Category: Journal

We’ve experienced some unusual weather of late – everything from mild sunny days to bitter cold with sleet, and even a very sudden hail shower at the weekend that sounded like marbles raining down on the house.

A week ago I took this picture of a tree that overhangs our back garden, which, for reasons best known to the tree, has flowers on it. Now I’m not much of a gardner – I can count the number of times I’ve been in that back garden on both hands, but it seems weird to me that a tree would have flowers on it in December.

Unless it’s some new breed of tree – some hard as fucking nails tree that’s saying “Is this all you’ve got?” to the climate of the time. Sadly the response was a very sudden dip in temperature ” meaning that while the heating is off the house is as cold as a witches nipple.

Check out the large, uncropped version of the tree picture to see a spiders web that I didn’t even spot at the time, but our digital camera had no problem picking up.

Fliss took one for the team over the last couple of evenings and let me watch my recently purchased box-set of Spider-Man 1 & 2 on consecutive nights. The second one still ranks as the best action movie I’ve seen in recent years, and was just as enjoyable on the small screen.

Maybe I’m imagining things, but it looked like the climactic scenes of Doc Ock sinking to his doom had been cleaned up a little for the DVD, as I thought the effect looked really poor when I saw it at the cinema. The effects in the second movie are substantially better than the first in any case – Spidey at least appears to have some weight to him in the swinging scenes.

I cant wait for the third movie now, but it’s still the best part of two and a half years away. Hopefully, come Summer 2007, I’ll be able to convince Fliss to come along with me.

Last week we had a bit of field trip from work, where a whole load of us got to go karting at the nearby Aintree Racing Drivers? school. The weather was foul, though, with lashing rain meaning conditions were pretty challenging on track. For those out in the worst of it, I think it was more like jetski racing than karting.

The course was a good one, even with the standing water, as the corners flowed together nicely, and I?d love to go back there on a dry day to see what kind of times are possible. I managed to lap into the mid 1:08?s during my long stint in the two hour endurace race we did, but I was pipped for fastest lap by about half a second. I reckon I could have bettered my fastest if I?d just gone balls out, but I was mindful of the good work my team had put in before me and throwing away the first place I was in would have sent the fuck-wit-o-meter off of the scale! ;o)

By the end of the event I was aching, my forearms were pumped to the point of numbness, plus I was drenched and cold. But I loved every single lap of it, and was stoked for my team that we managed to win it with some great driving by all, and three excellent changeover pit stops.

That night I flinched my way through lap after lap in my sleep, and the next day I was still on a high despite the aches and pains. I?d forgotten just how much I love karting. I used to do a ton of it, back when Ade and I shared an office, as we?d go every Friday lunch time for a half hour blast at Scotkart in Clydebank, and I?d end up going on weekends, too, with my old friend Richard and his son Jason.