Well, here it is. The first post of the new year. OK, admittedly I failed at writing “the last post of 2007″. That’s because, during my time of setting a deadline, and actually meeting it, I became desperately unwell with a case of dreaded manflu. I still have it, which is why I shall cut this short.

I did send a text message, on the stroke of midnight, to everyone in my phone book. This was a bad decision, as everyone else in this timezone attempted the same thing. This means, I’m left with a confusing pocket full of garbled receipts, I currently don’t even know if Coatesy is alive anymore… his came back with “Unrecognised Network”…

This means that if yoiu think I missed you out of my festive greetings, I probably didn’t. It’s just very busy.

Technorati Tags: 2008, failed, mobile, new year, sms, update

Just letting you know I haven’t fallen through a crack in the floor or something like that. I just haven’t blogged recently. I shall attempt to correct this in the next 24 hours. Honestly.

As I type this, it’s just coming up to 6:38AM in the morning I am up so early due to the fact that the second time in a few weeks, the neighbour to my right has had some type of party going on until at least 5 AM in the morning.

I woke up on the couch at about 4AM, with the sound of Madonna blasting out through my laptop speakers. Of course, I can’t blame my neighbour for that. It was at that point I decided to go to bed, as it was freezing cold. Off I crawled, up the dancers, and into my nice, warm bed. Aaaaaaaand then listened to the sodding noise coming from next door. Gah. I hoped it would quieten down, but in my own mind, knew it wouldn’t. And it didn’t. I laid there listening to someone cackling, and the voices of many people scattered around the house.

Sadly, of course, by the time I’d made my decision to return to the couch cluching my duvet and pillow, my mind was already swirling, too full of sadistic and violent thoughts to even contemplate getting to sleep. I currently have the fire on full blast in the vain hope that the intense heat and/or fumes will allow me to have at least another couple of hours. What this means is that I’ve got to do ALL of my Christmas shopping on three hours’ sleep. Oh, the thrill of it all.

On the subject of Christmas, I attended the lodge Christmas dinner last night. The first one I’ve been to for a couple of years, mainly due to the way my shift patterns worked out. This year, however, I managed to at least get to one. Needless to say, I took my camera.

It was located at the Hardwicke Hall, on the Blackhall to Heselden road. A place I’d seen, but never actually visited. It had received high recommendations from Chris’s dad, who used to receive bacon sandwiches from the owner.

We got picked up at around 6:30 PM on the coast road. Chris was going to meet us there, as his dad was giving him a lift up.

We entered a very cosy and welcoming reception area, complete with huge Christmas tree and roaring fire…

You’ll have to believe me when I say there was a roaring fire, as it was behind me when I took that photo. We were shown to the carvery, and our tables. Chris wasn’t “here” at this point, so we all chose seats, and there were a lot to choose from Provisionally, the lodge had booked 35 seats, but this number came down as the weeks passed by, and people dropped out for whatever reason, so the final total was probably closer to 15. However, it was still set out for 35 of us. Oh dear.

We sat, and examined the stuff on the tables. Of course, there was the obligatory Xmas cracker, bread roll, etc. along with “Rocket Balloons”. Bit of a strange thing to give, considering that the average age of the group was probably 50. The idea of them is that you inflate them (easier said than done), stick a plastic tube in the end and then let them go. Hilarity ensues, allegedly. Of course, it was much more fun to tie the ends up, and use them as weapons and/or phallic references.

Daddykins rang Chris to see if he was on his way. It turned out he was actually sat in the other room, and didn’t know we had turned up.

It was then to the bar, which served a fine selection of lagers, though at an expensive £2.80.

Clearly, I’m not waiting at the bar. In fact, I’m sat down taking what would be the first of many photographs of the evening.

Onto the meal, which started off with the starter, oddly enough. You could have a choice of what you wanted. I chose what was supposed to be vegetable soup, but instead was “Cream Of” something. I’m assuming this was mushroom, but I can’t be too sure, as I’d never had it before. It was piping hot, however, and enjoyable. The bread roll topped it off, however.

Up next was the main meal, which for me was the absolute highlight of the night. You could go and serve yourself, so I piled my plate, and dolloped on enough gravy to submerge a small town. Everything was cooked to perfection, even down to the roast beef, which was the best I’d had in years. Decades, maybe.

I skipped the sweet, as I was too full from the main meal. Now, it’s not very often I’ll type that in my life, I can tell you. The rest of the night was then handed over to the disco DJ for a few hours of christmas songs and more Tina Turner than it is safe to listen to in such a small space of time. Well, OK, he only played one Tina Turner song, which got one of the other parties into a frenzy of Tina Turner impressions, using salt pots as microphones. Why didn’t they just use one of the microphones hanging from the ceiling? Take a look at that picture above, with everyone waiting at the bar. Notice the microphone? There were two of them, the other one isn’t pictured.

I simply can’t think of any logical reason why they would be there, it’s still puzzling me now.

Unfortunately, the end of the night came all to soon, and we all headed home after what was a great night.

Technorati Tags: blackhall, christmas, Food, hardwicke hall, neighbours, night out, noise, roast beef, sleep (lack of), Socialising, xmas party

You may have noticed I was playing around with a Wordpress plugin this morning. This, for the uninitiated, is a little program designed for use with Wordpress, that adds that extra little touch. For instance, I use Akismet to filter out the ever-growing amount of spam on this site, I use Statpress to get realtime statistics on what visitors are doing on the site.

I tried one out which was supposed to allow me to integrate my flickr sets into this site, but I must have done something incorrectly, and it seems have all gone a bit Pete Tong. Oops. Not that it really matters, as I’ve not put anything interesting on there for a while.

Yes, sadly, my… ahem… “photography” is taking a back seat at the minute, due to the fact the weather has been atrocious recently, and the fact that there’s nothing to actually take photos of. Even I get sick of searching through endless images of streetlights. Well, OK, that’s a lie, but I’m sure you all get bored.

Well, it’s exactly two weeks until Xmas day. Does anyone else think that it’s been the most un-Christmassy year on record? Pfft, even at work (though I hate to mention it), normally by the start of December, there’s decorations hanging off every ceiling tile. This, of course, did have its advantages, especially when the wireless internet was kicking out an extremely weak signal…

However, this year, there are no decorations. The works tree has been put up. The fairy lighs have been plugged in, and they don’t work. The radio seems to be playing very few Christmas songs. In fact, the only place I’ve actually heard a Christmas song being played is Asda. There have been absolutely no discussion about a Christmas party, or in fact Christmas in general. I was discussing just the same thing with the taxi driver who picked me up from hell work yesterday morning. It just isn’t Christmas anymore.

I think I say it every year, and then I feel bad at myself for being a bah-humbug.

Technorati Tags: broken, christmas, non-smas, plugin, site, xmas

Woohoo! That’s “it” almost until Decmber 25th 2007, folks! Maybe next year, I’ll be in a little more of a Christmas spirit.

It meant nothing to me this year. In fact, we didn’t even put the decorations up properly this year. This was mainly due to the fact that when we opened the box with them in, they were all ruined.

The tree was OK, so we put that up. On the 22nd December.

We switched it on.

Once.

And then we never bothered again after that.

When you come to my age, with no immediate family other than my dad, it’s all a bit pointless making an effort over it. Especially when I appear to be on permanent nights. In fact, even Xmas Day itself was spent mostly in bed. And I’m not kidding.

I awoke at 3AM on Xmas day, bursting for a crap. You didn’t need to know that, but I thought I’d share anyway. I’d only had about 3 hours sleep, but I didn’t feel like going back to bed, so I stayed up and carried out some much needed hard drive clearance. I also upgraded to the new version of Audacity during that time. Again, that’s not really important, but I’m just trying to point out just how boring it was.

Daddykins got up at 11am, and we went down and opened our prezzies. I already knew what I was getting from my him, because Santa didn’t deliver this one, a nice, big bookcase, purchased from Staples because that was the only place we could actually get a decent sized one. It’s been sat in its box at the bottom of the stairs since Thursday or Friday.

Next door to Staples in the “Discount Fiurniture Store”, a term that should be used loosely. We went in there before Staples, just to see how cheap they were. After all, it was a discount store. There was a bookcase in the middle of ths store which looked ideal.

“How much for this one?” we enquired. It didn’t look anything special, and it was about the right size.

“That one’s £440″.

Two simultaneous jaw-drops later, we were heading out of the door faster than what the doors could physically open. And I’m not kidding. For whatever reason, it took 30 seconds for the doors to open all of the way.

So, into Staples we went. I immediately clapped eyes on the biggest bookcase they had in the place. It was still expensive, but 4 times less expensive than what it was in the… ahem… “Discount” furniture store. We paid half each. Now the only struggle was getting it into the bloody car. That was fun. The box is huge. I didn’t realise until that very moment that the back seats on our car can actually fold down.

Anyway, enough about the buildup. I’m sure you’ll all want to know just what happened on Xmas day. I bet you’re wetting yourselves with anticipation.

I’ll tell you what I did, oh yessiree. I slept for most of the day. As I mentioned before, I got up at 3 AM, and stayed up until about 1ish. I thought, that seeing I’d only had 3 hours, sleep, I’d have a quick power-nap to get me through the rest of the day. I’d only planned to go to bed for an hour.

At 11PM, I woke up. The entire Xmas day was flushed down the proverbial toilet. Bloody sleep pattern.

Sadly, I was in work Boxing day. Needless to day that Boxing day, without doubt, is the busiest night of the year. In fact the whole 3 weeks after Xmas are hell. This year, for reasons I won’t go into, is planning to be more hell than usual. Sigh.

Anyway, I’ve been trying my best to stave off the effects of professional depression by scanning lots and lots of photos. I don’t know whether Chad still reads, as he’s not commented for a good few months now, but it makes me wonder if he remembers this:-

The rest of the set is located here. There are more images up, but I’ve restricted those to family members who have a flickr account, which is only me at the minute. If you have a flickr account, let me know and I’ll add you to my friends.

I’m really getting into the whole photo thing. It’s something I’m really starting to enjoy. The price of digital cameras and the supporting media to store the images on, is getting ridiculously cheap these days. I’m never going to be a professional at it. I wouldn’t even know where to start. I can press a button, that’s about it.

Anyway, this will probably be my last post of 2006. I’m planning to tidy quite a bit today.

Technorati Tags: chad, flickr, photo, Reminiscing