Well it’s been nearly a year and finally I have got to have a go on the computer again! This is only due to the fact that the kids are at school and Seven can not move from the sofa due to a trapped nerve in her neck. What they say is true; nurses make very, very bad patients!

So how do I sum up a year in a few lines on this journal of my life? In truth I will cheat and just direct you to my wife’s journal instead. I’m sure you’ve already read her posts on the kids and zoo.

Gah! The office is trying to get hold of me. Don’t they know that I’m trying to nurse my wife back to health? Purely for selfish reasons of course, I really don’t want to have to do the weekly food shop on my own this weekend. The kids get most upset when I come back with nothing but cheese.

Well the equinox has been and gone for another half a year. Which is meant to mean that we are now moving in to the warmer part of the year, unfortunately there hasn’t been much sign of it so far. Seven is getting ready for work, so I have stolen the computer for a couple of minutes to write a much belated journal entry. So I hear you ask, what’s been happening? Well work still sucks but that’s nothing new. I wish they would make people take some sort of IQ test before buying a phone system so I don’t have to put up with their stupid inane questions. If they score bellow 90 they should be told to stick with the two tin cans and a piece of string! Sorry rant over, its been a bad day.
I’m thinking of joining a new martial arts club that I’ve found in my area. It’s a Ju-Jitsu club and this is a style that I’ve never tried before. Even though I enjoy teaching at the other club I’m starting to get fed up with saying to my students “This is the way you do the technique for a grading but if you get into trouble and have to use this for real do it this way as it is far more effective.”
I’ve managed to skive out of role-playing the last couple of weeks due to one thing or another but I get the feeling that this weekend Seven will put her foot down and demand her game, or else she will put her foot some were else. So to save the more delicate parts of my anatomy I really should use tonight to do a bit of planning. Hmm what new mental and physical tortures can I come up with for her character? Seven still flinches every time she sees a corkscrew. }:)
I watched a mildly interesting program last night about time. The gist of it was that time is not as inflexible as we believe in our every day lives and according to the latest theories in physics it is possible to create a time machine using a worm hole that has been enlarged from a subatomic level and one end of it subjected to large gravitational forces to keep it stationery in time. That means that we can not only screw up the present and the future but also the past as well! But that as always leads you in to the realms of paradox. If they have travelled back into the past and changed something, has that change already happened and if not, and the change means that the time traveller in question could not travel back in time, does it cancel its self out? Or do we just end up with parallel universes, or as Pratchett likes to call it the trouser leg of time effect?
Either way it makes my head hurt!

I wanted to be Worf!!!!! I've even got the beard!

Your results:
You are Geordi LaForge

Geordi LaForge 85% Mr. Scott 70% Worf 70% Chekov 65% Mr. Sulu 65% Jean-Luc Picard 65% Spock 62% Uhura 60% Deanna Troi 60% An Expendable Character (Redshirt) 55% Data 53% Beverly Crusher 50% Leonard McCoy (Bones) 45% James T. Kirk (Captain) 40% Will Riker 40%

You work well with others and often fix problems quickly. Your romantic relationships are often bungled.

Click here to take the "Which Star Trek character are you?" quiz...

Hi all I’m back. Sorry I haven’t been around for a while but work and training have kept me quite busy lately, that and not being able to get near to the pc. I made the great mistake of setting up the kids an account on the home pc and now between them and Seven I can’t get near the bloody thing. I did have fun though explaining to the kids that I had installed some parental control software that not only e-mailed me if they tried to look at inappropriate sites but also through the wire I had cunningly attached to the computer chair give them electric shocks. The youngest was so concerned that he might click onto the wrong site when he is using the internet he has taken to using the pc wearing his rubber boots!

The reason that I am able to do this entry is that Seven has finally relented and allowed me to get a wireless router. *cartwheels around the house, being very careful of the fish tanks* This means that I can now use my work laptop to connect to the internet from the comfort of the sofa. She finally let me go to the shop to buy it today after months of saying we can’t afford it and while we were there brought a digital camera that was twice as much as the router. Go figure! Admittedly the camera is an early birthday present but even so…..

I have actually spent most of the weekend taking my better half around most of the local fish shops as she had decided that we really didn’t have enough fish. The idea being that she would buy 5 to 10 new fish for one of her tanks. Two days and numerous fish shops later she finally made her choices and we ended up with 20 new fish. Now I must admit that fish tanks in the house are quite nice, they do give you something to look at when the telly is turned off but after walking miles around fish shops gazing into tanks and being asked “Do you think I should get the L260 plec or the L351 plec as they are both the same price?” , the only answers I could give was “Get that one then, its bigger so you are getting more value for your money.” Fish are fish for god sake! There was one shop assistant who gleefully spent quarter of an hour telling me the L number, common name and the Latin name for half the fish in his shop! It was all I could do to stop myself screaming in his face “BUT THEY’RE JUST FISH!!!”.

Were finally getting back to normal routine after the Polish invasion *waves at Krzys* . It was a nice week especially as the kids were still at school and it was a good excuses to go see ‘The Goblet of Fire’ at the cinema. The bottle of Vodka he brought with him went down very well and he was kind enough to ST for me and Seven. The dog was especially sorry to see him go.

I’ve finally started my own karate training again after an extend break over the Christmas period and bloody hell did I feel it. I spent the rest of the week walking around like a cripple to the great delight of Seven.

She has threatened to come back to the class that I teach soon, so I will have my revenge. My class are doing really well apart from a couple of kids whose parents drop them off and then disappear. They obviously don’t want to be there and are more interested in winding me and the rest of the class up than learning Karate. I’ve only been training in this style for a year and a half but I started my martial arts journey when I was nine and have trained in many styles since then. Due to my previous experience and grade in styles similar to this one they have let me teach a class This does mean though that some of the techniques that I have shown my class aren’t exactly on the club syllabus but I do make sure the class is aware which ones these are.

Sorry I haven’t posted for a while but I’ve been kind of busy with work and writing Seventh’s game, oh and healing after the incident with the crossbow.

I have been accused of being a brutal husband this evening. Seventh has decided to return to Karate, and has decided to practise on me. Our home has become like the old Pink Panther films with Kato. She is attacking me at every available opportunity.
She is slightly rusty though, and her last attempt to surprise me and stop short of my nose – needless to say ended with me having a nosebleed.
Naturally I am now on my guard. Her last effort at attacking me has resulted in her now calling me violent.
She came at me with such aggression, that I seriously feared for my health. I blocked a little harder than I intended to, while trying to protect myself.
She is now walking round the flat holding her arm, and telling me she is a battered wife and that I nearly broke it.

I really can’t win. I foresee her making me suffer for this!

I knew it was going to be bad and guess what, that’s right it was! I hadn’t been through the office door for five minutes when the phones went in to melt down. I hadn’t even had a chance for a cup of coffee!!!!!!

I spent the remainder of the day tearing around the south of England fixing problems and I’m meant to be office based! The first call of the day set the tone of things to come. A panicked phone call from an SAS training facility saying “We’ve got no phones!” to which I was soooo tempted to reply “Have terrorists stolen them?” lead to a discussion in which I finally ascertained that the phone system had no power. After getting them to check the usual, they aren’t in the middle of a power cut and the phone system was plugged in, I raced to the site. A two and a half hour drive later I was ushered into the comms room at gun point to find that yes indeed the phone system was plugged into the power socket but some one had switched it off! I pointed this out to them and told them not to waste my time again. I then switched it back on as they stood around sheepishly and then legged it. As embarrassing large blokes with even larger guns is not too conducive to continuing good health.

Anyway the day did not improve from there. Mercifully at around lunchtime I was passing fairly close to home, so I decided to pop in and say hello to the wife. I arrived home to find her in a cleaning frenzy and as I walked through the door the cross bow she was dusting fired. Only cat like reflexes kept it from being a mortal injury and after she had patched the flesh wound told me it serves me right for sneaking up on her.

She then handed me her wage cheque and asked me to go pay it into her bank. OK I thought today can’t get any worse. How wrong I was.

I drove into town parked the car and started to walk to the bank when it started to rain. Now one of my pet hates is wearing my glasses when it’s raining, so I took them off and strode confidently through the automatic door at the bank. Or at least I tried too. I bounced off the door grabbing my injured nose and though the tears streaming down my face saw an armed response officer spin round to point a very large gun at me. Apparently I had just missed an armed robbery in the bank, which is just as well if you think about it. As with my luck today the armed robber would have probably tripped over some thing and shot me!

So all in all my start to 2006 has not been the best. I think I’ll go hide under the bed now until 2007! :(

Well she’s cracked the whip again, so its back to planning more of the game. She thinks I’m being industrious sitting here typing on my laptop writing the next instalment when in actual fact I’m posting this and looking up information on the wireless router I want to get. God, she is so going to kill me if she reads this!

Oh well, it’s the last day of my holiday and I going to try and make the most of it by doing as little as possible, as I know tomorrow I am going to be horribly busy at work. Its always the same, a couple of days away and all our customers suddenly forget how to use the phone systems or find the office cleaner has unplugged it so they can plug in their hover to vacuum the server room. It does make me wonder some times about how fast technology is progressing and peoples inherent fear of the unknown about it. I’m not talking about the ‘behind the scenes’ technology that actually makes gadgets work as I must admit to having problems keeping up with it myself but most of these have a user interface which is designed to be easy to use. For example something that I have experienced too many times, when we install a new phone system for a company, the first new phone we connect is the receptionist’s phone so she or he can take messages while we get all the other phones up and running. So we plug in the phone which in many ways looks exactly like the old one and every other phone you have ever seen. Invariably it starts to ring as some one is trying to call. The receptionist then looks at this new shiny phone and with the look of purest horror, turns to me and utters the question “What do I do?” Bearing in mind, that this person has been employed for the last 20 years, for the express purpose of answering the phone. This happens almost with out fail and it is becoming increasingly difficult not to reply, “Quick run, it’s going to blow!”

I’d best get back to planning the game. I’m seriously considering toning down the horror theme after last game. 7th went from happy smiles as she was going to play again to wide eyed paleness and nightmares about cork screws by the time we had finished. Nah! Its fun watching her squirm. ]:)

Peace and quite at last! 7th is asleep, the kids are out side playing and my hangover has finally receded. After three days on call followed with a trip to my parents I let my hair down last night and drunk more than I have in the entirety of last year. As a result when I finally resurfaced this morning I was feeling decidedly worse for ware. To be quite honest I can’t remember if I made any new years resolutions, which quite neatly gets me out of trying to keep them.

Yippy we survived the mother in laws. OK to put it more precisely we survived the journey to the mother in laws. I must admit that was one of the most eventful drives I’ve experienced in a long while. We started out in high hopes in spite of the panicked phone calls from 7th mum and granddad about the conditions on the road due to the snow but as soon as the ‘S’ word was uttered 7th and the kids were adamant that they wanted to go as they wanted to build a snowman. Now I know that those of you who live in places were they measure snow in feet rather than inches will be laughing at the thought of driving through a few measly inches of snow but please try to take into account that we British are not used to it and I remember one year the train network being shut down due to I quote ‘The wrong sort of snow on the tracks’. Anyway I digress, the motor ways weren’t too bad apart from being a bit busy but as we drove in to Kent the snow really started to come down. You would think that the sight of sheets of white falling from the heavens and settling on to the roads would give most drivers pause and they would slow down due to hazardous conditions. Not a bit of it, even when we got on to the country roads they were still thundering along blissfully unaware that the slightest touch on their breaks would send them spinning into the nearest hedge. Normally I view morons driving on ice as good spectator sport but when I’m on the road too, with my wife, kids and dog it is no longer quite so amusing. After pulling over a couple of times to let kamikaze drivers who think stopping distances apply to other people past, we got to the traffic lights to the final junction before the mother in laws. Then the fun really began. Please imagine if you will a 1 in 3 gradient hill down, with snow which has been compacted into sheet ice. We spent more time going sideways down the hill than facing the right direction, much to the amusement of the kids and the turn into my mother in laws road was achieved with a rally car style turn. I then spent the whole visit wondering how we were going to get back up the hill only to find that they had gritted all the roads by the time we left.

The actual visit it’s self went well, the food was good, the kids nearly behaved and 7th got to build her snow man which with the addition of a couple of ears turned into a snow cat. :)