Minor changes, new blog toys

The eagle-eyed among you (you know who you are, I'm sure) will no doubt have already spotted some tiny changes I've made to this blog. Along with the brilliant SnapShots I've been using for a while, I've put Lingospot onto it too. This is quite a sexy piece of fun, which picks up words I've published and gives you a little run-down of what they're about. Check out some of them further down the page - you'll see a little arrow next to them which, when clicked, opens up a window where you can see the Wikipedia entry for that word, plus some Flickr photos and so on. Nice, no?

I've also shuffled some of the ads around, including this one at the top which I'm not sure about really. Don't forget that advertising on this blog does actually pay me money when clicked...

Oh, and the other thing is the little doo-hickey on the right hand side that cleverly dumps my blog into your feed reader, should you use such a thing.

That's about it, will write more shortly. This past weekend deserves a bit of bloggage, I'm sure.

Not so bad after all...

It's occurred to me lately that this blog's turned into less of a worrying insight into the byzantine workings of my 7-year-old mind, more a sort of 'this is what we did on the weekend isn't it nice' thing, which isn't what I'd planned at all. I'll do better in future I promise.

Despite that, this weekend has been fairly pleasant; tapas and cocktails on Friday night and a bit of a drinkathon with Keef on Saturday, strangely woke up feeling bright as a button this morning which sort of made up for Friday morning, when I woke up feeling disastrously hungover having (purposefully) not drunk a drop the previous night.

So we made use of the day, wandering out around Kensington in the sun, downing a massive, largely fried brunch at Café Continenté after which I'm fairly sure I went into shock for 30 minutes or so, heading to Oddbins for some of their amazing own-label rosé, and slowly winding back home via Tesco for lots of exciting spicy things to cook over the coming week.

So just before I wrote this, I was in the kitchen watching the Kiwi bake some banana oat muffins. She's wearing a gorgeous royal blue maxi-dress with a halter neck, the afternoon light's coming softly through into the kitchen and she's a perfectly beautiful image of femininity to me, and just at that moment, I hear the living room stereo, with Adele singing 'all the wonders of my world...', and it occurs to me, not for the first time today, that stuff can get pretty good really, can't it?

70s food, Kiwi-less, plans

Oh hilarious. I'm watching, as I have been doing every Tuesday evening for a few weeks now, 'The Supersizers Go...' with Giles Coren and Sue Perkins. This week, it's the 70s, and it reminds me quite how much I really like prawn cocktail. I remember having it at my eldest sister's wedding when I must've been all of five, and thought it was about the most exotic and brilliant thing I'd ever had. It was served with buttered brown bread, out of which I made a prawn cocktail sandwich. Classy.

I still make it, if the truth be known, with my own marie rose sauce and big fat tiger prawns - and it's still ace.

Anyway, childhood food aside, I'm writing this stretched luxuriously out on the sofa, as the Kiwi's in New York this week, generally attending numerous parties and watching films, I think, damn her, and so here I am, all by my self. She's back on Friday, which at this point is seeming very far away indeed.

My weekend was spent back in Manchester, which was brilliant - catching up with the folks and the family Yoog, then back to London on the Sunday night for drinks with my old housemate which were probably more enthusiastic than they should've been; Monday morning was a bit of a challenge.

I do have a bit of news for you all. The kiwi and I have been thinking about it for a while, but we've decided for definite to move to New Zealand. In about six months' time. Scary stuff, but massively exciting too. We'll go via Manchester for a week (early Christmas), then Canada, snowboarding, then Australia for a bit of time with the folks, then NZ for New Year. And then back to reality with a crash...

More on this later, but I wanted to let you all know. Funny, I started this blog to document some work-related changes in my life, but I guess the changes will be a little more wholesale than that.

In other news, Nick Drake has been in my headphones a great deal of late, what terrifically brilliant lovely stuff it is too. All three albums, in sequence, at least once a day.

Being very grown-up (sort of)

This Friday saw our annual 'doing something loosely defined as 'cultural', when the Kiwi and I went to see Pygmalion at the Old Vic. It got off to a slightly shaky start, when (being used to films and concerts) we turned up on the dot of 1930, expecting it to start some time afterwards, and were made to wait upstairs and watch the first act on a monitor before being let into the theatre. Nonetheless, the remainder of it was superb, Tim Pigott-Smith attacking the Henry Higgins role with evident relish and Michelle Dockery brilliantly timed and spot on as Eliza Doolittle.

I've not seen the play before and, although this could be as much down to the performance as anything else, I was surprised by the savagery with which Shaw tears into the privileged classes, showing through Higgins a thorough hypocrisy and lack of humanity, particularly in the face of Eliza's articulate, grounded and self-aware father. Whilst Col. Pickering offers some hope of redemption for the upper classes, he's still shown as fundamentally juvenile and short-sighted as Higgins.

It also reminded me how damaging a 'happy ending' can be to a play's message - in stark contrast to My Fair Lady, there's no closure to Pygmalion. For the viewer, this means the questions raised in the play are still firmly in the mind long after the show's over; it doesn't offer answers, forcing you to mull it over for yourself.

Anyway, following that we wandered down The Cut to Livebait, where the food was brilliant but the service, unfortunately, was catastrophic. Hey ho. The rest of the weekend involved travelling down to East Sussex to see some friends of ours and their 5 month old baby girl, who's a right bundle of smiles - although for some reason the sight of the Kiwi was enough to reduce her to inconsolable tears at first.

Fortunately they made friends before too long and that afternoon I was treated to the mildly alarming sight of my girlfriend displaying what can only be described as something of a maternal side - even taking over (bottle) feeding duties for a while. She didn't even seem to mind being vomited on, which is totally not my experience of her. Well well, how times change...

Another bank holiday, toddler tantrum

Another bank holiday sort of crept up on me this weekend, although this time I can profess to having found out about it a little earlier than last time (Wednesday? something like that). Following a week that was a bit like wading through treacle work-wise, it was very welcome.

So, if you're interested... on Friday night I started to teach the Kiwi how to play chess, and from the looks of it she'll be beating me soundly in relatively little time. She has a naturally analytical, strategic mind that lends itself well to the game, whilst personally I struggle to have the patience. We'll see. We're both about as competitive as each other, so perhaps I'll develop a bit more aptitude for it out of sheer bloody-mindedness.

Saturday we both caught up with friends separately, and Sunday we went to the rugby sevens at Twickenham, at which England beat New Zealand in the first quarter-final round and thus were out for the rest of the day. With that and the tennis result I'm uncharacteristically smug for an English sports fan - we don't often get the chance so I'm rather milking it. That said, rugby was definitely a secondary attraction of the day, the first being smuggling as much alcohol into the ground as possible, along with the usual results. Streakers, pitch invasions, hailstorms of plastic pint glasses, cardboard beer trays, hats and at one point, the construction of a snake of empty pint glasses being constructed that stretched pretty much from the back of the stands to the front, and the length of one whole block.

We called it a day afterwards, and came out of it relatively unscathed. I did run to a cashpoint (run? why? I don't know) and back during the course of the day, out of the ground what I reckon was about 1.5k at a sprint in my non-running shoes, which I think is responsible for every muscle and joint in my body aching today and a suspected pulled calf muscle. Hopefully this will be a learning experience.

Yesterday was hilarious from start to finish, the highlight being the sight of my Kiwi, face down on the living room floor throwing a proper toddler tantrum about having to tidy her clothes off the floor of our bedroom. Fists banging on the floor and everything. Second to this, superb food all day, with a brilliant borlotti bean minestrone for lunch (her) and good ol' roast chicken & veg & pan gravy for dinner (moi). And a short week ahead of us! Brilliant.

One Year In

Oh, and I forgot to mention. I've been in this company for exactly one year today, and what a year it's been. Tremendous stuff, feels very good indeed.

Run of the mill mentalness

So I'm sitting here at my desk in London, wondering why I'm so dog tired, and then it hits me - it's 0745. I'm precisely one hour early, and for no good reason. Note to self, if you're going to get up that early, either don't, or do some exercise or something. I blame the Kiwi, she's the one who's always in shockingly early, she works way too hard that lass.

Anyway, so in the lead up to the Move, a few interesting things have been happening at work. Firstly an offer of a contract came in with a different employer, which would have enabled me to save a fair bit of cash and, being self-employed, would have some decent tax benefits. So I took this offer to my current employer, told them the context (ie the Move) and the offer, and fortunately they came back with a counter-offer, despite the impending Move. This slightly changes my role here, and adds a huge amount to my workload, but the benefits are... tangible.

This will rather annoy the party who made the original offer, but I suppose it's all about No.1 when it all comes down to it. The rest of this year should be a bit of a challenge.

Back to reality today though, it's one of those 'head down' days where I finally get around to writing up stuff I've been talking about for weeks. Visio and Excel will be getting a bit more of my attention than they're used to I think, oh joy.

Oh, and I've decided that the new Martha Wainwright album is about 85% brilliant, the new Elbow album is still 100% brilliant, and I'm undecided about Santogold. Seems about 40% brilliant, about 50% meh, and 10% barking (and not in a good way). Recently I've had two songs going round my head constantly: Kate Bush's 'Moments of Pleasure' and Elliott Smith's 'Tomorrow Tomorrow'. The latter has been ringing in my ears since New Zealand (March), and is now feeling like a sort of muso-y tinnitus. Could be worse I suppose. Both of those last links will enable you to play the full track should you wish - just press the Play button.