Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Last night's gig

Bill Wyman was his usual laid back, musically brilliant self last night when playing at Dartford with his 'Rhythm Kings'.
Included in the line up along with a couple of fantastic sax players and a superb singer, was Terry Taylor, Albert Lee and Dennis Locorriere from Dr Hook. They were obviously enjoying themselves playing close on 2 hours with a set containing blues, rock, and even some Lonnie Donnegan skiffle.
Have you ever noticed how much like Lonnie, Albert Lee looks?

Monday, January 28, 2008

Another new week

Where does the time go? I can't believe we are nearly at the end of January. It only seems like last week we were still on Christmas holiday.
Just had a good but very busy weekend as the weather was so nice. I spent a good deal of both days in the garden pruning fruit trees and shrubs. I hope I haven't gone too mad as things look a bit bare now, but I think they will grow back OK.
I also went out on my motorbike on Saturday for the first time this year. I waited for the temperature to rise a little and went for a 90 mile run. I just happened to call in at the Honda dealer that I bought the bike from nearly 3 years ago and was tempted to get a price for trade in against a new one. I am also going to the annual MCN Bike show at Excel in the Docklands on Thursday so I am beginning to feel that I am going to succumb to buying a new one for the March registration!! I wonder if I should really discuss this with Mrs DeeJay first - I know damn well I should , but .........

Just read Cynnie's new post about her new bifocals and very sexy they are too. It reminds me that I haven't updated you on my new Varifocals that I posted about last year. Well after the minor disorientation associated with the peripheral distortion and the seriously dangerous first descents of stairs when you feel as though you are about to fall, my final conclusion is that they are great. I now see well at all 3 distances without having to keep changing my glasses andI wish I had tried them before. It's also great to see people at a distance and actually recognise who they are!

Off to a Bill Wyman's Rhythm Kings gig tonight with a couple of guys from the office - hoping for a good show and further inspiration to keep me at my guitar lessons.

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Bend Zee Knees!

Woohoo I'm going skiing!!
Mrs DeeJay and I have not been skiing for 3 years since we got thoroughly spoiled by the fantastic pistes and organisation of North American slopes when we visited Lake Tahoe. When the slopes get icy in Europe it sucks and the queues for the lifts, which are virtually non existent in America, are really like small battlegrounds in the Alps!
Anyway on the spur of the moment when idly discussing the reports of really good snowfalls in the Alps last week, I said to her "why don't we go?"
So on February 23rd we are going to Passo Tonale in Italy for a week's sliding down mountains.

All I have to do now is to get some additional workouts at the gym to get my squats and lunges together so that I can get down the mountain without agony in my thighs and to learn some basic Italian. I better call on Welshcakes Limoncello for some rapid tuition.

Monday, January 21, 2008

It has been a long time

I have just noticed that I haven't posted here since 2nd January! I don't know why really as I have been avidly reading all my favourite blogs so it has not been an issue of time.
I put it down to simply being a boring old fart with nothing much to write about in my life for the past 3 weeks or so.
So, nothing changed there then, but I will ramble on for a few lines.
As I was mentioning in my January 2nd post, I started the New Year off with yet another business trip to the U.S. The planned airport strikes were cancelled and all went well with the trip. In fact it was better than expected as the usual Connecticut January weather was markedly absent and the hat, scarf, gloves etc that I took were not needed at all.

I just had a bit of a 'geek' weekend as I bought a new printer for my home PC. I have got finally fed up with the intermittent failure of my old one. It is about 10 years old so I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised but some days it took about 10 attempts to get it to boot up properly and print. So I bought myself a nice new multi function one. Isn't it amazing though in these days of "plug 'n' play" peripherals it still takes forever to load relevant drivers and set up the darn things. This wasn't helped of course by the masses of disk space that these things need to load up all the manuals and this particular installation insisted that they had to go on my already crowded C: drive even though I had plenty of space on my D: data drive, so I had to spend time cleaning up my C: drive.
Well I know that Windows has a habit of storing temporary files, but I was under the impression that it cleaned them up when you closed down. Not so! I found masses of small and large files hiding away and managed to regain about 1.5 Gb!!!!!
I must stop watching all those porn flicks they take up so much space :-)

Oh by the way did I say that I also treated myself to a nice new shiny 22" flat wide screen monitor? No?, oh well I deserved a bit of self indulgence.

I will try to keep up with more regular postings, so please stay with me as I intend to keep reading yours.

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Holiday Over

Sigh! It's back to work this morning after 12 days off (including weekends) and already it feels tough and I haven't even left the house!!
It has been a great Christmas break with loads of free time to do just nothing or more to the point just whatever I wanted to do. I have managed some significant guitar practice time and feel at last as though I might be beginning to take control over the beast rather than the other way round. Tonight's lesson, the first for 2 weeks, will probably burst that bubble :-)
I was glad to hear over the past couple of days that the threatened BAA strike for Monday has been called off. That means I can stick to my original travel plan for the U.S. and not have to use up my Sunday for travelling. I hope that the tentative agreement reached with the unions will result in the cancellation of the other day's strikes planned as one of those also coincides with a U.S. travel plan of mine. I think it is sad that the unions feel compelled to take up this as a crusade. After all their members will have their current pension rights protected and any new starters will simply have a new scheme which they can choose to accept or not as condition of new employment. This is no more than happens with thousands of other new starters in many different walks of life and it is a straightforward fact of life that final salary schemes are simply not affordable any more.