Grand Theft Retro

I apologise for my lack of updating on both diaries, but time that would normally be spent, well, doing anything has been mostly taken up by DIY tasks and playing Grand Theft Auto. Yes, my friends, GTA is now available for the XBox, in a twin pack of two exciting flavours - GTA3 and GTA Vice City. My delivery from Amazon arrived on Wednesday, two days before the game's official release date and I immediately got to grips with GTA3. Yesterday I could resist no longer and finally tried out Vice City.

This is sooooooooooooo my kind of game. The free-form gameplay of the GTA games is highly appealing for a start, but take that and put it into an 80s Miami Vice style setting that is just perfectly gauged and, well, what's not to like? Soundtrack? Fantastic. Outfits? Fantastic. Hammed-up characters? Fantastic.

This is the funniest diary entry I've read since Daisy's first "drunk" entry.

Oh, and Happy New Year to you all.

In a short and sweet review of the year, I'll skip hastily past the opportunity to address the aims I set out here and instead say that it wasn't so much a good or bad year, but a year of change that was for the most part positive. And while point 4 on the entry I wrote a year ago was a total wash-out, there have been positive moves on the other three. And I got an XBox. Anne finally got as far as doing something I was telling her to do for 4 months beforehand. Well, maybe not exactly telling her, but... she knows what I mean. For me, however, the two big events of the year were the AFT and Bro's Wedding. Each provided me with challenges that were daunting to say the least, and yet I coped with them wonderfully.

This year? Well, SiL wants me to become an Uncle before her next birthday (December), that will be interesting (obviously, it's more a case that she wants to become a mother before her next birthday, but that's by the by). Other than that, I'm gunning for more of the same as last year. And trying to finish the damn kitchen.

Which brings us nicely to what I've been doing since my last update. The wall units in the kitchen now have pelmet attached (with the exception of one lone unit which lost out because we misjudged how much pelmet we needed), with two lights concealed behind the pelmet (which required the addition of a further double socket). In addition, the floor units now have plinth around the bottom, hiding the legs of the units and the cold draught-inducing bare concrete floor. Doing the plinth required that I buy a "Precision Deep-Cut Mitre Saw", which is dead cool and only cost 16 quid.

Probably should've worn a mask more while doing all the sawing. I did yesterday when I was finishing it all off, but the previous two days I didn't. I think that the current problem I've got of a mucky chest is due in part at least to inhaling sawdust. Lovely.

And while I've been doing kitcheny DIY stuff, Alison hasn't been entirely idle either. We now have new curtains in the living room and on the landing. We bought the material a while back, and Alison made a start on them before Christmas, but now they're all done. And they are most funky. We've also been buying sample pots for the living room/stairs/landing, which is next on the list to be decorated after the kitchen is finished (or possibly before!).

Then tomorrow I have the joy of returning to work. Meh.