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Saturday 1st July 2006
Not sure what's going on here. The bar is from A******'s new play-pen, which materialised today (or the day before?!) I believe.
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Tuesday 4th July 2006
Finally, we're having our kitchen delivered on Wednesday (heck, we only ordered it on 30th May). The various bits arrive Wednesday and then we have to wait another fortnight before anyone can be bothered to fit it all. I guess I could do it myself, but I neither have the time nor the inclination and we've already paid to have some professionals do it properly, so yeah . . .
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Thursday 6th July 2006
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So this week I have been looking after A****** without M****, as M**** is doing some training or something or other, over in Leeds, as luck would have it. So yeah . . . I've taken Thursday and Friday off work and A****** was cared for at the 'baby unit' (nursery?!) on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, which will be the way things are for A****** for quite some time (the nursery bit, not me being off work). Due to the proximity of all these things, I can drop A****** off on the way to work, take him home for lunch and . . . yeah, you can probably guess the last bit. I think what I'm getting at is that taking A****** to and from nursery is barely out of my way to where I would normally be going. I was a bit freaked on Sunday night, wondering how I would cope without M****, but it's all been fine (well, almost, but that wasn't my fault). I was gonna say something then, but someone kept singing, "Goodnight, Vienna," in my headphones which must have distracted me. Or maybe it was the lack of rhythm that was distracting me. It sounded like some kind of practice session. Erm . . . yeah. So today not much happened. Did loads of clothes washing, went to town to take some stuff to the dry cleaners and buy some varnish and paint for the kitchen. Erm . . . and then I went food shopping, fed/bathed A******, and here I am . . . here I am.
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Wow - I got to say the line, "I'm sorry, but I'm not prepared to disclose that information over the telephone," to someone tonight. Someone had been talking about this very thing whilst in France recently and, so . . . .well, you look up the phone directory, you get my name and my phone number and maybe you take a wild stab in the dark about a company who I have dealings with . . . And they rang me, asking if I had a spare ten minutes. Well, what the hell, fire away. The next ten minutes consisted of a load of questions related to my last communications with Company X (god, I only rang them to tell them I had moved house), asking me to rate my 'experience', "Was the service you received excellent, fairly good, neither good nor bad, fairly bad or . . . something else altogether," so I answered all these, even making it sound like I could recall whether the conversation I had with Company X all those months ago would influence my decision to recommend Company X to my friends and family (on a scale from 1 to 10). Craziness. At the end, Annabelle starting getting personal, asking about when I was born, my family, all this crazy stuff, and when I refused to disclose that information, even asked, "Well, would you be able to answer 'yes' or 'no' if I were to ask you roughly when you were born?" NO! No, I would not!! But dear old Annabelle understood, and gave me various phone numbers, the name of her manager, the company she represented, et cetera. Maybe I'll chase it all up, although I'm meant to be varnishing various things and painting some walls or ceilings or something . . . erm . . .
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Friday 7th July 2006
Stayed up perhaps a bit too late last night watching Lost, series 2. I kinda figured, "Well, I'm probably saving time in the long run, because I was going to watch it on terrestrial television anyway, but on television each episode goes on for one hour rather than 45 minutes." I think it was Justin (Anna's boyfriend) who suggested that Lost would never quite end, that all the questions would never quite be answered, and if the end of series 2 is anything to go by, this would certainly seem to be the case.
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Saturday 8th July 2006
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Various pictures from the wedding of Rob and Rosie. I arrived with Jill (another of Rob's Lancaster-based friends) at about 14:00 that day (the wedding started around 15:00) Bumped into various people from the dim and distant past, like Andy, who I think is featured in the fourth picture from the left on the top row (Jill took that one, and a few others besides). The last four pictures on the bottom row are from when we took a taxi to the hotel were Rob and Rosie were staying that night . . . miles from anywhere. I think there were about eight of us in the cab, but quite a lot of the guests were staying at this place too. It all got rather confusing.
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Sunday 9th July 2006
    
I took that last picture so I had some idea of what time it was when we got back to our hotel (me, Jill and Andy were all staying at the Lismoyne) but I'm not quite sure whether Jill and Andy are kind of thinking, "What you taking that picture for?" or "I think we know enough about you now. The night is over." It was 01:47. We had a drink or two, a cigar, talked gibberish for a bit (or maybe that was just me) and then went to our respective rooms.
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Wednesday 12th July 2006
Bleurgh
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Thursday 13th July 2006
      
Right. So I've had to write my own bit of script to generate thumbnails and the quality of the images (despite being as high as it gets) still looks a bit . . . bitty / grainy, you know? Anyway, these are various pictures either within M****'s hotel room or looking out. It was a pretty good view, you see. I especially liked the mirrored building - when people walked past you would see about five or six reflections of them (third and seventh pictures from the left).
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Monday 17th July 2006
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Today is my son's birthday, as would be obvious by the entry for this date the previous year. Blimey, eh - hasn't that year gone fast? Well, it has for me anyway. The previous two weeks I was looking after A****** whilst M**** did her training in Leeds. We went over to Leeds last Wednesday, stayed a couple of nights in M****'s hotel and then all went back together on Friday night. Friday afternoon I did visit former work colleagues at BT and then we went to Bar Home for lunch and drinks, so that was good.
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So all those pictures above were taken whilst we were at M****'s mum's place. A****** was just about getting his head around the notion of unwrapping presents, but needed a lot of help. So yeah . . . we had a barbecue to celebration A******'s first birthday, then there was some cake and some 'party rings', but still the temptation of eating gravel was too much for A******. I guess if you could eat gravel, though, there's that knowledge that's there's a lot of it about, so you ain't gonna go hungry easily.
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Those pictures to the left there didn't quite come out as we would have liked. But, hey, it was well beyond A******'s bed-time (one of the pictures is time-stamped 20:42), he had had quite an exciting day so he probably wasn't really in the mood for posing for the camera.
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Tuesday 18th July 2006
So today (in fact, at one point, yesterday) was meant to be kitchen fitting day, but this has now been moved to tomorrow. The fitter, Keith, said he can do it in one day, if we don't mind them hanging around for a while, so I guess we'll still be on track to have a finished kitchen by the end of Wednesday. Hmmmmmmm.
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Wednesday 19th July 2006
Yeah so . . . of course (hmm?!), I shut the computer down throughout most of the today, partly on account of kitchen fitters doing their kitchen fitting thing (which would involve turning on and turning off mains electricity at some point) but also because the computer . . . oh, never mind. I'm bored of this.
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Thursday 20th July 2006
I nearly wrote July 200th just then. July 200th, eh? What's all that about? So anyway . . . where are we? Ah yes. So the kitchen was fitted yesterday. It took them about . . . ooo, I don't know . . . 9 - 10 hours, I reckon, although I wasn't there throughout that period. They arrived just after 8am and were done by about 7pm. So yeah . . . we got a fully functioning (well, except for the extractor thingy) kitchen now. I popped back at lunchtime today for something . . . for lunch, probably . . . the recycling lorry went past, the driver got out, hammered at my door, or at least I thing he did . . . this was only confirmed later on, in conversation with my next door neighbour . . . but, no . . . you see, at the time, I heard this knocking sound (I was upstairs at the time) and was kind of like, "Is that someone at the door?" so I went downstairs, couldn't see anyone through the glass front door so was like, "Ah well, must have been someone else," and went back upstairs, none the wiser. They were probably knocking at the side-door, though, as people keep doing. Side door = kitchen door. Side door is made of wood and I can't see through wood. Right. So yeah . . . we unpacked loads of boxes last night, things labelled 'kitchen', primarily. The reason I suspect the recycling guys were knocking on my door was to say, "Say, that's a lot of cardboard there you got. We'll take it off yer hands this week, son, but . . . well, really, we just do empty breakfast cereal packets, the odd bit of packaging, you know? That kind of thing. You got a metre cubed of cardboard . . . well, that's something else." Probably. I don't know though. Maybe I had arranged my tins/paper/glass/whatever in the recycle bins incorrectly. Did anything else happen today? Oh, not really. Someone was going on about timesheets at work and someone else pointed out the dangerously recursive/spiralling nature of these things. You book time spent recording time spent doing actual work to a specific category ('filling in time sheet'), but then you realise that you're spending time recording the fact that you are spending time recording time spent doing actual work, so you need a category for that as well, and on it goes . . . very, very dangerous.
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Saturday 22nd July 2006
     
So the first two pictures are obviously A****** eating a nectarine on brand work-top, then we have various pictures from the house warming that night. Officially, it was meant to begin some time between 7pm and 8pm, so I was a bit confused when all these people started arriving at about half past four, or thereabouts - I think it was some arrangement M**** had made. Do I have to explain all these pictures? Naaaaaaah.
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So, in the first picture, I'm whizzing around this . . . thing . . . that is like a flexible pipe that you whizz around, and the action of the air against the top of it causes a kind of droning sound, tuned around E flat, but whose octave varies depending on speed of rotation. And then there's Archie on the garage (again), and my dad looking up at Archie. Second picture along . . . that looks like Anthony and Mark. Third picture along, that's Dougie and Christine, my next door neighbours in the property adjoining mine. And then some more pictures. Ooo look, it's Simon, all the way from Dubai.
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more pictures, more pictures . . . Justin and Anna, me, Justin and Anna, my brother, Mark?, Anthony? Weren't they characters in a Shakespear play? Or was it one person? Mark Anthony? Hello?
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Sunday 23rd July 2006
  
Of course I'm being pedantic here - this is still related to the house warming of yesterday, but we've now gone beyond midnight. First picture - these are new people - it's one of the many Dans from work (everyone's called Dan, Stuart or Chris, it seems) and his wife/girlfriend/partner, Sandra. A couple of other work people turned up, Chris and Sue, but I have no photographic evidence to back that up.
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Wednesday 26th July 2006
So I'm still alive (I assume), but currently busy trying to get my next university assignment done. Due Friday.
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Thursday 27th July 2006
 
This was the day of A******'s first hair cut. M**** used my clippers. I think I was at Lancaster University at the time.
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Friday 28th July 2006
Well, this is a day for firsts - A****** has had a hair-cut (yeah, okay, so it was done yesterday, whatever), and I've had a filling, so that was weird. My mouth still feels kinda strange, but at least I don't need to worry about some horrible tooth crumbling incident occuring in years to come.
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Saturday 29th July 2006
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Just to explain the pictures above . . . it was a day of celebrations - the rough mid-point between the 60th birthday of my mother and father. Dad's friend, David, was driving this fantastic red Routemaster. The rain stayed at bay (?) until we were all safely in the bus on the journey back. Our destination was the Fat Lamb at Kirkby Stephen (or near enough), where we had lunch, and a surprise birthday cake for mum and dad. All six of their grandchildren were present and I even managed to capture them all in one shot. But yeah . . . it was a really nice day out. I was the official photographer that day.
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Sunday 30th July 2006
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Yeah, so . . . we went for a picnic today. Initially, it all went a bit wrong, and I drove us somewhere around here, but it was a bit too exposed, too windy, and it wasn't quite what we were after. So I turned the car around and we headed for here instead. It might have been Tarnbrook - I'm not sure. We had lunch and then went for a walk, across the road, up a hill. We bumped into four people during our walk - two were in a Land Rover and the other two were just out walking around like us. I think that tree had been struck by lightning. Then, on the way back, we stopped at Jubilee Tower to admire the view, doing the requisite picture of Blackpool Tower in the distance. And in one of these pictures I even managed to capture a dragon fly (dragonfly? dragon-fly?) - middle row, fourth picture from left.
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July 2006
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Not sure what's going on here. The bar is from A******'s new play-pen, which materialised today (or the day before?!) I believe.
Of course I'm being pedantic here - this is still related to the house warming of yesterday, but we've now gone beyond midnight. First picture - these are new people - it's one of the many Dans from work (everyone's called Dan, Stuart or Chris, it seems) and his wife/girlfriend/partner, Sandra. A couple of other work people turned up, Chris and Sue, but I have no photographic evidence to back that up.
This was the day of A******'s first hair cut. M**** used my clippers. I think I was at Lancaster University at the time.
Well, this is a day for firsts - A****** has had a hair-cut (yeah, okay, so it was done yesterday, whatever), and I've had a filling, so that was weird. My mouth still feels kinda strange, but at least I don't need to worry about some horrible tooth crumbling incident occuring in years to come.
