Ten Days Later...

It's high time I did a decent update. Got a few things to rant about, a few things to update you on, and, well, yes.

It won't surprise you to know that one of my rants is directed at my dear friends, the tabloid press. As soon as I heard that Harold Shipman had committed suicide in his prison cell I knew that the tabloids would gloat sickeningly the next day. I'm not sticking up for him by any means, it's well recorded that he was an evil man who deserved no sympathy from anyone. That being said, the headline "Ship Ship Hooray!" that The Sun carried was totally uncalled for. To me it seems that no one's death should be cause for celebration, regardless of what they have done. I may well be in the minority for thinking this, but to me it seems important. If they were evil or notorious or infamous, surely it's better to just ignore their death and forget about them. Who were we talking about again? You see, much better way of dealing with it.

As if that wasn't sticking my neck out enough, this next rant has been pending for some time and I'm sure it's really going to annoy the fuck out of some people. Tough shit.

People were up in arms about the government's plans to put a levy on top of speeding fines to go towards a fund for victims of crime. Comments like "another stealth tax" and "so, the government finally admits speeding cameras are used as a source of revenue" were bandied around quite a lot. Utter utter twats.

What most people seem to overlook is that Speeding Is A Crime. I'm sick of hearing people getting all indignant about the number of speed cameras there are around, and how cameras are just being used as an easy way to raise money. Speeding Is A Crime. If you stuck to the fucking speed limit the cameras wouldn't raise very much money, would they? Admittedly, I am no saint when it comes to this matter, but I am willing to accept the consequences if I get caught out. When you get in a car you are implicitly agreeing to abide by the laws of the road, and if you break those laws you have to be willing to accept the consequences. Just because you don't agree with the speed limit imposed on a particular stretch of road doesn't mean you have some kind of right to put your foot down. In principle it's the same as deciding that it's okay to kill a particular person because you feel they deserve it. Murder is murder, regardless of who the victim is. Likewise speeding is speeding, regardless of the speed limit or how long and straight the road is. I know I don't need to highlight the fact that murder is a crime, no one's going to argue with that. But, it would seem that I do need to highlight the fact that Speeding Is A Crime. Stop whining about it and just slow down.

I think that's all the ranting I need to do for the time being.

Alison is doing much better now. The swellings in her cheeks have more or less disappeared, and the ulcers that were causing her so much distress at the beginning of the week are also well in retreat. She's also had her hair done. It's a fair bit shorter now. Not as short as it has been in the past, but still a lot shorter than it was. She's also off to Holland tomorrow until thursday. This means I will either get really miserable, or spend each day playing GTA Vice City until I pass out on the sofa due to exhaustion. I'm also likely to spend a lot of time online chatting to all me mates.

As for what I've been up to, well. I'm back On The Bench(TM), my assignment with my old lot having ended the day after Alison had her teeth out. I had a wee bit of work to do last week for another account, but that's now more or less done, and I am once again without an assignment. On the plus side, this means I am in effect on paid leave, which strictly speaking shouldn't be anything to complain about. On the minus side, after a couple of days of leisure you start to get bored and also begin to feel a bit useless and unwanted. One potential assignment which looked quite promising has already come and gone, and when I found out that the assignment was being withdrawn it was a bit of a kick in the teeth. I wasn't losing out because of anything I'd done wrong, I was losing out because the client had decided to take the work elsewhere. There wasn't anything anyone in my company could have done, it just seemed really unfair. There is another possible assignment which I guess will sink or swim sometime during this week. There is also another, a very local one, which is currently on hold indefinitely. I'm worried about taking anything else because really this local one would be perfect. I don't want to end up taking something else further afield and end up missing out on something on my doorstep as a result. To summarise, work, as usual, is meh.

I have not been idle though, oh no, far from it. I've been doing it myself! No, I haven't been spending every waking hour masturbating, I've been making stuff in the garage. It's turning into quite the little workshop. I mentioned over Christmas that I'd put insulation and boarding up in the porch, but it seems I didn't mention what the next step was intended to be. With sheets of MDF and a fair amount of patience I'd planned to make a slot-together rack of cubbyholes for shoes to go in, to go in the now slightly warmer porch. I made this gradually during the past week, and it is currently in the process of being painted.

But that's not all, oh no. Also in the porch is a meter cupboard, where the gas and electricity meters reside. It had a crappy louvred door on it. I say crappy because a) it had no proper handle on it, and b) the bottom of it was rotting. We bought a replacement for it, identical except for the rotting part, and I fitted that last sunday while Alison was convalescing and watching Pretty Woman. Hanging a door is not an easy business, mostly because of all the chiselling and stuff that has to take place for all the door furniture to fit onto the door nicely.

It's only a smallish door, and is kinda light and easy to throw around the place without much risk of injury, but it's still a bit of a complicated process and doing it all was good practice.

"Practice?" I hear you ask, "practice for what?"

For hanging our new doors, obviously. We finally tracked down the doors we wanted for the living room (matching glazed internal and external doors) and ordered them last weekend. We were supposed to collect them yesterday but due to a bit of a mix up one of them wasn't altogether ready. Add to this the fact that we hadn't as yet chosen any door furniture for either door and when we had we established that the stuff we wanted wasn't in stock, and we were left doorless. However, to make up for the mixup they are going to deliver the doors free of charge, which is very good of them. I am both looking forward to and dreading the whole hanging doors thing. It's a challenge that would make me feel fantastic if it all went right, but I'd get really wound up if I fucked it up at all. I did fuck up the other door a little bit and then spent twice as much time undoing the fuck ups as it had taken me to fuck up in the first place. I don't want any of that with these other doors. Needno door-related hassle, etc..

Now that we're painting all the stuff from the past week (the shoe rack and the meter cupboard door) and I don't have the doors to do for the time being, I'm feeling the lack of a DIY project. I have a couple of other projects pending for later in the year when we come to decorate the living room, one being another rack on a much larger scale than the shoe rack but using the same basic principles, which is going to be used for storing all my comic boxes, and the other being a TV/DVD/Xbox/Hifi Unit to go by the window. Looking forward to both of them for the time being, until I have to work out the actual details of each of the bastards.

In this entry I mentioned two potential purchases that had tempted me. Last weekend I gave in and ordered them both. The Simple Minds DVD arrived first, and thus far has been a bit of an education. Turns out that with the exception of Waterfront I hadn't actually seen any of their videos pre-1989, which is a bit of a travesty. Some of them are quite hilariously dated, and the video for All The Things She Said has to be one of the worst pop videos I've ever seen. Alison's comment on it was that even Dr Who made it look dated, and I can appreciate where she was coming from there. We watched the video for Belfast Child just now and that song still brings me out in goosebumps. It's nearly 15 years old, LOL!

And Crash Nitro Kart has been a great laugh. We've only really had two sessions at it, working our way through each track head-to-head, but it's been fun. And now that my extra controllers have arrived visitors can expect to be cajoled into various four-player fun-fests. Given what happened when Anne and Jess visited when we ended up playing on the XBox things could get quite vicious next time they visit. Four-player Burnout 2 could certainly be interesting.

I was going to enthuse about Babylon 5 again, having just finished the Season Three DVDs and seen Z'Ha'Dum for the nth time, but I'm running out of rambly energy and will probably head bedwards very soon. Now we just have to wait two and a half months for Season Four to come out on R2. "It was the year of fire; the year of destruction; the year we took back what was ours..."