What's been going on recently? Well, I bought this new motherboard thinking that, well, it supports my chosen CPU, it has enough PCI slots and . . . various other things . . . yep, sounds good. I spend Thursday night ripping out old motherboard and putting in new motherboard / CPU / RAM. Oh! But wait a sec - that power supply has a really old skool connector - it don't fit. A motherboard without electricity isn't much use. Fortunately, my mum's old PC had a fairly modern PSU that I was able to pilfer and attach to new PC. So, we're cooking on gas . . . or similar. It is only much later on, once I've got the graphics cards working and all the memory recognised by the operating system that I kind of realise, "Hey! Where am I supposed to plug in those old IDE drives?" For this motherboard has no IDE sockets. Hmmmm. So that's about where I am. I've constructed a Frankenstein PC out of the old PC and plugged in all the old IDE drives and now need to create some kind of basic NFS-enabled operating system to share out said IDE drives. I'm sure I'm meant to rant on and on and on about weddings and colour schemes or something.
The title is what someone said to me today, in a devastating put-down. I'm still recovering. It was lunchtime and I was walking home with R******. We decided to take the alley that runs behind Coulston Road. Up ahead was a large woman, who looked about in her early forties. She had a child with her, about 7-ish, and three massive dogs, none of which were tethered. These dogs were kind of lolloping about in a haphazard manner so I kind of instinctively (no - actually this is based on experience) drew R****** towards me. Sure enough, one of these dogs (almost as tall as R******, and probably far heavier) came right up to R****** and was sticking his nose in his face, sniffing him in a manner that was way too confrontational. I kind of looked at this dog and what it was doing in a bemused manner, wondering how long it would be before the owner asserted control. R****** didn't appear in any distress. As the woman passed by I said, "You know, it would be good if you could actually control your dogs," but I don't think this registered immediately, or perhaps it took a while for her to formulate her words - "Oh shut up, you stupid man." R****** and I stopped at that point and I turned to challenge her, hoping to remind her of how intimidating a dog of that size must look to a child of R******'s size. However the woman carried on walking, shouting as she walked away, "He's only being friendly! What do you want? Would you rather he was biting your son?" Which completely flummoxed me. How do you respond to that? As I struggled for a response, the same dog returned, growling, and again went right up to R****** and sniffed his face again, for good measure. The woman was further out of ear-shot now and as the dog lolloped back to his owner, R****** muttered, "That dog wasn't friendly, dad," and I shouted back towards the woman, "No, R******, you're right, that dog wasn't friendly." I was trying to explain that most dogs weren't like that to R****** and, sure enough, walking towards us was a man taking his dog for a walk with the dog ON A LEAD! Dog owners - what you think is friendly, others don't.
Today didn't quite work out according to plan. After a fairly late start (Hey, it's Saturday! Whaddaya expect?!) we headed north towards Penrith. I had never been to this Rheged place and M**** had been but once, and that was a long, long time ago. I was loving the word 'WOOL', covered in various types and colours of wool, the boys dutifully posing in one of the O's. Anyway, it had shops, galleries, exhibitions and stuff. The cinema was just showing 'Ice Age 3', though, which we've all seen many, many times. Besides, we hadn't come to see a film; I just wanted a short 30 minute thing, just to get that crazy IMAX experience. But no . . . just Ice Age 3. So . . . we did a bit of shopping and then let the children play in a fairly grim children's play area. Grim in the sense that there was hardly any natural light, the air felt kind of . . . stale and the play area itself was small and really kind of designed for toddlers. Oh, and the advertised wi-fi didn't work. The inhumanity of it all. As we were leaving, R****** suddenly took a turn for the worse, looking decidedly ill, with a raised temperature and promptly fell asleep once in the car and slept all the way home. Whatever was wrong with R****** remained throughout Saturday, perhaps alleviated slightly by the medicine M**** administered. But mostly he slept . . .
Oh, I remember. We must have gone over to Leighton Hall area after lunch, just for a quick walk. After this, it was Henry's party over at Holly Farm. Yeah. That sounds about right. I was amazed at how well behaved the children were at dinner time. Hey, I ain't saying nothing but perhaps one of my son's birthday's at Holly Farm wasn't quite the same . . . his friends being a bit more . . . erm, lively.
I was gonna delete one of those pictures of the boys next to the 'contribution box' but then the one I was going to delete was the one where R******'s pushing money into it (not that you can really tell) but then I figured, "Hey! Actually, we did make a contribution and here's erm . . . some proof of that. Yeah. " So yeah, that's what I did. Plus, I love the orange / blue combo of R******'s clothing. Can I go now?
