Here is a picture of my house burning down. Nearly.
One of the things that is occasionally at the back of my mind when I come home from work is “What if my house burned down while I was away?” It hasn’t happened yet, but today was as close as it gets.
Been a while since I wrote a blog entry. It’s not that I haven’t been doing much, just nothing that really warranted a full blog entry. I’ve been in Dublin for a while - could have written about that, maybe, but that’s already covered here. This time round I saw the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, although I didn’t get any photos. I say I saw the parade, although mostly I saw the backs of people’s heads as it was a nice sunny day and O’Connell Street was jammed full of people.
So, anyway, here’s a few miscellaneous pictures from my camera:
This one was taken a little while ago (obviously!) - I don’t know why but I thought it was amusing to look out of the window and see my car turned into a white blob. Needless to say it didn’t stay like that for long. I won’t bother to post my Crime Watch style blurred photo of one of the ill-disciplined local children using it as a step to climb over the fence.
You want more pictures?
It’s been a while since my last site entry but that’s (mostly) because I’ve been away on a well-deserved holiday to Thailand. I had planned to go away earlier in the year but that didn’t happen due to work commitments. That excuse no longer existed by the end of September, so I made my plans for a holiday.
I chose Thailand because I expected it to be a relatively easy place to travel to and around. I’d decided to travel on my own and to go as an independent traveler, rather than as part of a package holiday or tour group. My concrete plans extended as far as a return plane ticket to Bangkok and three night’s pre-booked accommodation. And even that bare minimum plan didn’t go exactly as it was supposed to …
This is another “watching, not doing” blog entry. Can’t see myself doing this anytime soon:
I took this at the Thames Festival last week. It shows a member of the Free Running (aka Parkour) demonstration team performing a hand stand on the specially built stage. We were also treated to running, jumping and somersaulting from the rest of the team, all neatly dressed in their corporate sponsor’s logo. (Barclaycard - Who, incidentally, caused me a great deal of inconvenience this week, so I’m not feeling charitable enough to give them a free picture advert on my blog.)
Other highlights this week …
This is Albert.
Yes, that Albert. Prince Albert of Prince Albert and Queen Victoria fame, now more famous for their museum than anything else.
OK, I admit they may be quite important but I had a useless history teacher at school and the museum’s what comes up top of the list if you type “Victoria and Albert” into Google. If you really want to see how times change, try typing “Prince Albert” into google and see what comes up first.
So, what’s Prince Albert doing on my blog?
I’ve always wanted to play the drums but never really gave the idea any serious thought as they’re one of the least practical musical instruments ever. Large, noisy and require the use of all four limbs to play, so couldn’t possibly be easy to play, could they?
Not that I’d let the third fact put me off, but living in a flat in London, the first two factors are pretty significant.
The solution?
I recently bought myself a drawing board so that I could do some pencil drawings from the comfort of my sofa. Here is how the most recent one came out:
I’ve altered the colours slightly so that the picture shows up better on the web. The original is in light pencil. The picture is sketched from the left shoe of my pair of Patrick Cox snake skin shoes.
Turns out I’ve owned them for quite a long time, although they’re still looking reasonably decent as I keep them for special occasions.
So, why shoes?
I spent yesterday evening with James Randi & Friends - about 500 of them.
The event was this one, which promised “A rare opportunity to share an evening with James Randi and his associates in an evening of discussion about science, pseudoscience, scepticism and the paranormal.”
James Randi, in case you didn’t know is famous for being a skeptic and used to appear on TV shows debunking people like Uri Geller the spoon bender. James’ website his here and you can read more about him on wikipedia here.
So, am I now a fully converted Skeptic?
I decided that since 35 is a kind of “special” birthday - well, it marks the traditional half-way point in one’s life - that I ought to do something to mark the occasion. Since Clare’s excellent Christmas Karaoke/Dinner party, I’ve been wanting to do karaoke again, so that’s what I decided to do for my birthday.
I realise that the picture just shows me, but that’s because I don’t like to post other people’s pictures on the internet without asking. I could happily do karaoke all on my own, but it is much more fun with other people. And, of course, I’d like to thank those delightful people for coming along to help me celebrate!
Skate and Date is one of my friend Clare’s bright ideas for getting single people to meet up with each other. Predictably enough, it involves Skating (on ice) and Dating. It’s been a while since I last ice skated, so I thought I’d give it a go.
And after the break, there’s an “action shot” just to prove that I did actually take part in the Skating part of Skate and Date.