Other than spending a lot of quality time with my family I have to say not a whole hell of a lot. Well straight off that’s a lie but sometimes I do wake up in the morning thinking that.

Just over a month ago our chickens were lost in a fox incident and after several years of them wrecking out garden we decided that until we had tidied up the place and got it back on it’s feet we wouldn’t get any more. We worked hard on the garden. We had four years of detritus sitting along one wall of our garden and by that I mean enough lumber to build a 20′ fence, old garden toys, two old chicken coops, 12′ of hedge that was chainsawed to the the ground last summer and various bits that we’d just never managed to get sent to the dump. It was a mess and with the addition of the chickens destroying out grass you only need to look on Google Maps to see that Princess Buttercup would have been worried if she had to walk into it.

Anyway as I say we’ve worked hard. The current chicken coop has been moved to a more suitable location in the garden with a paving stone floor and woodchip coating, the shed that sat all winter unbuilt under a tarp at my back door has been built, we’ve dug a flowerbed at the bottom of the garden and filled it with plenty of green things just waiting for the colour to arrive, our veg is thriving this year without hens to eat any green thing as it pokes out from the dirt and almost all that rubbish has been sent to the dump or put somewhere better for storage. It actually looks like a garden since almost the first few weeks since we moved into this house. Oh and we picked up three new chickens yesterday which are settling in fine to their new home.

Vonnie also found her old dog on Gumtree the other day so she’s came to live with us as well.

Things are moving along slowly but surely with the business. We should hopefully hear next week if out dream shop is ours or not. The landlord lives in Palm Springs so communication can be slow at times but he’s looking over all the applicants this weekend apparently so hopefully we’ll get some good news next week. Vonnie and Jennie have been running sewing classes over the last few weeks to test out some of the tutorials and that side of things seems to be going swimmingly.

The big news though is that our online shop went live a couple of days ago. We don’t have all our stock yet as we are waiting on shipments from the US and a few other lines won’t be stocked until we get a physical shop so bear with us but it’s out there. Now we just need to get our name in front of a lot more people and things should hopefully start to pick up!

Now that the shop has launched I thought I might have a bit more free time for things like blogging and general personal time but the list for post-launch is even bigger than pre-launch so maybe I’ll see you guys sometime next year!

Tags: gardening, shop, the life craft

This Icelandic volcano is messing a lot of peoples lives about just now. I can understand why some people are getting a little peeved. I’m enjoying it though.

I live a not that far from Glasgow Airport and I can’t think of a time in recent years where I’ve been able to look in the sky and not see a passenger jet flying off to some far away land or the contrails of planes that have recently passed. We have helicopters flying overhead throughout the day as well. If it isn’t the rich folk flying about instead of using their cars it’s the police helicopter flying overhead following stolen cars or chasing down criminals.

It’s not like that any more. I spent 2 hours in my back garden rebuilding a small retaining wall and the only noise I could here was the occasional truck driving past on the main road. Usually there will be the sound of a plane coming into land at Glasgow every half hour or so. I like peace and tranquillity and this seems to be the closest I’m going to get to it in my home any time soon.

When I was walking up The Cobbler recently Alex commented on just how quiet it was. No cars and apart from the wind the only sound was that which we were making ourselves. The views are great, the company is always good and the fresh air is as refreshing as you can get but the reason I go is for that absence of man-made influences. Whether that’s the noise of cars driving passed or the tarmac covering the car park they are heading to I want to get away from it all. I can deal with the paths we sometimes use to walk on up the hill as a necessary evil. I guess that’s one of the reasons why I want to buy a croft in the north of Scotland. I doubt I’d be able to deal with the day to day running of a proper croft/farm because I know it’s all mud and hard work rather than the fairy tail of vegetable gardens digging and growing themselves. Given the chance to just live in a place miles from anyone outside my family would be my idea of heaven.

One day… I promise. One day I’ll have that home.

Tags: ash, croft, planes, silence, The Cobbler, volcanos

Its better to write for yourself and have no public than to write for the public and have no self - Cyril Connolly

I spent the better part of last evening amalgamating various old blogs of mine into this one. Why did I put myself through that? Well considering that it took me the best part of an hour to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress thanks to a dodgy plugin I thought I’d deleted months ago and the inability for my install to successfully import the blogs correctly at first I really did start to wonder myself.

Over the years I’ve picked subjects I’ve had an interest in and started various blogs to explore them. I never thought I’d get a following but after watching many writers, and for some I call them that out of sheer politeness, gain a loads of readers I wondered where I was going wrong. I tried the various circle jerk sites like Entrecard to get new readers and all I got was warnings from my web host about my traffic being to high for my package. If I was lucky I received a very veiled attempt at self promotion in the form of a comment designed from the start to make it look like they had actually read my post. I just didn’t get where these bloggers were getting their readership from.

When my RPG blog joined the RPG Bloggers Network it’s traffic didn’t so much as jump through the roof as gave me a slight boost but those that came to the site actually read my posts and I was very lucky in that a lot of people took the time to comment on my writing and I’ve got to know a lot of folk through it but at the end of the day this blog gets only a handful of visitors a day. It’s a personal blog so I don’t expect much but if I was to tell you that almost every day around 80% of my page views are for the Malteser Cake recipe I posted months ago you’ll see where my angst comes from.

I wouldn’t go as far as to say that I need validation or acceptance when I write but I certainly want someone to have read it. Over the years my writing has changed and it’s not just the spelling that has improved but I always feel that I’m always grasping for things to say. If I have an idea for something to write about I’ll then spend four hours struggling to put the words together. Whether that’s my dyslexia showing through I don’t know but it certainly shows with anything I rush. I joined in a conversation a friend of mine was having on Facebook today and no matter what I typed it felt as though I was digging a deeper hole with every sentence. For those curious it was a discussion on why people were being so upset about horses dying in the Grand National when loads of animals die every day for our needs and desires. He is a vegetarian and I’m a conscientious meat eater so we’re never going to agree on the basics but I found I really struggled to put together an argument for my view point. I know why I believe the things I do but could I get anything writing down other than, and I’m paraphrasing here, ‘I’ve got grindy teeth and choppy teeth so I’ll use them for what they are meant for’? Needless to say I don’t think I came out of that battle with to many hit points left. On a side note I need to learn more about basic punctuation I feel…

I just took a couple of minutes there to check if my wife had updated her blog before going to sleep and reread her latest post. I’ll hold my hands up and say that because it’s got a lot of crafty posts I tend not to click the links but this time I did. Can you guess what the first link was about? This exact same topic!

Everything I write is there for the general public to see. I don’t mark anything as private for my eyes only. Maybe I should do that? I don’t know. You only have to look at the varied and many categories in the sidebar to see just how far I wander at times. The only brand I’m pushing is me and aside from friends and family I don’t really see who would actually care about what I write. I love to write though.

My written English skill levels are always a major fear for me when I put something out there even if only a handful of people will actually ever see it. It’s not just my writing skills that are out to stop me actually writing though. In my days of writing for Wired’s Geekdad blog I enjoyed every second of it but seeing the level these guys take their hobbies to really intimidates me and so any time I come up with a topic to write about I end up dropping it as they would either be far more qualified to write it or already have. Why even try and write a smart blog post on something topical when someone else out there will be able to do it far better than I can. On here my answer would be that I’d try because in the grand scheme of things noone would see it. Add possibly a few hundred thousand readers and I’ll shrink back into my dark corner and let someone else give it a try.

For those that haven’t guessed yet this is one of my rambles that like my earlier discussion on Facebook isn’t actually going the way I originally intended. I’m grasping at a point but never quite getting there. I can almost guarantee I’ll wake up in four hours time in a eureka moment with a way to make this more structured, readable and to the point but that in itself completely misses the point of this post.

I’m getting a huge feeling of deja vu with this posts…

Tags: dyslexia, writing

For those of you that have followed my past attempts at hill walking in recent years this one was a win. For those of you that haven’t in the past we’ve never made it to the top with our full compliment of walkers and in one case no one made it. This is our story.

We swapped a Stoo for a Mook and headed off to Arrochar on time. We made such good time in fact that an hour after being picked up we were standing in the car park at the foot of the hill for 9am. The car park was busy but as we found out later in the day it was going to get busier.

The start of the walk is up a zig-zag path designed to make the beginning a little easier but in all honesty it makes for a very dreary start to the day. Not even the possible shortcuts between levels could make it any more exciting but we weren’t there to race up the hill. In fact that strolling attitude made for a far better day that it would have been had we needed to drive ourselves along to get anywhere.

Once up past the tree line you could see the summit. Usually when your out on the hills you have a fair idea about scale and distance but I think the ruggedness of peaks distorts these. Until we got to the bottom of the final scramble and seen someone else coming down it felt as though you could just reach out and touch the top. I knew a few of the hills surrounding The Cobbler could be reached from this path but I couldn’t remember any of their names so I really did think the ‘Narnian Boulders’ that dotted the path had something to do with The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe rather than the fact the hill they were on was Beinn Narnain.

My knowledge of Scotland took another beating just as we stopped for a rest before tackling the scramble up the last third of hill when Alex asked if the hill in the distance was Ben Lomond to which I replied without even looking, “Nah it’s over that direction.” Willie quickly corrected me as I looked on in disbelief and realised how wrong I’d been. You only had to look at the shape and the loch at it’s feet to realise what it was. It started snowing at this point. It’s been a long while since I’d seen this kind of snow. Very light and being blown around that much that the same flake passes you three or four times before hitting the ground. It was almost as if it was fake snow.

For a hill that looked so rocky and formidable from below the scramble was very easy. The only awkward parts being those where you had to walk across the snow that was left over from the winter. It wasn’t that bad and in most cases it could take your weight easily but every so often I’d put my foot through it up to my knee. I was lucky as it got a little deeper on the way back down.

The one thing I’ll say about this walk is it brings out a lot of the wrong kind of walker. On hills as busy as this you’ll always find the odd bit of rubbish about the place but almost every hole I looked down was full of plastic bottles and crisp packets. At first the place looks clean until you start looking in the corners. To make it worse though someone left something in the middle of the path. I know that when your out on the hill s and you get caught short you sort of have to go where you can. Leaving that in the middle of the path though with a brick on top to try and hide it only meant whoever stepped on the brick would get a rather unpleasant surprise. Just saying…

The weather at this point was fantastic. As we reached the cairn at the base of the saddle between the central and north summits the weather started to change. The wind was picking up and it looked like the mist and clouds were coming back in so we decided to quickly get the north summit over and done with before heading to the central summit to see what was going on over there. It didn’t look that hard until my fear of heights kicked in as we made out way along a ledge leading to the path up to the summit. It would have been fine if the wind wasn’t picking up but everyone else found it easy enough. My legs were wobbling by the time I got passed it however. We sat down at the Cairn on the top for a quick bite to eat.

In about the space of two minutes it went from being a little breezy with the odd flake of snow to a full on blizzard which lasted about five minutes.

The walk to the central summit was almost the easiest part of the day but we got to see just what the fuss was about The Cobbler. To technically claim you’ve reached the summit you have to climb a rocky outcrop sitting on the edge of the plateau. You might think that this isn’t that hard but it involves climbing through a hole in the rock out on to a ledge on the other side with a 150 foot drop below you. In good weather it’s apparently easy if your a certain height and confidence but this day the wind was blowing hard and there was ice all over the ledge and although Willie went out for a look none of us attempted the climb like the guy below.

The way back down was almost uneventful except for my unfortunate incident with the snow. I took a slightly different path down to catch up with the other guys and ended up having to walk across a 30′ section of snow. I went through the top crust a few times down to my knee but just as I thought I was making it out without to much problem my right leg disappeared through the crust. I struggled a bit but eventually made it out and had a look down the hole I’d made. It was over 6′ deep! Lesson learned I think.

We made good time getting back down and headed home. Just as we went passed Tarbet a police car pulled out and followed us along the road and eventually pulled us over for a routine check. It seems Dave hadn’t shut his door properly so they were worried we’d lose him as we drove along at 60mph. Everything was fine though and we were soon on our way home again.

Surprisingly my legs were not that sore the next day this time around. In fact I didn’t even get any blisters which is almost unheard of with my boots! Plans are afoot to do another hill later in April so we’ll see how things go with that one.

Tags: Ben Arthur, hill walking, The Cobbler

I’m feeling out of sorts and I can’t work out why. I’ve got a few ideas for contributing factors but I can’t work out the main thing that’s causing it.

The shop is dragging on and everything is, or was, resting on the lease being signed. Once that gets signed then everything else starts to fall into place as the bank accounts can then be set up and various other bits of paperwork can finally start to be processed. Everything fits neatly onto a timeline but they need that signed lease to kickstart it. Theres a few fears about the state of the place but we should be getting the report in the next couple of days so we’ll see how that changes things. It’s taken five months to get to where we are now so I’ll be buggered if we don’t get this thing kickstarted one way or another soon.

Everything today has just fell apart. If it’s not Vonnie’s laptop falling and cracking it’s me smashing eggs on the kitchen floor. The kids have been far worse than usual today and if Nairn wasn’t ignoring everyone to do his own thing he was hitting Erica. Erica just couldn’t settle into her usual rhythm today at all and Greer refused to go down for a sleep for most of today.

Thinking about it now I’ve spent the most part of the last couple of months wearing a moonboot on my foot thanks to damaged ligaments and the only thing I’ve been looking forward to was being healthy enough to climb up The Cobbler which I’ve now done. I’ve got nothing planned to look forward too. The shop is a lot of work so I’m finding it hard to get excited about it at the moment and after seeing the front page of the test shop on my parents computer yesterday looking awful the thought of going back through all that code again to fix it is filling me with dread. In fact I’m sure that’s it. So much so I’m going to spend tomorrow working out my next couple of months to give me something to look forward to and see if that picks my mood up any.

Heres hoping….

Tags: health

There’s been a meme running around Facebook for the last while to do with 25 random facts about yourself. I hate doing meme’s at the best of times but something my brother said struck a chord with me. Listening to certain songs provoke such strong memory recall that it’s hard not to think about one particular time that you listened to them. And so in that vain and with it being a Friday night and I’m at home on my lonesome with the kids asleep in bed I thought I’d share those memories.

The soundtrack for the rest of this entry can be found here is you have spotify. I hope that works as I can never get Spotify playlist links to work on this damn laptop.

1. Bucks Fizz – The Land of Make Believe
This was quite possibly the first every single I bought. I don’t ever remember choosing it but aside from a few compilation albums it’s the only one I remember owning before I inherited my uncles singles collection from the 70′s and early 80′s. Put quite simply this song terrified me. If I got up during the night to go to the toilet or to get a drink the first thing I would do would be to look out the window and check there was nobody at the bottom of our garden waiting for me.
Shadows tapping at your window
Ghostly voices whisper,
“Will you come and play?”
Those lines had me running up and down the stairs at night terrified of what might catch me for years.

2. Whigield – Saturday Night
My very first holiday abroad without my parents was to Santa Ponsa in Majorca when I was 19 years old. It opened my eyes in a lot of ways but one of my main memories was of loving a song but being unable to find out who wrote it. I spent most of that holiday trying to track it down until one day I was sitting around the pool with Graham and Shug sipping on an ice cold pint of beer when I heard it being played from one of the apartments above us. A couple with twin daughters had bought a tape with Saturday Night on it and it was the third track on the A-Side. I hunted all over town for that tape and finally found it on the last day in a small newsagent. I’d found the song that had been haunting me! When I reached the apartments the twins were fighting as although they’d only bought one tape themselves they’d copied it so they’d both have their own. They only had one case though and so in what I thought at the time was my good deed for the day I gave the other girl my case. It wasn’t until I got back to my room that I realised the tape didn’t have a track listing on it. To this day I still have no idea what the song was called.

I promise there will be some good songs in here. Honest.

3. Green Day – Welcome to Paradise
When I left school I went to on to attend Glasgow University but like the home boy I was I never moved into the city and instead commuted every day into the city by train and then out to the West End on the Underground. The journey into Glasgow itself usually involved getting train at stupid o’clock in the morning and sitting with Alison Noble and a few others before we headed our separate ways once we hit Central Station. I never managed to listen to any music until this point and every day as I walked down Union Street towards St Enoch Station I’d hit play on my Walkman and the tape would jump to life. Just as the train filled up at Buchanan Street Station Welcome to Paradise would kick in. In my half asleep wee world all I could hear was the song and to this day I can still smell the trains whenever that song comes on.

4. Lou Bega – Mambo No. 5
Yet another holiday song. There is/was a bar in Benidorm called Sinatras which has a tiny dancefloor but is where we would end up at some stage of the night almost every night we were there. Why does this song stand out? Well we had got into a bit of a routine of a few beers and tanning a litre of vodka before leaving the apartment every night and this night was no different. What was different however was my brother and his friends were in town on holiday for a few days overlapping my own stay. We had no idea what the other was up to but on this night we fell into the bar and as this song came on my brother and his friends appeared from the other side of the room. I have very vague memories of downing drinks with Scott and Masson but seeing my brother for that first second always comes back when I think of that song.

5. The Prodigy – Breathe
If you’ve ever lived in East Kilbride you will more than likely have attended Crystals nightclub in one of it’s many guises. To call it a nightclub is doing other real nightclubs a disservice but we won’t go there. ANYWAY, Breathe always brings me back to my many drunken nights in there. Whenever the song came on myself and Barry would clear the dance floor and basically scream the song at each other. We’d go home each night covered in bruises from pushing and hitting each other during it.

This is going to be a long post!

6. Ugly Kid Joe – Everything About You
I don’t every remember owning a microphone but somehow one day we started recording ourselves singing to our favourite songs. We were 19 for feck sake not nine year old girls. Everyone picked a song from my CD selection and we recorded our attempts. This was my song. Everything went well until my brother found the tape. I don’t sing karaoke any more…

7. Green Day – King For A Day
And our second entry for fun punksters isn’t that famous a song and fits into another holiday story. This time we were in Tenerife staying in a lovely apartment in Los Christianos and a couple of days before I flew out Green Day booked a one off gig to happen whilst I was on holiday as something to do between their festival shows. I went to the local travel agent to try and get a flight there and back in the hope of getting a ticket from a tout on the night. It would have used up all my spending money but I was going to do it and the only reason why I didn’t was because the only flight I could get home landed 10 minutes before the gig was due to start.

The night of the gig I locked myself out on the veranda whilst the other guys got ready for their night out. I took my entire Green Day collection out with me and played every album and b-side as I worked my way through a bottle of Aftershock and as I found out the next day the best part of a 12-pack of beer and about 48 fairy cakes. The aftermath of that night is where I gained my online username of Bobzilla from so you can guess the destruction and mess I left in my wake that night.

8. Biffy Clyro – Hope For An Angel
The first time I heard this song I was standing in awe after hearing a band that I’ll come to later in the list. I’d never heard of Biffy Clyro at the time I stood almost front and centre in King Tut’s and knew from the moment I heard them that I was going to remember the gig for a long time. You see a lot of local bands that think they are God’s Gift to the local music scene and get nowhere. Simon, Ben and James would almost sneak into the gig through the crowd and put on the most amazing shows. Whenever I hear this song I can remember trying to work out who was singing what part. That might have been down to the fuzzy beer brain though.

9. Moby – Go
The very first CD I owned was the album this track came from. I had to borrow my dads hifi as my own didn’t have a CD player in at at that point in order to listen to it but I stole every second I could. I still remember sitting at midnight after everyone had went to bed with my dads headphones on after I’d snuck back downstairs and putting this track on repeat. I remember thinking at the time that this kind of music was going to change my life. I didn’t realise it then but it did but not in the way I envisioned. This was the first track that I every loved for the feelings it stirred in me rather than the comical novelty songs I’d enjoyed before then.

10. Westworld – Sonic Boom Boy
I couldn’t even tell you who sung this until a few days ago. The song has stuck in my head for decades though. As a child everyone used to sit and tape the Top 40 Chart Show on a sunday night but seeing as I was just a child the tapes were used over and over again all except one that just happened to have this song on it. The tape was played that often however that the tape stretched and for years I actually thought the changes in pitch and tempo were actually parts of the original song. Even now when I hear it as it should sound my mind automatically puts in stretches.

11. Faithless – Insomnia
My clubbing credentials are horrendous. We could never be bothered with the busy clubs like The Arches or Archaos when I first started heading into the city for nights out. We went a few times but we just never enjoyed it. With this in mind we always ended up the biggest dives in the city as nowhere else would let our drunken selves in anyway. One such night we ended up in The Lime Club where myself and Paul looked after the kitty and with every round bought would treat ourselves to cheeky shots from our own pocket at the bar. Put politely we were mangled by 1am. Then this song came on. Until that point I never danced. I tried it once and someone compared me to a granny ironing a shirt and so I gave up after that. This song however had me up dancing for it’s entire eight minutes and those eight minutes felt like the entire night. By the time the chorus came around for the second time our hands were in the air chanting along.

12. The Day I Snapped – Start Again.
This song sticks in my head for reasons beyond my knowledge. Forget that I came away from the gig trying to convince Rab to try out for their bass player as that gig was the last for their current guy. Forget that the guy that got the gig was also a friend and forget that since then I’ve became friends with their drummer. This is the band that were playing before Biffy at Tut’s that night and I don’t think they hit a duff note the entire set. I didn’t walk away from the gig singing Biffy songs. I walked away singing Start Again and Jennifer 8.

13. The Prodigy – No Good (Start The Dance)
Everyone thinks of The Cathouse as a mostly rock or punk club and in all honestly nothing could be further from the truth. They’ve long had a ‘tradition’ of playing dance tracks alongside their normal setlist fodder as well as chart and RnB stuff. There would always be a section of the night though when DJ Billy would try and kill those that liked to dance. The Blade soundtrack would come on and get folk on the dancefloor and thats when the marathon would start. Then the strobes would kick in and the smoke machines would start and opening sample of No Good would start up and you’d be in your own wee world. This is the song that made me realise that I love to dance even if I need to be completely drunk to do it in public.

14. Zero 7 – Somersault
Some who know me and who were at my wedding may think my first memory upon hearing this song is of our first dance. You’d be wrong. When I first started staying over at Vonnie’s flat in Glasgow she would put this album on when we went to bed. I’ve long enjoyed listening to relaxing music to help me get to sleep but I’d never heard this band before. Whenever I hear this song my first memory is of lying in bed in the front bedroom of that Govanhill flat barely being able to hear it staring at the orange street light outside and listening to the world go by underneath it knowing that I was safe in that room with Vonnie.

15. Kid Rock – Devil Without A Cause

Benidorm yet again. This time though I was sober. Everyone on that holiday was there for 14 days where as I flew out late to meet them and only stayed for seven days. I jumped in the taxi to take me to the airport and left all my CD’s in the apartment for the guys to listen to. When I arrived at the airport I found my flight was delayed by eight hours and I cursed that decision as loudly as I could without getting myself arrested. Once through check-in the kiosk, for that’s the only shop that was open, had about ten CD’s to choose from and Kid Rock’s album was one of them. That album spent the next six hours on repeat until I got onto the plain. This song is about the only one I can actually listen to now without all that rage coming back.

16. Beth Orton – Central Reservation
My cousin Alan was getting married and as usually happens my mum organises a minibus and my Uncle Sam drives it to where ever we need to go. With the help of my brother we managed to get our table to drink a bottle of aftershock, 13 bottles of wine, 7 bottles of champagne and whatever we managed to buy from the bar. Needless to say almost all of us, apart from Skippy as she barely had any I think, were very worse for wear the next morning. We then had a seven hour drive home from Birmingham to survive. My brother sat looking very green and I curled up in a ball with this album on repeat the entire way home. Beth Orton’s voice to this day reminds me of being severly hungover and this song in particular of that drive home.

17. Die Krupps – To The Hilt
We had just got cable TV for the second time and my brother and I were obsessed with MTV Europe. Here were bands we’d never heard off before from countries we’d never been to playing songs we loved. Almost every day we would catch this video and would find it hilarious. The video was so simple and the chorus perfect for screaming at each other.

18. CJ Bolland – Sugar Is Sweeter
As I mentioned before I like to listen to music to help me off to sleep at night when I get the chance. For years when I got home from a night out my headphones would go on and my hifi would still be playing the CD on repeat when I woke up the next morning. This song was a staple of my post night out music for years.

19. Josh Wink – Higher State Of Consciousness
This is another one of the songs DJ Billy would try and kill us with. This one stands out though because my dad actually liked it. He went through a period of listening to any music he could get his hands on. I’d catch him listening to my Rage Against The Machine CD’s on occasion but one day I found him sitting with his eyes closed on the sofa, headphones on, nodding his head along to beat and dancing whilst sitting down. I don’t think he even knows I caught him.

20. The Toy Dolls – Nellie The Elephant
I’d heard the song on the radio before but never really liked it that much. That was until one night out in Tenerife where we went into the Crows Nest and downed what I’m told was tequila but what I think was actually lighter fluid. Paul had met a girl the night before from Liverpool who insisted we all keep saying Curlywulry to her. Anyway he was to meet her in the pub opposite the place where we were so we all headed over to find an Irish bar playing this song. Everyone, and I do mean everyone including bar staff, was pogoing to this as we walked in. I’d never seen that kind of energy in a crowd before then and to be fair to them even after a lot of gigs they are still up there in the top five.

21. Dire Straits – Brother in Arms
I’m in primary 6 and we are at the school disco. The girl that I fancied all the way through primary school was there and I wanted to request a song for her. This was her favourite song at the time and everyone else seemed to hate it but I loved it. I can still remember the rest of the class running up the DJ demanding he put of Spitting Images Chicken Song.

22. Terrorvision – Alice, What’s The Matter
This was my Computer Lab tape when I was at uni. Between this and a Carter USM tape I thin I just played them on a loop for the entire year. This song remains my favourite from that time though.

23. The Beastie Boys – Sabotage
My first night of Freshers Week and Glasgow Uni had me in the QMU playing pool with a friend and two girls while Slam played downstairs. As with all attempts to get on with the opposite sex conversation moved round and around until we got onto something we could both get our teeth into. One of the girls stance was that Oasis were the second coming. This was before they had any chart success by the way meanwhile I insisted that I’d never heard of them and anyway how could she dismiss the greatness of The Beastie Boys. It was at this point that Sabotage came on the jukebox, I potted the black to win the game and her friend kissed me. I seem to recall shouting “and that’s my point!”

24. The Bloodhound Gang – Kiss Me Where It Smells Funny
I can barely play guitar. It didn’t stop me going along to my mates band practice though. They ran through various songs but they finished they finished with this song. Myself and Dave jumped of the amp stacks while Mark sang/rapped. I think I even managed to play along to the chorus. It probably sounded like shit but that is how I remember that song. Nothing from the countless times I’ve seen it played live by the actual band or from my CD’s but from our version.

25. The Quireboys – 7 o’clock
If you weren’t there I don’t think this wil ldo it much justice but watch this clip. Whilst at our friends wedding The Quireboys were in the hotel bar and very kindly agreed to play a few songs for the happy couple. Until the day I die I don’t think I’ll see a wedding party so animated for the music. In saying that the groom brought along his band for the nights entertainment so it was going to be a good one anyway!

Tags: meme, memories, music

I honestly don’t know where the last 2 months have went. When I was off work sick with my heart problems a couple of years ago the 4 months I was sitting at home for felt like an absolute age where as this time it really does feel as though I only finished up at DFID a couple of weeks ago.

Things never stop here. We ‘work’ until we’re exhausted and then all our spare time is taken up either being ill or being to tired to do anything other than go to bed at 8pm and struggle to sit through a TV show before collapsing into a restless sleep. When I was still working I went to work Monday until Friday and when I got home each night I’d cook dinner, watch the kids to give Vonnie a little break and then once they went to bed we’d have three or four hours to ourselves. Saturdays would be the family days to rest up and Sundays would be busy with everyone coming and going all day. At the end of every night we’d have those few hours though to unwind and relax. Not so any more.

I don’t know what the difference is but these days your lucky if we’re both awake past 9pm on any night of the week. On those occasions where we are actually capable of not falling asleep on out feet we’ve got 101 other things to get done. Currently I’m trying to put the finishing touches to design for the shops website. I’ve managed to bluff my way through javascript editing and after playing with designs for a few days I’m trying to convince myself I do actually know enough CSS to make it look the way I hope it should. For every thing we manage to check off on the to-do list another six appear at the end of it.

We tried to raid the Au Naturale stores yesterday for any and all shop fittings that we thought we’d need. The only thing we seen that wasn’t ruined wouldn’t fit where we needed it to anyway so other than crockery and a few bits and pieces it was a wasted journey on that front.

In other news I’m sitting here listening to the new Gorillaz album in an attempt to find something to say about it in a review. I’m really struggling. It’s not what I’ve came to expect from them and finding it hard to get into if I’m completely honest. As singles I think they’ll do well but as an album it’s lacking something that I can’t quite put my finger on. We’ll see how it does after a few more listens.

I’m so behind with everything these days. I’ve got my final 28 Day Project photos to edit and upload to Flickr. Don’t hold your breath by the way. They can only be described as photoblog photographs rather than good photographs. It served it’s purpose to get me taking photos every day though. Now I just need to keep that energy going forward and actually try and improve.

Tags: Gorillaz, music, Photography, shop, sleep, time

I’ve struggled to write these past few weeks. I never have the time and when I do have the time I don’t have the energy or brain capacity to string a sentence together never mind a full post.

My foot is getting better. I managed to walk for 90 minutes around Calderglen Country Park yesterday without the support on it. My foot was strapped up as best as my hiking boots could manage though and I’m paying for it today. I managed it though without any real discomfort. I’m looking good for my date with a mountain at the end of March.

Vonnie had it confirmed last night that her contract will not be getting extended so come the end of March we will both be ‘out of work’. By out of work I obviously mean working for ourselves as we should hopefully take over the shop we’re leasing a few weeks beforehand.

Talking of the shop things are progressing. It’s going slowly as every time we think we’ve managed to get over the last hurdle another three or four appear. The latest one involves bank accounts and proof of ID. Basically a lot of the things we need to get sorted NOW require proof of the business address which we can’t do until the lease is signed and in some cases until we get our first utility bill in. I think we’re going to have to get inventive to get past this one.

I breathed new life into my photoblog a few weeks ago but I’m not entirely sure folk know it exists. Trying to work out some way to display the updates on here to catch a few more readers. And yes I did actually take that photo up there!

Tags: business, Calderglen County Park, foot, health, photoblog, walking, work

The postman knows us very well. There isn’t a week goes by where we don’t get a package of some sorts. It’s got to the stage where he knows we’ll be about so holds on to packages for use if he misses us while we’re on the nursery/food/chicken feed run and swings by later to pass them in. Every single package is for Vonnie. The stuff inside might be for the kids but it’s always addressed to Vonnie. Then last week a box arrived addressed to myself…

Turn back time to just over a month ago. I’m sitting at my desk at work trying desperately to do as little as possible whilst still looking busy (for all prospective employers out there…read back through my journal as there is a reason for it ) I stumbled upon a competition being run by the Scottish Book Trust. All you had to do was complete the titles of a few books and give their authors and you could win a few books. Easy. So over lunch I completed my entry and then completely forgot all about it. That was until the other week when I received an email saying I’d won the competition. With it being kids books it was a nice win but my limit of good luck never stretched to more than a few quids worth of prizes.

Now we’ve had a few freebies from them in the past. One of the things they do is to reach out to every child in Scotland and at various times of their give them a bundle of books to help encourage the love of reading. So needless to say with having four kids we’ve seen our fair share of Bookstart books come through the door.

What arrived was a little more than a few free books however.

Rory and his Magic Castle by Andrew Wolffe
Yo-Ho-Ho A-Pirating We’ll Go by Kaye Umansky
Stella to Earth by Simon Puttock
Mungo and the Picture Book Pirates by Timothy Knapman
Captain Flinn and the Pirate Dinosaurs by Giles Andreae
The Octonauts & the Sea of Shade by Meomi
Chick by Ed Vere
Paddington : King of the Castle by Michael Bond
Love From Louisa by Simon Puttock
Call Me Gorgeous by Giles Milton
I Love Holidays by Anna Walker
Red Rockets and Rainbow Jelly by Sue Heap and Nick Sharratt
Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy by Lynley Dodd
The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle

To buy all that in the shops your looking at around £60 and Nairn’s already demanding to have the dinosaur pirates one read to him at night. We already own a copy of The Very Hungry Caterpiller just like every household with children in the UK but I think we’re on to our 5th copy and that is on it’s last legs. My favourite off them all must be Chick though. With us keeping chickens it’s a great wee book for the kids but Nairn was the only one of the younger kids to go through the hatching of our chicks and be able to remember it. If we don’t hatch this year then it will be perfect for the girls to get a better look at how our chickens live.

So needless to say I’m very pleased with the prize and so are the kids. Now all I need to do is buy them another bookshelf to fit their new books on!

So hows things with us other than winning books? We’re getting there. Greer is loaded with the cold and seems to be teething so we’ve been up a fair bit of the last two nights. Vonnie says my eyes look like pinholes which is a nice look. With Nairn we’ve got the whole speech therapy thing going on as well as trying to work out whether it’s in his best interest to go to school a year early or not as well as working out just what school we should be sending to him. Erica’s speech is confusing me. She still has her own wee language almost as her pronunciations aren’t great but in the last few days her fluency has shot through the roof. Findlay? He’s in his own wee work with his laptop these days. If he’s not playing on Club Penguin he’s round at his friends houses.

Today all the kids are at nursery so although I had plans to use that fact to get started on decorating the girls room it’s looking like a quiet day with tea and a sofa to snooze on. This isn’t a bad thing.

Tags: books, competiton, kids, Scottish Books Trust

Just realised I haven’t blogged about my jaunt up Ben Lomond last year. Well I did but a couple of short paragraphs doesn’t really cover it. It was a crazy day after all.

It started with the seven of us planning the trip and gradually realising the weather was going to possibly scupper all our plans. Alex ended up pulling out due to a case of the lurgy and one of Willie’s mates gave up as well. In all honesty we possibly should have as well with hind sight.

I guess the first sign that the day wasn’t going to go we the way we planned appeared when we started driving up the east bank of Loch Lomond. Forget the rain we encountered on the way up there. It was definitely the fallen trees on the road that gave the biggest hint.

The rain held off as we got our gear together but thanks to a few errors in the layout of the roads and land *cough* I couldn’t read my map */cough* it took us five minutes which included a walk up a forest road that went nowhere near the summit before we realised we had to head back to the car park to find the real path.

The initial going was good. The weather was a bit crap though. One minute it rained the next it stopped but the wind just didn’t let up. We would get completely soaked by the rain and then by the time it stopped and started again we would have been blown dry. As we started to reach about a third of the way up we really started to struggle with the wind. It gets a little steep at this point and as the hillside is completely exposed once you get pass the tree line at the beginning it started to take it’s toll. Mark decided he just couldn’t go any further. I don’t know if it was the wind or just his body telling him that despite the energy drinks he was stupid to go any further but he was the first to head back and with hindsight I think that’s when we all should have turned back.

The wind didn’t let up at all throughout the climb and in fact just got worse. I read the weather reports when we got back and for most of the climb the wind was gusting at up to 50 miles per hour. Dave and Stoo were determined to at least make it to the half way point which to there credit they did. There is a well about halfway up on the map which they made it passed before they turned back. I don’t know why but I stood for a few minutes shouting to Dave to make sure he knew what to do if something was to happen to them on the way down. I guess it was because although we all had radios with us the mobile phone reception up there is sporadic at best and almost all the survival and first aid gear was either in my own bag or Willie’s ruck sack.

So we pressed on. At times the wind would just hit us constantly for a few minutes and we’d just stand there leaning into it hoping for it to let up long enough for us to walk another couple of hundred yards before the next gust. It was round about this point that we started to meet a few other climbers as they caught up with us. We’d only seen one other person on the hill up until then and he had shot ahead with his dog and you could see his outline as he made a break for the summit. They all seemed nuts if truth be told. We stopped for a quick rest just as it starts to get really steep and rocky just before you turn back around and start the last leg up to the summit. Willie stopped for a breather and I carried on to see how far I could get before I stopped for a bite to eat to let him catch up.

That’s when I bumped into they guy with the dog again. He was on his way back down after reaching the summit and said it was insane up there. As I found out later it was gusting at up to 90 miles an hour up there. He waited until the wind died down before running between rocks and then holding on until the wind died down again. He almost lost his dog three times thanks to the wind apparently. I pushed on and got to within what I thought at the time was about 400 yards from the summit but after looking again at the map it was probably twice that I turned back. It was just stupid to carry on. I took my last picture looking out over the lochs behind the mountain and the camera’s battery died. It’s was definitely a sign.

It turned out Willie had actually decided just to wait where he had stopped hoping that I’d turn back as well. I eventually made it back down to him and just like when I climbed Ben Nevis there was a spring in my step on the way back down. Where we struggled to walk up the damn hill we were almost running down the thing. The worst bit was still to come however.

When we reached the bottom we found out that the hotel was without power. A tree had been blown over and took out both the power and phone lines. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem except all the way back down the hill all we could think about was a nice warm meal and a pint of beer. The kitchen was shut and the beer pumps wouldn’t work without power. We were stuck with warm bottled beer or cans of soft drinks and a scone.

We will be back to do it again when the weather gets better and there are plans afoot to hit The Cobbler in March in preparation. Fingers crossed the weather works out for us next time!

Tags: Ben Lomond, Dave Hogg, hills, Mark, outdoors, rain, Scotland, Stoo, walking, weather, Willie, wind