Kristen goes into the hospital tomorrow for surgery on her deviated septum. Hopefully they’ll only keep her in overnight and she makes a speedy recovery. Its been really bothering her sinus’s and sleeping and general health so it will be good to get this sorted. Get well soon love!

Kristen’s sister-in-law gave birth to a healthy 5lb and 14oz baby girl at 1am this morning, red curly hair and blue eyes. So we are now an Aunt and Uncle!

Well I feel like a fully fledged plumber tonight. Wednesday night I brought home the dishwasher from work as we had no room to put it in the new offices. We gave it a good clean outside (after the clean it got in the office too!) and I wisely decided not to tell Kristen that there was a dead mouse under it when we moved it from under the sink – that brought the grand total to 3. Anyway, I stopped off at Wickes on the way home and for under £9 I got a splitter for the cold water outlet and a self cutting waste outlet clamp. Both are now firmly in place with no leaks….yet. I did manage to get wet putting the splitter on the cold water pipe as I foolishly decided to let the stopcock on the join stop the water – it didn’t. As I called Kristen to give me some help she went into the loo – I thought she was going to turn the main stopcock off, but no – she just needed the loo! Afterwards she turned the water off and I was able to adjust the nonworking stop cock into more of an off position. Then it was a quick attachment of the washing machine and dishwasher, turn on the main stopcock and then struggle to turn the little splitter stopcock back to the on position. Then it was loading the dishwasher – which started the arguments off already – and we’re now sitting up waiting for it to finish, neither of knowing how long it will take – to ensure that the waste outlet doesn’t leak. Oh and Kristen says that I am a fully fledged plumber 😉

What can I say?. 😉 (that’ll attract some google searches!) Turns out that she was over enthusiastic yesterday and managed to not only destroy the equipment but trip the electrics for the entire house. I didn’t notice as by that time I was asleep as I had been awake really early in the day to drive to Birmingham to visit a customer. Unfortunately the equipment was not ours and was borrowed and they didn’t have a receipt for it. I was not looking forward to the visit to the shop to see if we could get a replacement under the year guarantee and thankfully they did. Thanks Wickes! Now as long as it lasts for an hour tonight we’ll be happy and the bedroom will soon be back to normal 😉

Things have been really hectic and busy round here the past couple of days so I’ve not really had a chance to blog much. As I mentioned earlier, our section of the company was sold off over the weekend, so Thursday and Friday last week was very stressful as I was trying to juggle responsibilities of the old job with planning the merger of the two companies and their networks, in particular trying to plan for an email migration with the minimum downtime and user hassle. Tomorrow the big switch over will take place and we will be cut off from our old company network and we’ll be joined to the new one….so yet more stress 🙂
Saturday evening we went out with some friends of ours to Old Orleans which neither of us had been to before. The evening was different as we were greeted by an extremely hairy chested, back and legged wait(e)r(ess) wearing a dress as it was their 20th birthday and so all the staff were in fancy dress. It really was a mistake in allowing a hairy guy to wear a dress and seat people at their tables and bring the food over – it really was a sickening experience. If we hadn’t have booked a table or been on our own I think I’d have left the restaurant. We had a magician come over to the table and do some card tricks,smutty innuendo’s and balloon puppetry. Kristen kept trying to be clever in the cards, as they were all different shapes and sizes and didn’t do too badly although she pulled the king of hearts out when it should have been the queen of hearts. Credit to the clown though, he carried on without pausing in his patter and took her heckling in his stride. The funniest thing is that he was incredibly hard to understand and our friend had a really hard time. Whenever she was asked a question there was a pause, followed by a “errrmm” and then the answer. It really looked like she was trying to think up a fake answer to her name or where she had come from. The rest of the time we were served by a playboy bunny (with matching outfit) who did a good job of apologising for the delay in the food as apparently “everyone had ordered the main courses at once”. When the food came it wasn’t very good and there was quite a lot of food left on the plates. I did manage to eat all my alligator though (tastes like chicken with the consistency of tuna steak) so thats another exotic meat I’ve tried. Note this was NOT eaten at Jamie Oliver’s Dad’s pub, I do not know Jamie Oliver and can’t come to your school for cookery demonstrations or get you a tv break.
Monday I went to see the Doctor about my knees as they’ve been really hurting since we did a 6 geocache hike and he told me that it was just the knees not being used to the amount of exercise and I’ve got to take Ibuprofen for a week.
Today I had my cancer checkup and was given the all clear, which as usual is good news.
Also managed to clear out the broken glass in the barbeque outside so we had steaks on the grill tonight and they were delicious. Thanks luv!

There was/is a major fire in tunnels underneath Manchester yesterday which seemed to only affect BT phone lines. BT said it would affect a wider network and yesterday we were unable to receive calls at home although we were able to make them. Same thing at the doctors. Apparently the pharmacy opposite the doctors and the job centre had no phones or data lines either. Fortunately our broadband access was not affected 🙂

I’ve just been looking at the Yahoo news about the Columbus shooter capture including the slideshow of photos. What is a bit disturbing is that after 4 pictures there is an advert for a 007 James Bond game on the Yahoo games domain in which a car comes into view on the screen and a sniper scope focus’s in on it. This seems to me to be entirely inappropriate considering this is what the guy was doing and he managed to kill someone.
You can complain about this by going to Yahoo advert feedback and clicking on the ad feedback link.

Well for once it was worth going to work today. We had a meeting with some customers and partners. Naturally the partners brought freebies for the customers. Thankfully the partners couldn’t count so there were plenty of freebies left over. The first was a stuffed tiger, the second a magnetic puzzle, where you have to put the slices of a square back together again and the third was a mousemat. I decided to “upgrade” my 2002 mousemat (with our company logo and 2002 calendar on) and was pleasantly suprised to feel the mouse being so much more responsive. Hooray for Fridays (well this one anyway)

Kristen suggested that we went to ReaseHeath college for their lambing open day. A quick search on google shows a blog entry for last years lambing which explains how all the lambs are born at the same time of the year. We were very fortunate to see and hold lots of lambs – most of which had been born early this week and we were even more fortunate to watch a 2 year old ewe give birth to the first of twins – that was a really neat sight and something that neither Kristen or myself had seen before. I took some pictures but not sure how they’ll come out as the flash is pretty useless.

Yesterday was my birthday so I took a much deserved day off work. The only problem is that today feels like Monday again 🙁
In the morning we went and did a nice cache in the Delamere forest which was a very busy walk meeting loads of dog walkers. We found the cache fairly quickly, despite walking in the wrong direction a few times. Whilst we were signing the logs a dog came up to us to give a sniff to see if we had any food for it. The owner apologised and explained that is what the dog was doing, thinking that the cache container was actually a food container!
The afternoon was spent watching Lord of the Rings as I hadn’t seen it yet. I wasn’t very impressed as it was so long and certain sequences really really dragged. The fight sequences were so shaky and blurry I was wondering if the cameraman had had a shaking fit. I did really like the scenery shots and wished that I could go to some of those locations on holiday.
The evening was going to be spent at a restaurant with some friends of ours, but they got lost coming to our house, so we ended up having KFC with them instead which was still a good laugh. Overall a good day, especially as I didn’t have to spend it in the office.