips on the car paintwork and finished fixing the door to Alison’s bedroom. It no longer sticks and the wood floor is safe again.

I’m getting more and more satisfaction out of this DIY stuff and am becoming unbearable.

 

Spent Saturday evening at our neighbours house. We’re fortunate in having a great bunch of neighbours. I’m sure they all don’t like me that much if truth be told (I can be a bit upfront in my opinions and beliefs…). Kids had a blast and despite his illness that morning Ben ate rubbish with the rest of the kids.

 

It’s sunday morning and I find myself in our sunroom at the back of the house having just read Andrew Collins’ blog and thought it was about time I did a little updating of my own. I have that little anxious/anxiety feeling I get some days so I’m going to keep myself busy – that’ll make it go away. There’s some gardening that could be done but what I really want to do is sort out my 6Music access at home. I really like listening to that station and have a couple of ways of listening to it but neither work well at the moment. I can stream it online to a PC or Mac but that stream only works on the computer. If I’m downstairs where we have a couple of Roku Soundbridge M1000 devices I can’t listen because of a compatibility issue with the streaming technology. I found some great software which I’ve installed on my iMac. This takes any input (including a realaudio or windowsmedia player for example) and streams it on my home network (or out to the internet if I wanted to). Nicecast is intended to allow you to run your own internet radio station but I’m just using it to ‘rebroadcast’ 6Music around the house. It doesn’t work very well – I’m listening to Liz Kershaw at the moment and the sound is lilke bad AM radio. The other method I have is to take the sound from a Sky digibox and broadcast it on FM using a little transmitter I’ve got.  What I’m thinking of trying to set up is a combination of both : the Sky digibox connected up in the attic/office (see webcam here !)

 

 

That’s what I’m doing if it rains. If it doesn’t rain I’m going to try and persuade Val to do a bit of gardening with me. I’m not really supposed to do any gardening with my chronic pollen allergy but I do enjoy it (sometimes).

 

Mr. Blue Sky is out and the small wisps of cloud are shooting across the sky – it’s quite windy innit ?

 

. . . does anyone really read this ?