Phew...

Made it to the weekend!

Almost...

This afternoon is our graduation, so I have been/will be hunting down familiar faces with my camera.  Each year I do this, and make a poster for the wall and now upload the pics to our FB page for all to see.

Today has been dry, but the BBC says that heavy rain will start at 5pm - just as I leave for home.  Ah well, I can get dry and warm when I get home, and I am also supposed to have a tail wind to help me along, so it is not all doom and gloom!  [Curses, the rain arrived an hour and a half early - going to be nasty when they come out of the Cathedral from graduation!]

The weekend?

Probably a lot of the usual stuff, plus a bit more time learning songs for The Band...

This is a really old one we have picked...



A great song to play!

I have also got a figure to paint for a friend - a rabbit with an assault rifle!

 

I added the waist coat and gun. 

 

And he will have green fur...

 

Looking forward to painting him!

 

Have a great weekend!

Back to the Land of the Living!

The trip went pretty well.

The drive up was nice, having a good chat with one of my colleagues as we went.

We eventually found the place we were staying at, one of those chain hotels that advertises on TV.

It was pretty good overall, but I felt that the bed had been mis-sold.

On the TV ad, the guy is shown falling backwards onto it, sinking in to the comfy mattress with a sigh.  If he had done that on MY bed he would have had a major injury, I swear!  It was the hardest bed I have ever encountered, only slighly softer than a pebble beach.

Here I am pressing as hard as I can...

When checking out I mentioned this to the girl on the desk - she suggested that if I went to another one of these places again, I should ask for an extra quilt to be put on top of the mattress.  When she sleeps over she has SIX quilts.  Clearly I am not the only person who thinks that they are too hard!

The view out of the window wasn't great either...

The food made up for it, though, so overall I was happy.

The meeting itself was interesting and constructive - I made a few contributions that should prove useful so hope they felt it was worth taking me.

The return trip was nice too, with my boss driving.  The weather was a bit grim, though, so we went carefully, not wanting to aquaplane under a truck.

So today I am back to normal, my cold more or less gone and looking forward to a few days of normality.

Monday...

Well, denying illness only seemed to delay the onset.  Dragged myself through to the end of the week, and then sort of collapsed when I got home on Friday evening, sleeping on the sofa and being pampered by the wonderful Mrs RC if I woke up.

I gradually got better over the weekend, and am now down to a bit of a sniffle and a tickly cough from time to time - nothing that a cough sweet can't deal with.

Tomorrow I have to visit Cambridge University for a meeting of some sort.  Might be important, so I am hoping to keep the sniffles under control.  Wish me luck!

Meanwhile, I have been brushing up on a few old songs for when the band has its first meeting.  A few classics in there that will make for a fun time, at least for the band - those listening might not have so much fun  :-) Nah, who wouldn't enjoy a lively rendition of Summer of '69?

Time for our own Revolution!

 

£7 for a box of imported American cereal?  Makes me want to throw it all into the sea!  :-)

Hope you are having a good week!  I am rushed off my feet.  Back soon!

Friday...

Phew, been a long week, finally bumping onto the weekend.

Planning on a totally slobby weekend, good family time, painting a few more Vikings, typing up a bit more zombie book, playing a bit of guitar, etc....

Number One Son is settled back at Uni again and working hard.  One of his latest modules is actually challenging him!  Yeah, amazing!  Before this he has worked hard but rarely felt that he is being taxed mentally.  He won't let it beat him, of course...

We had a long discussion on Skype the other night - made better by plugging the laptop into some external speakers - about capital punishment.  It was sparked by a news item about a guy who was recently executed by lethal injection and took longer to die than usual.  Lots of views on this and I think we covered most of them, from "hang them all" to "it is not their fault, society is letting them down".  Not sure where I stand, to be honest - I think my view varies from case to case, really!

Anyway, let's not get bogged down in all that! It is time I shut down this PC for the weekend and went off to do the things I mentioned above!

Oh, but before I go, I was just invited to go on a fieldtrip to the tiny isle of Lundy for a week.

Makes me think of Craggy Island. Apparently we will be staying in a bard (make that a BARN!).  There is one pub and one shop and not much of a phone signal.  Sounds like a blast to me!

Monday

Well, the weekend was far too short, still feel worn out from last week to be honest!  Maybe I am on the edge of a bug or something?  Not sure, but I hope this passes soon.

I did get some more of my zombie book typed up in draft last night, which was good - not much more to type up, then I can focus on finishing off the rest of the story - then it will be rewrite time, making sure the time lines match up, fleshing out the characters, etc.  While typing I found a scene that I had forgotten about - the arrival of the Maltese Terrier, a yapping mutt that wants someone to constantly throw his stick for him.  What to do with him?

What would YOU do with him?

Sunrise...

on a beautifully clear, crisp winter morning.

 

 

Not a cloud is sight, not a rain drop, not a hint of even the smallest breeze.

 

It was noticably colder than the warm, wet weather of recent weeks, but I was not complaining one bit.  You expect January to be cold!

 

Just hope it doesn't get as cold as the USA and Canada have had it - although I have heard that this will not happen.  Hope they are right about that!

Busy Day

Yesterday was the day that Number One Son went back to Uni, so I took the day off and went with him on the train as far as London to see him onto his second train.  I wanted to help him as he had a couple of heavy bags that would have been a struggle on his own.  Once in Lancaster he would grab a taxi to the Uni.

 

The train journey nice and easy, so we chatted away and munched chocolate and drank Cherry Coke.

 

When we got to Euston, we had about 40 minutes to burn, so we grabbed a burger.

 

London has lots of pigeons.  These pigeons often make their way into train stations.

 

I guess it is just a small trip from that to clearing up crumbs in Burger King...

 

 

On the way across the city I saw this place...

 

I spent a couple of minutes trying to work out how you pronounced it.  Turkish or Moroccan maybe?

 

Gnnbarrr...

 

Nn-H-Bar...

 

Gun-Bar....

 

Then I looked up...

 

G.N.H. Bar.  DOH!

 

When I got home, Mrs RC's laptop was insistant that we upgrade to Windows 8.1, so away we went.

 

It took a while to do, and during that time it displayed a lot of messages.

 

This is my favourite...

 

I guess they just ran out of explanations after a while!

 

After that, we looked at the PC that is going to be used in the dining room to play music.  In a moment of rashness we decided that it would be fun to install the original Sims on it and have a communal game going too.  So I installed it with all the expansions, ran it - worked fine.  I quit and then tried to run it again.  It gave an error message and then proceeded to uninstall itself!.

 

Bah!

 

Reloaded it all, and the same result, except that I stopped the uninstall this time.

 

A bit if fiddling with compatibility settings and a bit more swearing, and it was up and running!  We like the original version, nice an quirky and great fun with all the add-ons.

 

And then it was time to go sleepy-byes...

Stuff

Just a quick post here - sorry for my slackness!

My resolutions are going well so far - I have spent a couple of evenings in bed with my laptop transcribing my scrawled zombie story from the notebooks into something more functional.  Enjoying it a lot!

Had a meeting with an old drummer friend of mine yesterday - he has a singer and guitarist lined up, just needs a good bass player. 

Oh, that would be me!

I have seen video clips of the guitarist and he seems to be very good.  The singer apparently won a TV talent contest some years ago and has been living off that ever since.  However he now wants to do more than sing to a backing track at least some of the time, have a bit of the fun and spontaneity that goes with having a live band.  Should be a blast!

The British weather continues to be wet and windy - we have lots of wind damage in my area, fences, downed trees, etc, but the flooding is well away from where I am, the wind is blowing the wrong way for my town to flood, and we are well away from those parts of town anyway!

More soon, even if it is only a snippet of my zombie story...