Stephen Loves NI, if you do too and have had it with tribal politics get involved. http://election.iloveni.com/ . It's a pretty difficult process trying to wade through manifestos and seek out the important bits, but that's what we are trying to do. If you have a spare half hour pick a topic and try to break it down to the Yes/No table. Even if we get it wrong, it will stimulate discussion.
The suburbs are killing me - So it's minus 3.5 on my car thermometer. That's quite cold. I have a problem with the city though, I trundle along approximately 100 yards of untreated road until I hit a well lit gritted road which takes me to work in 10 minutes.
I crave a little bit of adventure, I want to feel like I have accomplished something by making it in to work in the morning.
My colleagues have herculian stories of heartache driving from all corners of the countryside, my father drives from Portadown to Derry over the Glenshane every day of the year. I can't compete in this game of 'Commuting Top Trumps'.
The city makes you soft, this is undoubtedly true. Everything is in such easy reach, you become lazy very quickly. Roads are bathed in artificial lights, you see eejits going to the 24 hour Tesco with no lights on at midnight. It lulls you in to a horrible false sense of security, your edges become rounded and your reactions dull. I need to head to the hills this weekend, I do, I do.
I know it has been done elsewhere, but I intend to make this a feature for 2007, it's my resolution.
Shopping list Number 1 found at Tesco Knocknagoney.
There are a couple of thoughts I have about this, firstly I have no clue what Raffins Ashers is, it's obviously important, it's got a cloud around it.. This list appears to be collated by an elderly person with time on their hands, the items are not that important, and certainly this isn't the 'Big Shop'. So Lucozade Sport seems to be the misfit item here, paper,lottery,crossword puzzle book all fit neatly with my mental image, but Lucozde Sport and perhaps bananas throw me off slightly.
Although the list seems to be written in at least 2 hands, so maybe that explains the misfits.
So it's all over, Christmas was my usual mix of driving up and down the M1 and eating and drinking copius amounts of food and drink.
In between I spent a day and a half finishing our bathroom. I got professionals to do the tiling and plumbing and in my head they were going to leave the bathroom in perfect order for us to start using it again. I was naive to say the least. We got porcelain tiles, normal tile drill bits dissolve when trying to drill in to the damn things. I ended up getting diamond tipped hollow drill bits at 20 odd quid to the job. Each hole took at least 5 minutes to drill, using a water spray to dampen the bit and keep it cool.
The bath panel took me almost 5 hours to fit, using an electric plane to take a quarter of a mil off each time, I was determined to have no gaps, no easy task when there doesn't appear to be a straight surface in our house.
Here are a few snaps of the finished article.
I got a gorillapod in my christmas box, I have been attaching it to every available surface. It's a great yolk altogether.
This evening I started measuring up the bathroom floor so I could order some marine ply to cover the banjaxed floorboards before the tiler arrives. My tape measure decided to explode into little pieces. It was a good tape measure it lasted me well. When I bought this ramshackle house 4.5 years ago Dad arrived with a new toolbox and some essentials, the tape measure was from that time.
Anyway I started to look for another that I knew was in a box somewhere. I have a lot of boxes, in a lot of places so I haven't found it yet.
I have always hoarded junk, this collection of stuff was from two boxes on a shelf by the bed. I have many other such boxes, I might just make this a series, if you are lucky. ;-)
