So, this post is part apology, part solution.  I do apologise to any of my loyal blog followers who may have been put off by the content of my recent posts.  I also apologise to any new followers who have seen the geekiness and expect that to be the only subject matter from now on and for all time – sorry, I’m not that much of a geek.  Herewith, therefore, is a post that is not geeky.  Or at least not intentionally.

So… erm… life.  Good.

I saw a bunny the other day.  It was cute.

Oooh, I’ve just remembered I do actually have something I can blog about after all.  So away with the random ramblings for a moment.  My wife and I went on holiday for a few days last week.  It was all a bit spontaneous, actually – we started thinking about it the week before, decided where and when we’d go, booked it, and went.  We didn’t actually get a holiday over the summer, you see, so we figured we’d squeeze in a nice short break before the weather deteriorates too much further, and before the baby arrives and changes our lives irreversibly from then on.  We booked a couple of nights in a guest house in Weymouth (a little place called Philbeach Guest House, highly recommended!) and drove down on Thursday afternoon.

The weather was beautiful all day, quite uncharacteristically sunny actually, for mid-October.  So after checking in at the guest house we wandered along the beach, stopping off half way along to buy ice creams.  Yes, ice creams on a beach in October.  We also found a nice old ship moored up at the docks, found nothing at all on at the theatre (boo, hiss), and found part of the town centre with a load of shops that had already closed for the day.  We also found a pub in the middle of town where we had dinner, just catching the last of their food serving times (not quite sure why they would stop serving at 5:30pm, just as people start looking for food…).  It was quite nice, though a bit rowdy on account of the locals (who, for some unknown reason, were undeniably Welsh) collecting money for charity, promising that one of them was going to have one of his eyebrows shaved off.  We heard the roars of laughter coming from upstairs later on, so presumably they raised enough to persuade him to go through with it, although we never actually saw it (or didn’t see it, as the case may be) for our own eyes.

On Friday it was overcast pretty much all day, and rained at about lunchtime, but we had expected that (thanks to an accurate weather forecast) and were prepared for it.  We went to the Sealife Centre (taking advantage of a 2-for-1 offer the guest house landlady had given us), where we found lots of fishes, sharks, rays, more fishes, a couple of turtles, four sealions and a couple of otters.  I took a fair few photos and quite a bit of video too (on our new camcorder), so I guess I ought to upload those at some point.  We spent part of the afternoon in town, doing a little window-shopping and suchlike, and then went back to the guest house to relax and read for a bit before heading out in the evening.  We went to another pub, one that served dinner at a helpful time, and I splashed out and had a curry (don’t do that often, and haven’t had one in the last few years) which was lovely.  Then we went round the corner to the cinema and watched The Invention of Lying.  It was pretty good, not spectacular, but raised some interesting questions about truth, social conditioning and human nature.

Saturday brought glorious sunshine again, and after checking out we headed off to Monkey World, which isn’t actually in Weymouth (or particularly near it, in fact), but was near enough for us to visit it as part of our holiday.  There were lots of monkeys, surprise surprise.  And all manner of other ape-like creatures, too.  There were gibbons, orang-utangs, monkeys, lemurs, capuchins and marmosets.  The enclosures were superb, lovely and spacious with plenty to do, and all the animals seemed quite happy to be there.  It did mean a fair bit of walking around, as the site was quite big, so we were both quite glad to sit down for lunch in the cafe.

And then we came home.  Short but sweet.

In other news, I spent most of Sunday at church (thanks to two services in the morning and then leading worship for the evening service), my brother and his fiancee are coming to visit tomorrow, we’re getting a trailer-tent at some point (subject to me getting a tow bar fitted to the car), we need a new vacuum cleaner, I was inexplicably in a Christmassy mood this evening, I love my wife lots and lots, and we need a new tap in the kitchen because ours is broken.

And finally, one last sneaky big of geerkery.  I’m looking into getting a new mobile phone.  Not because my current one is broken or dying, but because I’ve had it several years now and everyone else seems to be getting a new phone and I’m feeling a tad jealous.  So I’m weighing up the LG Cookie and the Samsung Tocco Lite, both of which are fairly affordable touch-screen phones.  They have very similar specs, but on the basis of the reviews I’m tending towards the Tocco Lite at the moment.  We’ll see.

The reason for that introduction stems from my experience in the last half an hour, where I had to pick Sarah up from work and deliver her to the university campus where she was catching a coach, as fast as possible.  Not because Sarah was late, but because I forgot.  She had organised this with me several days ago, and yesterday evening I went round to her house so she could put a bag in my boot to save her worrying about it today.  And yet, somehow, I completely forgot about it until 10 minutes after I was supposed to have picked her up.  Grrr.

Some might put this down to the fact that my wife is at work and thus unable to remind me of what’s going on.  Some might just attribute it to me being a muppet.  But if I’m honest I can’t really pin the blame on Ellie, whom I’ve seen only briefly recently, as ships passing in the night – almost literally (she gets in from work around 11:30pm, and leaves the following morning at some unearthly hour).  On this occasion, it just completely slipped my mind.  I had intended on setting an alarm, aware as I was of my tendency to lose track of time and space, but clearly I’d forgotten to set the alarm.  So it was only when Sarah called me at 4:10pm asking if I was lost that I realised what day it was, what time it was, and how the laws of mathematics had ensured that those ten minutes would be subtracted from the time I had left to get to Greenstead.

On the plus side, it did give me my first chance to drive my new car in anger.  I’m not saying I completely flouted the traffic laws, but I’ll admit I gave it some welly where I could.  The Ford Escort GhiaX has a respectable 1.8 litre engine, pumping out a good 150bhp on a good day.  The brakes are simple but effective, and give a good positive response.  However, being the luxury model rather than the sports model, the GhiaX focuses on comfort and tranquility at the cost of ultimate performance.  Yes, the large-bore engine does develop a good wallop of power, but only when you get the revs right up, and gear changes are noticeably sloppy – more the fault of the engine than the gearbox.  Straight-line acceleration is reasonably good, considering it’s pulling a relatively heavy car, full of padding and sound-proofing and air-conditioning and suchlike, but I wouldn’t describe it as exhilarating.  Cornering is about average, with the overall setup being adequate enough to keep the car feeling safe, while not necessarily giving enough stability to be able to really hammer it through the bends.  And the exhaust sounds like a congested bee.  Albeit a rather large bee.

In conclusion, then, the Escort GhiaX is a fantastic little car for pootling around, doing the shopping, visiting grandparents, giving people lifts to the station, and soforth, but attempting anything even remotely… well, fun, the car fails to impress.  It is, after all, a Ghia, not a Cosworth.  For ferrying people from A to B it’s very comfortable and pleasing to drive, but it won’t get your heart pumping no matter how fast you drive.

And, just so you appreciate the effort I went to, Sarah did catch her coach in time.  In fact, after all that, the coach was late.

On the work front, things have been exceptionally busy just of late.  A web designer friend of mine recently handed me all his clients, ahead of his year-out move to America (I think… something like that), and I’ve spent the last couple of days sorting myself out and getting to grips with the new web sites.  In particular I’ve had to think more carefully about my client management – storing passwords, contact information, billing and invoicing details, and anything critical to the project.  Before now I’ve done it fairly ad-hoc, writing down passwords in a text document where needed, and remembering most of the details myself.  With my client-base almost doubled, I realised I needed something more substantial.  I looked into creating a database using OpenOffice, but found their database app remarkably difficult to use and somewhat unstable – it got confused when I tried to enter some information, and I hadn’t even got as far as linking tables and doing complex queries!  So in the end I’ve reverted to something simpler, but more effective than what I had before, keeping a document of information for each client, with enough information that someone else could theoretically take over if something untoward happened to me overnight.  Which I hope won’t happen, but it’s good to plan for the unexpected anyway, just in case.

So that’s all kept me rather busy, and I’ve not really done much ‘real’ work – i.e. stuff I get paid for.  I guess that’s just part and parcel of running your own business, you have to do the boring administrative stuff as well as the fun designing bits!

Of course, then there’s all the time in between, which is where it gets more interesting.  As timewasters go, we have plenty in this house.  Not only do I have my computer, which is connected to the internet is thus an almost endless source of entertainment, we also have a lounge.  Lounges are good fun.  Especially considering all the toys we keep in it.

For my birthday my Auntie Julia gave me a special offer thing for LoveFilm.com, giving me free access to film rental for 90 days.  I’ve registered a whole load of films I haven’t yet seen, and they’ll send me an unlimited amount every month, with a limit of only having one film at home at a time (postage is free too).  Ellie already has a subscription to Amazon to do much the same thing, but this LoveFilm one means I can book the sort of films Ellie won’t be interested in – so lots of car chases and stuff blowing up!  I’ve already had 3 films come through, and they’ve all been fairly good so far.

And while we’re sat in front of the TV, why not switch on that black box underneath?  What black box?  You know, that big black box, with a PS2 logo on the front.  Yes, I finally succumbed and bought myself a games console.  I’ve been after one for a while, but waiting for the prices to come down.  With the recent release of the PS3 prices for the old PS2 have dropped substantially, both in the shops and online, and it’s finally become affordable.  In fact, my birthday money effectively covered the cost of the PS2 and 2 games, which is pretty neat.  I’ve been playing GTA San Andreas for a few days now, and thoroughly enjoying every moment.  I’ve also got GTA Vice City Stories, which was a follow-up game using the same engine, but from what I’ve seen isn’t anywhere near as good (despite being newer).  Essentially it’s a PSP game ported to the PS2, and a lot of the functionality in the San Andreas version has been lost.  In GTA VCS you can’t eat, you can’t go to the gym, you can’t get fat, you can’t build up your stamina and strength, you can’t change your clothes or your hairstyle, you can’t shoot using the old-school targeting system, there are fewer guns and cars available, and the map is significantly smaller.  VCS is certainly a good game, but pales in comparison to the original.

In addition to all that (as if three major timewasters weren’t enough) we also have gerbils.  Eventually (and by that I mean within the next few years) we’ll undoubtedly be getting a dog (Golden Retriever, on Ellie’s insistence).  But in the meantime we’ve got gerbils.  Two of them.  And they’re so much fun.  I could sit and watch them for hours.  Except they sleep a lot, so there are times when there wouldn’t be much to see.  Nonetheless, we’ve bought them several toys, and get them out to play regularly.  They’ve even been up and played on my desk when I was supposed to be working – they look so cute hopping around on my keyboard and running around in my in-tray!

Oh, and then there are the usual suspects: multiple musical instruments, a Mini to tinker with, a garden to plant stuff in, friends to hang out with.  It’s a wonder really that I get anything done at all…