In an effort to break the monotony of working on the shop, tidying the house or working on the garden I thought I’d have a little go at this. Basically I’ve been asked five questions by people and as the game goes if you want me to ask you five questions then leave a comment and I’ll see what I can come up with for you.

From lirazelf@LJ
1) What was your first impression of von?
That depends on whether you want my first impressions of meeting her in person or online
Online I’m sure we ended up getting into a ‘discussion’ about the Israel/Palestine debate but neither of us remember the exact conversation and neither of us can find it on Alt Nation. Maybe it didn’t happen?

In real life I thought she was a nutter. In a good way honestly!

I’d split up with my girlfriend a couple of months previously and we both attended the student/AN day at Scapegoats airsoft site. She spent the day in combat gear and wearing a face mask but still managed to make an impression on me with her rendition of The Star Spangled Banner whilst holding aloft the US flag we used as a base upside down with a rape alarm screaming along in time to the singing. It took a few months to get talking to her though what with her ending up going out with one of the other players for a few months after that.

2) You seem to be very good at making cake. When/how did you discover this talent?
I’d like to say that as I come from a family of chef’s that it was passed down in the blood or something but it’s more likely I’m just good at practical things. I’ve mentioned before that whilst I was at school any class that required reading or theory work I was useless at but what I don’t really talk about is that I was really good at practical or art work. Whilst I could draw or paint whatever was in front of me I couldn’t make stuff up. I received the merit in tech class every year I took the class because between my drafting skills and my woodwork/metalwork projects I was by far the best in my class.

What surprised most folk though was that every year I took Home Economics I received the merit as well. I couldn’t sew to save my life where as a few of the girls were on their way to a fashion degree years later but my cooking was far better that anyone elses. I was careless though, and I still am at times, and my teacher almost stripped the merit from me because although I’d baked the best sponge she’d eve seen in her class I hadn’t ran a knife around the tin before tipping it out and totally ruined it. It wasn’t until I bought my own flat that I started baking again though.

3) Are you still thinking about going back to uni?
The desire is still there but the practicalities after us both ending up without work at the same time has meant the reality of it probably means it won’t happen any time soon. I really REALLY want to do the Rural Land Management course at the SAC and although the first year can be done as a distance learning course, in fact I think that is the only way of doing it, I would still need to commute to Ayr for the rest of the course every day whilst dealing with family and shop stuff. It would also probably mean I would have to pass up a lot of job opportunities due to not being able to relocate the family . They’ve got something stupid like a 98% employment rate in the field for graduates of that course but most of them are for jobs up north or in the Lake District and Wales.

The other choice is to look into doing something that fits easier into our current life. Whether that is an OU course or night classes in whatever I don’t know but I will get back into doing something. Being a student was the happiest ‘working’ days of my life and by that I don’t mean I was in Jim’s Bar 24/7. In fact apart from freshers week and the occasion afternoon pizza/pint all I did was study or work. I miss learning or more specifically I miss learning with others.

4) What was your first gig?
Define gig?

I went to many band nights in local pubs when I hit pub going age and went to the Radio 1 roadshow as a kid aged around seven or eight in Morecombe but other than it being hosted my Tony Blackburn and having to climb a tree to see the stage I remember nothing. Our school had an annual rock concert with the pupils getting their bands to play 3-4 songs and the teachers throwing together a band as well.

The first actual gig that I had to buy a ticket for never actually happened. In ’96-’97 I think Green Day were supposed to play in support of Dookie at the Barras and I was due to go with my brother and his mates but they had to cancel their tour after Mike went a bit nuts in Sweden or some other Scandinavian place. My brother took his ticket back and exchanged it and his friends for RATM tickets but forgot to get me one. Needless to say I haven’t forgiven him for that one. It took until The Prodigy played on Glasgow green as part of the double header with Primal Scream before I actually made it to a gig. Almost broke my leg when the crowd collapsed and and Maxim misjudged a roundhouse kick at the front of the crowd and wacked me in the chest and knocked the guy beside me at the barrier over. I loved it so much I went out the next day and bought tickets to the first five gigs I could find where I recognised the band name. I went to at least one gig a week after that until about 2002 I think.

5) Is there any one thing that you absolutely, definitely, without doubt, Hate?
My inability to say something profound and interesting without fucking it up. My friends one night took issue with the nonsense I used to spout and I proclaimed in complete drunken honesty,”One of these days I’ll show you people. I’ll say something so profound and true it will stop you in your tracks and make you forget to breath as you realise how correct I am.” And as if by magic as that final word came out of my mouth I dropped my almost full bottle of beer all over my friends bedroom floor.

From Vonnie
1) Does it offend/bother you that the children go to church?
Not in the slightest. Whilst I didn’t go with my family as a child I did go with my school and the Anchor Boys. It wasn’t until I was old enough to realise what my own beliefs were that I stopped going. Yes it sometimes gets to me when they talk about God and angels but I like the fact that they know I don’t go and question my beliefs and they are only three and four years old. They’ll choose their faith or lack of in their own good time and we’re there to support them in until whatever choice they make and for every day after that.

2) If you could change any part of me (physically/mentally/verbally!) would you?
Honestly? I’d fix it so that you’d never have to deal with the problems you’ve had from PND and your joint/nerve pain ever again. You wouldn’t be you if I changed anything else.

3) Are you avoiding learning to drive because it is intimidating?
Learning to drive isn’t intimidating as such. I’m hugely terrified because no matter when I’ve been behind the wheel I’ve never felt as though I’ve been in control of the car. I always feel as though I’m half a second away from crashing and that it’s been only blind luck that I’ve lasted until now without hitting something. That and I’m very wary of spending that much money at a time where we need every spare penny going into the business and would only be comfortable going for more lessons once that initial stress of making sure we have enough cash to startup is gone.

4) Describe your perfect idyllic weekend.
Being under no pressure to get anything done. I couldn’t care less if the weather was good or bad as long no one in the house got stressed and none of the kids got worked up or had a tantrum. Seeing where the wind blew us and us all coming home with a smile on our faces would be good too. Our magical mystery tours down the west coast or to Millport are perfect examples.

5) Where do you see us in ten years?
Honestly? Trying to come to terms with our desire to not live in a large town/city but being able to be close enough to Glasgow to run the business. A large house with a bit of land where I spend more time pottering in the garden that doing anything constructive and you running several of your shops. By then almost all the kids would be at secondary school so we’d almost be free from their tyranny and iron rule and could start planning for our trip into old age and our ‘slowly going nuts to wind the kids up’.

So like I say if you want to join in leave a comment and I’ll throw five questions at you.

It’s hypnotic!

To quote one of my favourite songs…”I can’t get no sleep”

I don’t know wether its the stresses involved with the christening, a carry over form the pericarditis or a combination of both. I was up at about 5am with the dog again yesterday morning I think but after everyone was out to work/school/nursery I managed to sleep through until about 1pm. I felt great but Barry had been calling all morning and ended up coming over to check I was OK. I’d went straight into the shower after waking up and the phones were downstairs so I didn’t have a clue.

Skip to last night and I was as wide awake as I’d ever been I think and I finally managed to force myself to go to sleep at some point around 1am. Up again at 6am this morning and despite getting a few more hours again once everyone was away I’m like a zombie. I sat down on the couch for 5 minutes about an hour ago to check something on my mobile phone and the next thing I remember is the house phone ringing and I was lying on the couch.  Now I’m up again I still shattered but I know I won’t be able to sleep if I was to try.

It’s not insomnia its just my body recovering. I just wish I knew what exactly from so I’d have a clue how long it’s going to last.

Just a quick update to fill those in that have wondered where I’ve been for the last month.

Basically Mark, who hosted my blog, had a server with a company that went under and its taken us this long to get things in shape to restart this place. Thanks to a reformat of both my home and work PC’s earlier this year I lost all my up to date backups but I’ve got old entries from Jan 2005 – July 2007 with comments and the rest are being transfered over from Livejournal without comments. Unfortunately it also means the entries from Aug 07 onwards have a stupid wee box at the top that makes no sense on here as its a notice to LJ users to come here to comment rather than do it on LJ.

The place will be a bit of a mess for a wee while but it works again

So yeah…my health.

For the last month I’ve been battling a cold/chesty cough/chest infection and at the beginning of last week I finished my course of antibiotics and most of it cleared up leaving me with an occasional dry cough that felt more like I’d cut my throat and the healing was itchy and causing the cough rather than the remnants of the infection.I felt that good that on Monday night we went for a cycle to my parents and on Tuesday I cycled to and from work. At no point did I feel I’d over done it and actually felt really good about it all.

Then I lay down to go to bed on Tuesday night. It hurt to lay down. It hurt to sit up. When I wasn’t lying down it felt like someone was trying to crush my throat and when I was on my back it was if someone was sitting on my chest. It didn’t hurt that much to be honest it was more the tightness that worried me. What did hurt though was when I breathed in and out. It was fine until a certain point then it became unbearable. Vonnie said I was being a drama queen and I sort of believed her but at teh back of my mind was the thought that if it didn’t get any better by 4am I’d go to A&E there and then. I finally managed to get some sleep after finding some painkillers but if I moved from the one position I found that was comfy then I’d wake up in pain again.

I’d told Vonnie I’d go to A&E if it didn’t get any better by lunchtime but when I got off the bus its was just as bad as it was during the night. A quick text to Vonnie to say I was going earlier than expected and instead of walking across the road to work I walked into A&E instead. Sometimes it’s quite handy having the local hospital across the road from your office! I went in expecting them to say I had pulled a muscle and I’d be back in work within the hour. I got to the desk and told then of my chest pains and my difficulty breathing only to see the 4 kids that came in behind me with strained joints get taken first. It took me a few hours to realise they were being taken into the room we normally go into when the kids have to go to A&E and they were waiting for space to come up in the treatment rooms for me. I’d walked in of my own accord so those that came in via the ambulance got in ahead of me. I didn’t thing like that at the time… Vonnie also found out that they refer to the room I was eventually taken into as Resus which certainly didn’t worry her when she asked where I was…

I was taken in, prodded, questioned and hooked up to a monitor. An IV thingie was stuck in the back of my hand so I could get morphine injected and I was given O2 as well as a couple of ECG’s. Just as the morphine kicked in my mum turned up and before I was whisked away for a chest X-ray I was told by a nurse that Vonnie had called. At this point I’d been told it was probably pericarditis and that I might need to stay over night depending on what the X-ray showed. What Vonnie was told however was that my ECG showed signs of a mild heart attack and that I was definitely staying overnight. Nice of them to a)give incorrect info to loved ones and b)to give that sort of info out over the phone in the first place. Anyway by now the morphine felt very good and I’d had my xray and didn’t even question how my brother had got to the hospital never mind how he’d managed to get from Hamilton in about 3 minutes flat. Vonnie turned up to find me with tubes and wires and all sorts stuck to me and despite my smiles looked really worried. She was much relieved to find out that despite the place being called Resus I wasn’t in need of any and that I hadn’t actually had a heart attack.

After several hours of trying to find me a bed, the hospital had about 2 spare at this point, I was moved up to the ward. It just so happened the 2 spare where in the same room and they the other was soon filled up. I shared that room with a guy that just sat stairing at the wall all day or sleeping and a guy that had had a stroke and spent the day pissing into bottles or shitting in a bag. Not long after I got there the other spare bed was filled by a wee guy with a huge O2 mask on that I was convinced wasn’t going to see it through the night. I’d been hyperventilating when I came in thanks to the pain when I took deep breaths but this guy was something else. He was up at 50-60 breaths per minute, his BP topped out at 240/168 and they could only find one place they could both draw blood from and put an IV into as his arms and legs were that swollen. He was really struggling and his alarms were going off all night. They also had a couple of floor fans on him trying to keep his temp down. So between my pain/discomfort I also had the fans, the alarms, the guys breathing and the stroke guys toilet habits keeping me awake almost all night.

One thing I’ll say though is they like to keep you fed. From the moment I got ont he ward until I left just before noon I think they must have gave me four meals! And thats not including tea and biscuits.

So anyway here I am now trying to find things that I can do that won’t wind up Vonnie or kill me. I’ll likely be off work for at least a week and depending on how I do at my GP’s on tuesday I may be off for another week as well. Just going to the shops knackers me out thanks to my breathing!

I've sat since my own hosted blog went down wondering whatthe hell I've done with my backups. I've remembered now though.

I've deleted them. All of them.

You may think this is a bad thing but I'll tell you why. Those of you that read this will know that I never use LJ. I can't stand the structure/look and I can't stand how limited it is with it's features. But because I get more folk reading my LJ than my actual site I decided a wee while ago to cross post my ordinary entries here as well but direct all comments over to my own site. Not that many of you commented on it anyway but thats not the point

The point is though that the plugin that allowed me to cross post also allowed me to transfer over all my previous posts as well. Due to the age of my blog though it was going to take a long time to do so I never really got around to do it. Then I remembered that I accidentally started the process one day at work and a few hours later it had 'backed up' most of the blog to LJ. I think I've got from 2005 onwards on here. I've also got what little I had from before then backed up as text files on my laptop but that only covered me until early 2007.

Woohoo as they say.

I'm still working on getting my domain back up and running so we might see it back up bofre I go back to work

Talking of health I'll try and update later on the last few days. Most folk will be bored by the length of it but my next post should hopefully cover my brush with an ECG machine and my encounter with Darth Vader.

I've been trying to sort out my apocrypha.co.uk domain so that I can get my blog back up and running but I'm hitting snags at every turn.

First off I couldn't find the domain on any of the sites I use for buying them. Eventually I remembered that when Mark first started hosting my site rather than use my own server we moved it over to his account to make nameserver changes etc easier any time he updated his hosting. If I set up an account with the company he uses it should be the work of two minutes to transfer it back over to me and from there move it back over to my usual company.

Then once Mark managed t find the signup page which was hidden somewhere that neither of us to easily find it I hit a snag. You need a valid credit/debit card to create the account. Thats never been a problem before but apparently my debit card is out of date despite its expiry date being in 2009. Every other card I've tried with them has had the same problem and now I'm waiting on them getting back to me. I've been waiting since Saturday night and still nothing so I think I'll be nudging them later on today if I've still not heard anything.

I've also got to work out how to organise my my hosting. Currently all my sites work from the one hosting package with the separate sites being registered as addon domains. My problem being the base domain name isn't what I want it to be and is going to require reinstalling one of the blogs from scratch and a bit of jiggery pokery to get it all on an even keel. Basically more time and money than I have at the moment. Joy.

It seems my blogs webhost can't pay its bills on time.

I *think* I have a backup somewhere thats got everything up until March but anything after that is a goner. Now the question is what PC did I make the backup on? I installed a DB backup plugin on my blog from work so it may be on my laptop but I can't see it.

Either way normal blog services will return once either I move everything over to my own server or the webhost gets its finger out and pays its bills.

Originally published at The Apochrypha. Please leave any comments there.

Right my brains fried thanks to work, home and lack of play so I’ve came on here for 5 minutes just to throw together a brain dump and get away from payroll work for a wee while.

I feel about 2 inches tall. I won’t go into the whole story but whilst I ran to the toilet yesterday Nairn got his hands on a steak knife and cut his hands. The cuts aren’t that bad but both of them are between the thumb and forefinger so they kept opening back up and our plasters were just too small. Ended up spending 3 hours with him and Erica in A&E yesterday afternoon to get someone to check him over and get some proper dressings on them. He’s fine and apart from when it started bleeding again when the nurse was applying the dressings he was in great spirits almost the entire time. I still left him alone long enough to hurt himself though.

Vonnie went up to see Emma in Aberdeen over the weekend so I had the babies from Saturday afternoon onwards. I’ve been on a diet for the last week but I cheated on Saturday night. We sat down and watched a DVD with some popcorn before I put the babies to bed which was entirely healthy and not at all bad for my teeth…honest.

We’ve got 2 baby ducks to add to our collection of poultry.

We should have had a better hatch rate than that but our incubator is shit. We seem to be getting a 33/66 success rate which isn’t very good. Vonnie picked up 2 more chicks from a breeder on the way back down from Aberdeen yesterday and I picked up a delivery of 6 Scots Grey eggs this morning. Hopefully that should be us and with a little luck the hens we have will start laying any day now.

Vonnie also picked up some spares for the bikes from Ebay the other day which arrived this morning so hopefully I can have the bikes up and running again pretty soon.

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Originally published at The Apochrypha. Please leave any comments there.

Vonnie managed to pick up a splashproof keyboard on ebay for buttons the other day so now I can actually type on this computer without having to use the virtual keyboard! I don’t think I’ve seen such a user unfriendly piece of software in my life, half the letters you click on don’t register so you end up with something that wouldn’t look out of place on a teenagers SMS text message.

I’ve had the last week off work with the intention of gutting this house but as I’ve actually only ended up with two days without the kids I’ve not actually got anywhere near as much done as I’d hoped. Last weekend was taken over with Erica’s birthday. It’s hard to believe that shes one year old now!

We also got stuck into the garden over the week and the hedge is finally down and after hiring a chipper on friday most of it is now being used as mulch around the garden or as flooring in the chicken run. We also were planting the flowers we had bought this week in our front garden at 10pm on friday night! Theres proof if anything of how busy this week has been. Most nights this week I’ve been in bed for 9pm which is getting silly and in fact I was in bed by 8pm last night! We also finally managed to build up the swing set that we got for the kids over a year ago but just as the storm hit yesterday we had just built the first section and were determined to get it finished. I’m still trying to work out just how stupid it was building a metal frame in the middle of a thunderstorm whilst standing next to an electrical substation. I get the feeling we may be sponsoring the Darwin Awards next year.

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