Moving out

Anyone who actually pays attention to this blog (it’s a long shot) will know that I have been homeless for months now. Not literally homeless but alternating between my parents and my gf’s parents. We are doing this whilst we wait for our new landlord to move out so that we can move in. The positive side to all of this is that we have saved a lot of money by not paying rent. The negative side should be obvious to anyone who has parents.

As I mentioned before we were trying to look at flats which had conservatories or a garden so that we had some outside space. Well calling it a garden may be pushing it a bit but we have some french doors to a patio and double glazing so it’s a definite improvement on the last place!

The new flat has a little more space than the last one so my girlfriend has decided that a trip to Ikea is in order. I suspect she will take a very active role in deciding what we buy but will be nowhere to be found when it comes to assembling it all. The last thing I built was a bed which took me about 10 hours so wish me luck!

The house of the future.

Do you remember when the year 2008 seemed like the future? Not the future in the sense of something yet to happen but the future in that everything would be different and exciting? Watching Tomorrow’s World as a young boy it seemed like by 2008 we would be zipping around on hoverboards, in strange Lycra suits whist robots did all the work. It never occurred to me that 2008 wasn’t that far away (maths was never my strong point). What most people who create visions of the future seem to forget is that very little changes. Sure we all take things like the Internet, mobile phones and for granted and they have totally changed the way we live, but things still look pretty much the same.

People often predict how ‘The house of the future’ would look. In the 50’s and 60’s illustrations would show a man arriving home from work (on some kind of space craft) to find his wife cooking dinner with the help of some robots. It seems strange that these illustrations never seemed to predict that women would be able to work in the future (shock horror!)

It is possible to live in an approximation of one of these homes of the future now, and god knows I would if I could afford it. I can picture myself surrounded by robotic vacuum cleaners, in a oxygen helmet looking something up on my portable Internet Tablet whilst my girlfriend prepares me some space food with the help of a robot. Except robots are that useful yet except for entertainment purposes. Dyson have started to produced a Robotic vacuum cleaners so we are one step closer to the magical future I was promised.

I have looked at the Dyson Spares page there doesn’t seem to be any arms to attach to these things so It may be a while before it is able to cook dinner.

Don’t call it man-flu!

I’ve just recovered from my first Cold/virus of the year and It was typically brutal. Yes brutal. If you’re female then you may believe in something called man-flu which means a cold blown out of all proportion, but this is a common mistake. Lets just say that if you think childbirth is bad, try having man-flu.

Right, now that I’ve offended half of my readership (that’s around 0 people stats fans!) its time to tell you how I experience colds. My colds are similar to my performance in the bedroom i.e messy but mercifully quick. They also tend to go like this:

• Day 1: Feel okay but a little sniffy.

• Day 2: Feel like death. Unable to get up. Outwardly appear like an extra in a war film who’s leg has just been blown off. Rummage through the bathroom Cabernet like a drug addict in search of anything to dull the pain. Almost all bodily fluids attempt to leave via the nearest exit. Unable to communicate anything other than “Please…[COUGH]…kill…[SNEEZE]…me”

• Day 3: Feel okay but a little sniffy.

Black Gold.

Apparently smaller, independent coffee shops actually benefit from nearby Starbucks stores. The theory goes thus:

Starbucks makes people who wouldn’t normally bother, try fancy coffee. These people are turned into caffeine zombies requiring a daily fix. The long waiting times and the exorbitant prices force these consumers to look elsewhere and they discover the little family run place next-door which has been there all along.

I can remember a time when my home city didn’t have any national chain coffee houses. There was just one local place which specialised in coffee and a load of cafes where you could get an bad to average cup dispensed by an old lady who had never even heard of crema.

I don’t often buy take-away coffee as I can make my own at home and at work but when I do I normally get it from one of the three big chains who now dominate the high street here. I find that the staff in this store are actually polite and attentive. The staff in the independent coffee house are often too busy thinking about how cool their dishevelled hair and I’ve-been-to-Thailand-on-my-gap-year jewellery looks (answer: not at all) to actually make my Mocha in under 10 minutes.

Anyway I’m not too bothered where people buy their coffee from, anybody selling something with a 400% markup is probably making more money than me. (Although what the growers are making is probably a different matter altogether).

All this reminds my of a joke by Lee Mack (and probably a hundred people before him) “I like my coffee how I like my women: hot, dark, from a street corner and for not more than £2.50.”

Car troubles.

I’m starting to think I need a new car. I’ve had my trusty little Nova for about 3 years now (by trusty I mean completely untrustworthy, the only time it seems to be in full working order is on m.o.t day, somehow). She is held together by rust and still bares the scars of my early experiments with parking techniques.

I left the house this morning armed with a bottle of warm water, a scraper and my car keys, naively thinking this might be enough set me on my way without too much trouble.

 

Once I had scraped all the ice from the windows I tried to get inside. Several minutes and a few swearwords later I climbed in through the passenger side door. This is when I discovered the ice on the inside of the windscreen, always a pleasant surprise!

My joy at the fact that the car had actually started soon disappeared as icy cold drops of water began dripping onto my face from the sunroof above me.

 

Still I suppose it’s better than walking.