Colindale, London, England // 8.48 pm // Mostly sunny 18ºc / 63ºf
Saturday, 30 May 2009
Thursday, 28 May 2009
Video post: Doing something jazzy with peas
Colindale, London, England // 11.53 am // Mostly cloudy 18ºc / 64ºf
Tuesday, 26 May 2009
Video blog: Dazed
Colindale, London, England // 4.51 pm // Light rain 15ºc / 59ºf
Quick update before I head off to the radio station for tonight's show. Been feeling really quite strange for the last couple of days, yesterday particularly. The whole morning at work went by in a blurred daze. God only knows how I managed to do television. As it happens, I've had no complaints so I'm sure it was fine, not that I remember much of it! Today I've been feeling a bit strange too. I'm not sure if I'm finally losing my mind, or if I'm just a bit tired and it is a phase that'll pass.
What is really odd is that I was so completely done in by the time I went to bed last night, but I found it really hard to get to sleep. It didn't help that it was really warm in the flat, but it was still annoying.
Elle finally got back last night around 9pm and we watched a bit of TV before I went to bed.
And no surprises in the news that Gordon Strachan left Celtic yesterday. I'm not one of those people who hated him from the start - I'm actually quite sad to see him go, but as time got on it became more and more apparent that he wasn't really right for the job anymore. Not least judging but some of his strange decisions. (Riordan? Continually playing Hessilink?). No idea who will take over, although Owen Coyle and David Moyes seem to be favourites right now. Personally, I quite fancy seeing what John Collins can do. We'll see what happens in due course.
Quick update before I head off to the radio station for tonight's show. Been feeling really quite strange for the last couple of days, yesterday particularly. The whole morning at work went by in a blurred daze. God only knows how I managed to do television. As it happens, I've had no complaints so I'm sure it was fine, not that I remember much of it! Today I've been feeling a bit strange too. I'm not sure if I'm finally losing my mind, or if I'm just a bit tired and it is a phase that'll pass.
What is really odd is that I was so completely done in by the time I went to bed last night, but I found it really hard to get to sleep. It didn't help that it was really warm in the flat, but it was still annoying.
Elle finally got back last night around 9pm and we watched a bit of TV before I went to bed.
And no surprises in the news that Gordon Strachan left Celtic yesterday. I'm not one of those people who hated him from the start - I'm actually quite sad to see him go, but as time got on it became more and more apparent that he wasn't really right for the job anymore. Not least judging but some of his strange decisions. (Riordan? Continually playing Hessilink?). No idea who will take over, although Owen Coyle and David Moyes seem to be favourites right now. Personally, I quite fancy seeing what John Collins can do. We'll see what happens in due course.
Sunday, 24 May 2009
Saturday, 23 May 2009
Wednesday, 20 May 2009
Soup for one
Colindale, London, England // 5.40 pm // Partly cloudy 18ºc / 64ºf
Last night was the 8th edition of Grooveline on XStream East. When I got there, it was the busiest I think I've seen it. For the first time, there was a show before me which starred one of the girls that was at the same induction as I was. Also in the computer room was Katie, who is a girl I used to work with, and the person who persuaded me to join the station. As it happens, right now she'll be on a flight back home to Australia, to where she is relocating for a job at a radio station in Sydney.
The show itself went really well, although it was the most quiet so far, as far as listener response is concerned. Still, I really enjoyed it and thought the music was excellent. And it's always a pleasure to play something from the live session Kaldera did for the show in Reading a few years back.
Elle was out last night, and didn't appear by the time I went to bed. I spent the hour or so before bed watching some more of The Good Shepherd. Anyone that knows me knows I generally don't watch films, but I do have quite a few DVDs, including some that I got from colleagues when I worked at the BBC, so I've decided to start going through them. Although I wouldn't be able to sit through a whole film from start to finish - just too much effort. But I'm quite enjoying this one, and don't have much left to watch.
Tonight I'm having a bath (I'm only mentioning it as it's something I do once a month, showers every day for the rest of the month), tomorrow I'm cooking after work, and I'm off until Monday. Elle is going to her dad's this coming weekend, so I'll be left to my own devices. Sunday is the big, massively important Celtic game. It's also the editorial weekend for Communicaton, and I've yet to make a start on it.
Last night was the 8th edition of Grooveline on XStream East. When I got there, it was the busiest I think I've seen it. For the first time, there was a show before me which starred one of the girls that was at the same induction as I was. Also in the computer room was Katie, who is a girl I used to work with, and the person who persuaded me to join the station. As it happens, right now she'll be on a flight back home to Australia, to where she is relocating for a job at a radio station in Sydney.
The show itself went really well, although it was the most quiet so far, as far as listener response is concerned. Still, I really enjoyed it and thought the music was excellent. And it's always a pleasure to play something from the live session Kaldera did for the show in Reading a few years back.
Elle was out last night, and didn't appear by the time I went to bed. I spent the hour or so before bed watching some more of The Good Shepherd. Anyone that knows me knows I generally don't watch films, but I do have quite a few DVDs, including some that I got from colleagues when I worked at the BBC, so I've decided to start going through them. Although I wouldn't be able to sit through a whole film from start to finish - just too much effort. But I'm quite enjoying this one, and don't have much left to watch.
Tonight I'm having a bath (I'm only mentioning it as it's something I do once a month, showers every day for the rest of the month), tomorrow I'm cooking after work, and I'm off until Monday. Elle is going to her dad's this coming weekend, so I'll be left to my own devices. Sunday is the big, massively important Celtic game. It's also the editorial weekend for Communicaton, and I've yet to make a start on it.
Tuesday, 19 May 2009
The dirty lowdown
Colindale, London, England // 5.18 pm // Partly cloudy 16ºc / 61ºf
Very quick post before I head off to the radio station to do tonight's Grooveline.
Glad to say the bluebottles have disappeared. Sadly, that probably means there's not very much left of the poor dead bird that remains in my loft. In a way though I hope the bird carcass with disuade any other birds to make their home above my kitchen. Personally, I think it's a bloody good warning. The message doesn't seem to have got to the family of birds above the living room, at the front of the flat though. They are still pretty happy. For now.
Had an extremely lazy weekend, which was fantastic. It didn't dawn on me until I was on my way to work at 4.30am on Monday morning that I actually didn't leave the flat once between Friday afternoon and Monday morning.
On Saturday night Elle and I invited our friends Stu and Jenn round for a Eurovision party, which involved several drinking games, which included taking drinks when someone fell to their knees, did an "airgrab", winked at the camera, or did a dodgy faux-English language rap. We also did a sweepstake for the scoring round, and took drinks any time our country got points, culminating in the downing of drinks any time our country got 12 points.
In the end, the UK did amazingly well considering our performance in the last few years. I was most impressed by the Azerbaijan entry though. The song was pretty good, they scored fantasticly and the female singer was absolutely stunning. I still need to Google her. And it's ok, Elle knows. And agrees with me.
On Sunday, Celtic virtually threw away their chance to win the Scottish League this season. Now it's all up to Rangers, they have control. This Sunday, it really can go either way.
Nothing much else to report. Some news from back home... one of the guys who I kinda grew up with - he grew up around the same street as me, and although we were far from friends, we shared some friends and did hang out together sometimes - was found dead in his prison cell at the weekend. He had been jailed for attempted murder. Although he obviously made some bad choices in life, he seemed to be a nice guy at heart. He was a dad to three children, which is the saddest part. And my thoughts are with his family and friends.
Very quick post before I head off to the radio station to do tonight's Grooveline.
Glad to say the bluebottles have disappeared. Sadly, that probably means there's not very much left of the poor dead bird that remains in my loft. In a way though I hope the bird carcass with disuade any other birds to make their home above my kitchen. Personally, I think it's a bloody good warning. The message doesn't seem to have got to the family of birds above the living room, at the front of the flat though. They are still pretty happy. For now.
Had an extremely lazy weekend, which was fantastic. It didn't dawn on me until I was on my way to work at 4.30am on Monday morning that I actually didn't leave the flat once between Friday afternoon and Monday morning.
On Saturday night Elle and I invited our friends Stu and Jenn round for a Eurovision party, which involved several drinking games, which included taking drinks when someone fell to their knees, did an "airgrab", winked at the camera, or did a dodgy faux-English language rap. We also did a sweepstake for the scoring round, and took drinks any time our country got points, culminating in the downing of drinks any time our country got 12 points.
In the end, the UK did amazingly well considering our performance in the last few years. I was most impressed by the Azerbaijan entry though. The song was pretty good, they scored fantasticly and the female singer was absolutely stunning. I still need to Google her. And it's ok, Elle knows. And agrees with me.
On Sunday, Celtic virtually threw away their chance to win the Scottish League this season. Now it's all up to Rangers, they have control. This Sunday, it really can go either way.
Nothing much else to report. Some news from back home... one of the guys who I kinda grew up with - he grew up around the same street as me, and although we were far from friends, we shared some friends and did hang out together sometimes - was found dead in his prison cell at the weekend. He had been jailed for attempted murder. Although he obviously made some bad choices in life, he seemed to be a nice guy at heart. He was a dad to three children, which is the saddest part. And my thoughts are with his family and friends.
Friday, 15 May 2009
Lord of the flies
Colindale, London, England // 6.15 pm // Mostly cloudy 12ºc / 54ºf
Quite a bit of time has passed since the last written blog. Not a huge amount has happened in that time either. Actually, I think I recorded a video blog, but somehow it disappeared into the innards of Youtube.
Bank Holiday Weekend at the start of the month was no such thing for me, as always. One day I might work in a job that honours a normal working clock and bank holidays along with everyone else in the universe. Still, the weather was nice and we had visitors in the form of Elle's sister and her boyfriend. As we tend to do with guests, we did the tourist thing around London: Westminster, Trafalgar Square, South Bank, Canary Wharf, Covent Garden etc etc. On Sunday we went to one of Elle's friends in Ealing for a BBQ, although I had to leave after an hour thanks to a 4am start on "Bank Holiday Monday".
The next installment of the pub crawl took place after work on Monday, with one of my colleagues joining me for the first few stops. I managed to finish off the Bakerloo line quest, and start on the Central line.
Two of the main things on my mind in the last week or so have been insects and football.
On Saturday, my friend Stu came round to watch the ever-important Celtic v Rangers match, which was deeemd to have the power to decide who wins the league. Stu left around 3pm. It was a nice day outside, and I had assumed Elle had opened the kitchen window at some point and it flew in. But I asked her, and she hadn't. Strange, I thought. A few hours later, another appeared. Hmm. Coincidence, probably.
Three more appeared later in the evening, and I started to question if we had a problem.
Saturday night, Elle and I with our friends Stu and Jenn went to our local for karaoke. I was feeling particularly daring and only sang songs that I had never done before, including Mike & The Mechanics with Over My Shoulder.
On Sunday afternoon, the first bluebottle of the day appears - before then, I had completely forgot about the day before. And another. And another. And a few more. Then I started getting worried, as did Elle. At this point, I was managing to let them out of the window one by one.
Later, Elle and I went to the Barnet Council dump to drop off my old PC monitor (got a nice sexy flatscreen LCD one now) and to Asda to get ingredients for the dinner I was cooking later. Two hours later, we returned. I had thought about and worried about the bluebottle situation all the time we were out. I was right to do so; I stepped into the kitchen to find the horrific sight of 21 bluebottles all flying around the vicinity of the window. Thankfully, I was armed with a can of Raid! which I had just bought at Asda, and proceeded to wipe the bastards out with the stuff. I don't know exactly what this stuff does, but I do know that it *really* fucks them over. It's actually quite an amazing sight to see 21 large bluebottles all fall from the sky pretty much simultaneously a few seconds after spraying this stuff. 10 minutes later, when they had all buzzed their last buzz, I was able to count them. By the end of the day, I had spotted and got rid of 49 of the cretins.
Needless to say, I wasn't going to be able to deal with this for much longer, and got the landlord on the case. I also emailed my boss to warn her that I might need to take Tuesday off work (Monday was already a day off) to keep on top of the situation. Good job I did, as Tuesday was the only day the pest control guys could come out. But on Monday, encouragingly, only 6 of the things appeared. On Tuesday, 5, but the pest control guy found nothing. It's probably a good time to explain what I think the cause of the infestation was.
For the last few months, we've had two nests of birds in the loft space above our flat - one above the living room window, and one above the kitchen window. Around the same time as all this shite happened, I realised I hadn't heard the family of birds above the kitchen for a while. They had flown the nest for some reason. Presumably because one of the birds kicked the bucket. Dead bird = rotting corpse = maggots = bluebottles.
But as I said, nothing was found. However, the guy admitted he couldn't access the portion of loft space that I assumed the birds had been living in due to the construction of the roof. A good thing is we found out our loft actually had a complete floor, and we're contemplating what to do with this space.
Thankfully, the following three days - including today - bore no new bluebottles, so I can now assume that the problem has past, the corpse has rotted, and the bastards are gone. Until the next time.
And amongst all that excitement, the Scottish Premier League has also reached a really exciting phase. However, it started with Rangers beating us last weekend, which meant that they were now in control of the SPL, and their own destiny. We kept up the fight by managing a win on Tuesday, and amazingly Rangers screwed up on Wednesday by drawing against Hibs, putting Celtic back on top and back in control, albeit only 2 goals ahead. It's turning out to be one of the closest title races for years, but I have horrible memories of four seasons ago, and the last game of the season against Motherwell, and losing the league by one single goal!
So there are two more games to go. And the Rangers games are just as important as the Celtic games for me now. Rangers play tomorrow, Celtic on Sunday, then we both play at the same time next Sunday for the last game of the season, which will decide the title. I'm really hoping we can do it.
Quite a bit of time has passed since the last written blog. Not a huge amount has happened in that time either. Actually, I think I recorded a video blog, but somehow it disappeared into the innards of Youtube.
Bank Holiday Weekend at the start of the month was no such thing for me, as always. One day I might work in a job that honours a normal working clock and bank holidays along with everyone else in the universe. Still, the weather was nice and we had visitors in the form of Elle's sister and her boyfriend. As we tend to do with guests, we did the tourist thing around London: Westminster, Trafalgar Square, South Bank, Canary Wharf, Covent Garden etc etc. On Sunday we went to one of Elle's friends in Ealing for a BBQ, although I had to leave after an hour thanks to a 4am start on "Bank Holiday Monday".
The next installment of the pub crawl took place after work on Monday, with one of my colleagues joining me for the first few stops. I managed to finish off the Bakerloo line quest, and start on the Central line.
Two of the main things on my mind in the last week or so have been insects and football.
On Saturday, my friend Stu came round to watch the ever-important Celtic v Rangers match, which was deeemd to have the power to decide who wins the league. Stu left around 3pm. It was a nice day outside, and I had assumed Elle had opened the kitchen window at some point and it flew in. But I asked her, and she hadn't. Strange, I thought. A few hours later, another appeared. Hmm. Coincidence, probably.
Three more appeared later in the evening, and I started to question if we had a problem.
Saturday night, Elle and I with our friends Stu and Jenn went to our local for karaoke. I was feeling particularly daring and only sang songs that I had never done before, including Mike & The Mechanics with Over My Shoulder.
On Sunday afternoon, the first bluebottle of the day appears - before then, I had completely forgot about the day before. And another. And another. And a few more. Then I started getting worried, as did Elle. At this point, I was managing to let them out of the window one by one.
Later, Elle and I went to the Barnet Council dump to drop off my old PC monitor (got a nice sexy flatscreen LCD one now) and to Asda to get ingredients for the dinner I was cooking later. Two hours later, we returned. I had thought about and worried about the bluebottle situation all the time we were out. I was right to do so; I stepped into the kitchen to find the horrific sight of 21 bluebottles all flying around the vicinity of the window. Thankfully, I was armed with a can of Raid! which I had just bought at Asda, and proceeded to wipe the bastards out with the stuff. I don't know exactly what this stuff does, but I do know that it *really* fucks them over. It's actually quite an amazing sight to see 21 large bluebottles all fall from the sky pretty much simultaneously a few seconds after spraying this stuff. 10 minutes later, when they had all buzzed their last buzz, I was able to count them. By the end of the day, I had spotted and got rid of 49 of the cretins.
Needless to say, I wasn't going to be able to deal with this for much longer, and got the landlord on the case. I also emailed my boss to warn her that I might need to take Tuesday off work (Monday was already a day off) to keep on top of the situation. Good job I did, as Tuesday was the only day the pest control guys could come out. But on Monday, encouragingly, only 6 of the things appeared. On Tuesday, 5, but the pest control guy found nothing. It's probably a good time to explain what I think the cause of the infestation was.
For the last few months, we've had two nests of birds in the loft space above our flat - one above the living room window, and one above the kitchen window. Around the same time as all this shite happened, I realised I hadn't heard the family of birds above the kitchen for a while. They had flown the nest for some reason. Presumably because one of the birds kicked the bucket. Dead bird = rotting corpse = maggots = bluebottles.
But as I said, nothing was found. However, the guy admitted he couldn't access the portion of loft space that I assumed the birds had been living in due to the construction of the roof. A good thing is we found out our loft actually had a complete floor, and we're contemplating what to do with this space.
Thankfully, the following three days - including today - bore no new bluebottles, so I can now assume that the problem has past, the corpse has rotted, and the bastards are gone. Until the next time.
And amongst all that excitement, the Scottish Premier League has also reached a really exciting phase. However, it started with Rangers beating us last weekend, which meant that they were now in control of the SPL, and their own destiny. We kept up the fight by managing a win on Tuesday, and amazingly Rangers screwed up on Wednesday by drawing against Hibs, putting Celtic back on top and back in control, albeit only 2 goals ahead. It's turning out to be one of the closest title races for years, but I have horrible memories of four seasons ago, and the last game of the season against Motherwell, and losing the league by one single goal!
So there are two more games to go. And the Rangers games are just as important as the Celtic games for me now. Rangers play tomorrow, Celtic on Sunday, then we both play at the same time next Sunday for the last game of the season, which will decide the title. I'm really hoping we can do it.
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