Electricity hates me!

More precisely, electrical items hate me.

A new oven has been ordered and is on the way for tomorrow hopefully so I get to be an engineer and install it.  That is, hack out a piece of the sideboard big enough to feed a standard three pin plug through, plug into socket, screw oven into place, done.  It may have ended up costing us over twice what we were expecting but a new oven is better than a potential fire hazard.

All well and good, but now two light fittings have blown their fuses.  I’m starting to feel like an outcast for Heroes who’s power to blow a 13 amp fuse without doing anything wasn’t quite enough to be kept off the cutting room floor.

Pressure is on this week at work as I now have to have a fully working version of the departments new internal website by Friday.  That includes gaping holes of information that the team are used to with the old system, never mind not even getting near implementing the new stuff that needs to go in.

What the boss wants, the boss gets, but it’s going to feel like a bit of a half-arsed effort. Frankly I feel quite embarresed to release it to the team in its current state, but on the up side I’ll get some unwitting bug testing done when it goes live.

Speaking of which, I have a ton of links to check.

TTFN

Beer and ovens

Or should that be lack of beer, and knackered oven.

In the past week I have actually managed to keep to my temporary ‘no beer’ rule, bar one pint of Old Speckled Hen with a meal at our local pub when I was ‘allowed’ it. :p  Good god that tasted good…

I’m even managing avoiding the temptation of warm beer from the box of Stella in our garage.  The saving grace is our old sofa and armchair, along with an amalgamation of junk, blocking a swift scavenging run to said box.

Besides sounding like an alcoholic, it actually isn’t that hard to go without the old tipple.  I do miss it of an evening with a film, good food, or on Live, but it’s hardly a life or death thing.  Plus I do feel better knowing that should Claire’s labour start in waking hours I’ll at least be completely sober to take up ambulance duties to the hospital.

At least, that’s what I keep telling myself when the Stella calls!

Weekend was good.  Watching Leeds Rhinos win the Super League Final and England just about brush off the French was a superb Saturday night.

However, yesterday (Sunday) our oven decided to be a bastard and die on us.  So Claire calls out an engineer to get an idea of how much this is going to cost us.  It wasn’t heating up, so I thought a new element would cure it.  Ooooh no!

Turns out, the bottom of the oven had somehow dropped, knocking some electrical connections, causing a spark and shorting the circuit.  The words ‘hazard’ and ‘fire’ were mentioned in some order and as such we now have a gaping hole were the cooker once sat after the guy removed it for us.  If you call un-doing four screws and unplugging a standard three pin plug removal! New cooker here we come, just when we really can’t afford it.

But isn’t that always the sodding way!?

RIP my Twitter account

After not using Twitter for the last three or four months, I’ve finally taken the time to just delete it all together.  It just has no real relevance to me personally anymore.

Sure, it’s a quick, convenient way to blog about what I’m doing, when I’m doing it (oo-er), but the reality is I can’t be arsed to write a sentence about what I’m doing, when I’m doing it; because I’m bloody well doing it!  If I want to blog about something, I’ll write it here with more explanation, or drop it on the Consoles & Conkers forum, or email someone, or call them, grab them over Live etc. etc.

Did that make sense?

On another unrelated note, I’ve just returned to work today after a week off.  A week that was probably the last amount of leisure time that my wife and I would spend together as a couple, what with Junoir being due on 2nd November.

The next holiday from work will be Paternity leave (of which I have three weeks), and that’s hardly going to be a holiday.  More a journey of abject discovery as the two of us try to get our heads around the presence of this small third person in the house.  It’s all exciting and daunting in equal measure!

Can’t say I’m ready, but then I doubt I would be even with years of getting ready for the new arrival.  As Phil said to me not long ago, it’s all about on the job training that never stops.

Also, a quick congrats to Paul, Gem and the kids for their house move last week. It’s been a long time coming and I’m really glad that you guys have got somewhere more suitable for you all!  So that house warming……

Aren’t last days at work before holiday great!

I know, shocking, two posts in two days! I’m as amazed as you are!

Right now, I am in official ‘killing time’ mode till 5pm this evening.  Frankly this week holiday couldn’t come at a better time.

See, next week is a little thing called Customer Services Week.  Personally I neither enjoy, nor am proud to work in Customer Services because it is largely a repetative and thankless task; aka mind numbing.

In the run up to Customer Services Week, we (when I say ‘we’ I mean a collective department, although I have largely avoided helping set up) have been putting together some displays to show what we do and how we do it this week.  The idea is that a few members of the team are going on a ‘tour’ of the other sites to show the department off.

Not so bad you may think, and in principal it’s a good idea.  However, when that preparation happens during a time that you are already in arrears with the workload by a good few days, that almost half the team will not be available next week to do that workload due to said CS Week, it becomes a bloody awful idea.

Quite how it takes three people three days to set up two sodding display boards with cut outs and laminates I’ll never know!

Anyway, I don’t care for next week.  Or longer term.  Put it this way, the job paper is being purchased weekly.

A week in the…….cold?

Tomorrow, Friday 27th, I’ll be finishing work for a weeks holiday.  More importantly, my wife finished work tomorrow to begin maternity leave!

Cue me realising that we really are knocking into ‘it can come at any time’ mode.  Next week will eb really nice though as we’re planning to do not a lot, and loads of stuff at the same time as it is theoretically our last week as a couple.

It got me thinking about all those things that will become difficult, or neigh on impossible, to do post-birth.  Popping out for a bit of shopping, going to the see a film, sleeping, being able to sit and watch 5 or 6 episodes of the latest TV show that we recorded back to back.  I could go on and on, but you’re probably bored already.

However, the weirdest of all is the fact that I’ll soon be known as ‘Dad’.  As much as I’m excited and looking forward to our little one coming into the world, that’s one scary word!  Just sit and think for a minute what the conotations for that word are, whether you have kids or not, and I don’t mean the dictionary’s definition. Think about all those things your Dad did, or maybe didn’t do, what you wanted from him, what you needed, what you got.

It’s made me realise just what I’m about to step in to.  Best of all though, I’m not alone in this brave new world, as I have my beautiful wife there with me all the way, and vice versa. Not to mention all our collective family and friends who I’m sure will all be happy to offer a nugget of golden help along the way.

I am finding myself stuck in a bit of happy nieveness (is that even a word!?) about parenting at that moment.  What I don’t know I’ll learn, quickly. What I do know……..thing is I don’t know what I do know, because I haven’t had a way to find out if I do know anything.

Wait, now I’m confused. Anyway, point is, ermmm.  You get what I mean, right?! I need a beer!

Shit, can’t do that, as I’ve been banned by Claire for when I’m needed to make the Hospital drive.  Well she didn’t say ‘you’re not drinking damn it!’, but it was all in the phrasing, not the wording, if you know what I mean.