I’m sitting at Clarendon College bus stop right now. I’m updating using my laptop, not my mobile phone. There’s an unsecured wireless connection around here somewhere that’s actually quite reliable. 😀

It’s a weird feeling being connected on a proper computer in the middle of nowhere!

Oh well, the joys of missing your bus…

I’ve really enjoyed being off work for the last few days. 🙂 It’s been very nice indeed.

I got some bad news the other day though. Adam’s got a new job. It’s obviously good news at the same time, but it does mean I’m going to be pretty much alone at work. And everyone will stop playing football after work on a Friday, and we’ll hire some other old guy to work in Adam’s place and it’ll suck. :\

Oh well, mustn’t grumble. Adam gets a 5k raise of the situation, so that’s a lot of weight off his shoulders. 🙂

I watched Inside Man and Raising Arizona the other night. I thought Inside Man was pretty cool. Some weird stuff going on in it though. Like the weird rolling shot after the “execution” where it looks like the guy’s on wheels rather than walking. Also the music that gets played whenever him and his girlfriend are together. Really raunchy sounding music from a 1920s detective story. He even wears the detective’s hat… Weird, but good.

Raising Arizona went from strange, to bizarre, to fricking mental. What the hell was going on in that film? I get some bits of the story, but other bits confuse me still. A bounty hunter who looks like something out of Mad Max? They both have the same tattoo? What the hell?

Also, anyone else ever thought about how there’s a motorbike in this that leaves fiery tracks behind it, starring Nicholas Cage, and now he’s in Ghostrider… Yeah, coincidental huh?

I went out in Nottingham with Rebecca, JonP, Alex, Emma, and Rachel yesterday. We started out in Revolution here we listened to 2 45 minute-long songs. JonP wrote his newest best-seller: “Repetitive Music” and then we left.

JonP, Alex, Rebecca, and I went to The Pit and Pendulum and endured some crap music before selections could be made at the jukebox. Then we sat and watched The Matrix 3 action sequences while listening to metal. It was brilliant. Up until someone paid £1.50 to skip Relight My Fire to the top of the queue and totally ruined a whole section of the film. 🙁 The night ended with a live version of Walk by Pantera which meant I had it stuck in my head the whole way home and spent a considerable amount of time shouting “NOOO WAY PUNK!” Then I decided a high-pitched version was in order. JonP decided the Charlotte Church version was what I was singing. That’d be interesting.

When JonP and Alex went to the bus stop Rebecca and I carried on up the road. Rebecca decided she was starving, so we waited to get some chips for £1.20 for a small portion. Rebecca ate a grand total somewhere in the region of 5 of them, then left them. Wonderful.

Today is a bank holiday so everyone seems to be just sitting down and enjoying doing nothing. I know I am! 😀

Rebecca used the can opener on a can last night, but it stayed attached in a couple of places so she called me over to help her with it. I went over and realised I wouldn’t be able to get to it with my fingers so I picked up the can opener. It has a thin part that I could fit between the lid and the can.

Now, this is where I started to think that I was going to cut myself. It’s like Final Destination where you see a close-up of someone putting a knife on the edge of a counter.

Instead of stopping I carried on so we could eat something with our chicken kievs and potato wedges. 🙂

About 3 seconds into it the lid finally gave way and my hand moved quickly and I knew I’d cut myself straight away. Idiot!

You’d think that after my adventure fitting the sound card that I would have learned something, but evidently not. :\

I got an idea for a comic because of a conversation with Rebecca last night. The idea occurred to me in the shower, as all good ideas do. So I drew it when I got back using my mouse tablet thing. It’s been a long time since I used it, but I like it better than drawing all the shapes with polygon tools and copying and pasting everything.

It’s very rough and could do with being a frame longer, but I can’t be arsed, so deal.

Edit
I decided I’d put in the extra effort and fixed it.

The other two versions are still available for posterity. I thought the second one was funny in a stupid way, but Rebecca overruled me. :'(

I’ve been slacking with my blog posts recently… Not sure why, but I just haven’t felt like writing much of anything. :\

I’m off work this week. I had to use most of the rest of my holidays before September, so I’m off until (and including) next Wednesday! 😀 Unfortunately I’m already quite bored of sitting on the bed using my laptop. I think I’ll have to venture out of the house tomorrow or something. I get paid at midnight, so I can go buy a better bag for my laptop, some new cutlery for the house… An ironing board. Who knows what else. I’ll be broke by Friday!

I’m looking forward to my teacher training beginning on September 11th. It’ll be cool to finally be on my way to something. I’ve probably got a bunch of teaching hours sorted as an assistant to some of the tutors I know fairly well at college. I’m going to try to do as much as I can. Anything to further my chances of passing well. 🙂

Rebecca and I are both still looking forward to going to Paris a lot. We get to buy the tickets tomorrow and then it’s set in stone. We’ll just have to save a shitload of money to spend there! Shouldn’t be overly difficult. We’re both closely monitoring our finances now and we should be sorted pretty soon. It’s good knowing that.

Now I’m off to find something worthy of my abundance of time!

I’m writing this from my bed at home on my new Sony Vaio! 😀 It arrived after the majority of a day spent pacing around the office, complaining, and generally annoying the people I work with.

I must thank Paul for giving me a lift to my mum’s at lunch time to make sure everything was in order, and Adam for taking me down there again when the thing had actually turned up!

I’m working on getting all my software installed and such. It’s quite a job. You don’t realise just how many little programs it’s useful to have when you first think about it. I’m already finding about a billion that need downloading.

So, the laptop… It’s absolutely brilliant. I’m actually quite liking Windows Vista Home Premium at the moment. It’s very nice when plugged into the TV aerial. I can use my awesome remote to control windows Media Centre and everything works much as expected. The 17inch widescreen display does a pretty good job of replacing my 20inch 4:3 TV.

I’m copying all of my iTunes tracks onto my new 500GB external hard drive at the moment. I’m going to end up having all of my songs in two places all the time though. I can’t leve the home computer music-free when I’m out with my laptop!

I guess that means I’ll need some software to sync them up so that I have the same songs on both. I hate inconsistencies. I’d always be looking for that song I swore I got just the other day, only to find it was on the other computer. 🙂

It was my mum’s 50th birthday yesterday. Rebecca and I bought her a thing to keep candles in outdoors. It’s in the shape of a quaint Japanese building. We also bought a candle to put in it. She likes them very much, which is great.

I got a lift down to the house yesterday and knocked on the door for 5 minutes. I got a message saying my mum was at Carly’s house but she wouldn’t be long. 30 minutes later they arrived and let me in. I went up to meet Rebecca at the bus stop a few minutes later, then we hung around in the house waiting for Carly and Rob to come over and take us to The Naaz for an Indian meal.

A surprise was awaiting my mum though. Carly got a whole bunch of friends and family to be there and everyone sang happy birthday to her as she walked through the door. It was really nice to see her so happy for a change. 🙂

We all sat down and had a meal a little while later. Everyone was introduced to Rebecca, and there was a lot of talking among people. Anna and David (my cousin and her boyfriend) are moving to Leeds at the end of the month, so it’s good that I’ve seen them a couple of times recently before they disappear and (hopefully) I disappear too.

Rebecca and I went back to my mum’s house to stay the night because there were no more buses at that time.

I got up this morning expecting my laptop to be delivered. I called the laptop company to see whether it was dispatched today or not and they said no. 😐 Apparently they’re waiting for some “code” to be set on the account before it’s dispatched, even though they are perfectly aware that I’ve been accepted for the finance. It sounds to me like they’re just delaying pointlessly because they know how much I _really_ _*really*_ want it! :'(

Tomorrow, perhaps…

I bought a “Sony Vaio VGN-AR41M”:http://vaio.sony.co.uk/view/ShowProduct.action?product=VGN-AR41M today.

It’s got a 1.8GHz Dual Core Intel processor, 2GB of DDR2 RAM, a 200GB hard drive, a 17 inch widescreen display, CD/DVD writer, Bluetooth, a built-in camera, etc. etc. 😀 Oh, and I bought a 500GB external hard drive for it too.

It should be delivered either tomorrow if they don’t wait for finance, or early next week if they do. I can’t fricking _wait_!

I had a shower a little earlier, with a twist.
In this shower I had a beer, with a twist.
It had lemon or lime in it or something.

Rebecca took pictures. 😀

Rebecca and I went to a barbecue at Dave’s house on Friday. The first one of the summer and hopefully not the last. It’s amazing that the weather’s taken this long to be semi-decent. Oh well. Summer’s here, at last. Enjoy it.

Craig, Glenn, and Shaun were there and it was a really good evening. Craig gave us a lift back home afterwards too which was really helpful and definitely better than a Pronto bus.

Now onto the big news!

Rebecca and I are getting married.

Just kidding. She’s pregnant.

Just kidding. We’re going to Paris for Christmas and New Year. 😀

I’ve made an 18 night reservation at the “Hotel Monte Carlo”:http://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Review-g187147-d456558-Reviews-Hotel_Monte_Carlo-Paris_Ile_de_France.html which has some absolutely great reviews. All we have to do now is book my time off work, get Rebecca’s passport sorted out, book the flights, and save some money to spend on stuff over there! 😀 It’s going to be absolutely _*awesome*_, I’m sure.