Back to the normal routine pretty much today. Shopping arrived, coffee was drunk. I attempted to go for a run but it started pissing down as soon as I left the house so cut it rather short.

Today I was supposed to be doing an SDK upgrade, but ended up fixing a shader compiler problem which was pissing me off. I never really did find the cause of the problem, but at least I managed to find a way around it. Synced to the bank using Microsoft Money on the main machine, all worked fine. It’s good to see a program that is fourteen years old still serves me as well today as it ever did. I’ve never found anything else that has come close, or will indeed sixteen years worth of my dull accounts data. I’m sure one day it will fail, I will then have to die as I will no longer be able to trace my financial transactions. I then did the yearly cull of all the filing and receipts. Now gone to a box in the loft, where it will sit forever more for no purpose whatsoever.

My Gyro’s have arrived from the US, which is pretty bloody good going.

Went to the gym and did Pump. Increased my weights by 2Kg again. I’m now sweating in Pump, I never sweated in Pump before. I really felt it, which was actually a pretty good feeling. I did a couple of music CD’s for Laverne, so asked her for some free weights sessions in return. So I’ll do those when my neck is fully restored. Saying that, it’s actually pretty good at the moment. I think January I will continue to consume all the bad food and alcohol as I have yet more social engagements coming up, but February I think I need to hit hard. Sort the diet out a bit better, may be exchange the sausage roll for a chicken breast, get the protein up if I’m doing more weights. Cut down on the alcohol. Stop eating so much bloody cheese.

So tomorrow we are off to Bournemouth for Jim’s (Jamie’s granddad) 80th birthday bash. I’m sure it will be kind of fun, to some extent. As long as it’s not torrential rain while driving there.

Woke up fairly early, so started fairly early. Found out most people on my team were actually working which cocked up my plans a bit. Picked up the dogs. Dillon managed to bash down the gate and made a run for it, closely followed by Sasha. They ran to the car. I settled up and took them home. They spent the entire day sleeping.

I spent the entire day working on something I’m still not happy with. I think I’m going to end up reverting it all, goes like that some times. The rest of the time I spent calculating the average unit price for electric for the year 2012/2013. Then after that working how many units had been used. Followed by expenses for inter lines and server components. I then filled in and filed my tax return. They owe me about six hundred quid, so that was time very well spent. Also tried to catch up with some accounts stuff. Put up the new wall planner.

I went for a run. Then I went to Spin this evening. So slowly getting back into the swing of things. Will probably have another long day tomorrow, split between work and accounts type things, as well as some tidying up.

Looking at upgrading my SLR, just doing some research into it.

Just a note folks, you can follow me on Twitter @mannmansion or follow my vlogs on YouTube.

This morning started late. In fact it started at about 10:20 after a beautiful nights sleep. Even though our room was right next to all the air conditioning units. We got up and checked out. The weather was terrible to say the least. We walked about ten yards and stumbled into a small Italian cafe that was serving breakfast. Jamie had the full English which was fucking massive and I had a giant bagel, lots of coffee. Considering the hotel was doing breakfast for twenty quid and it was probably shit, this was a fiver for a plate the size of the sun. After the coffee had kicked in and my bowels had done a good download, we headed next door to the tacky ticket shop. We decided that we could either get very fucking wet walking around London or do another show. They had tickets for the Wicked matinée, so we grabbed those. We still ended up doing a bit of walking around London and went in a few places. We went in Tokyo toys and I picked up a great ‘Death Note’ note book. Went in ‘World of M&M’s’ which is just fucking strange. We got on the underground to Victoria.

We had a wonder around in the rain, but eventually just waited in the theatre. We’d both actually seen wicked before, I saw it years ago and fell asleep during the entire second half (I’d had a long day at work). We had good seats in the stalls, I had a bloke with a large head in front of me which was rather annoying. First half was great. Cast not amazing, but good. They could sing, but I have seen better. No disrespect to the cast, but if you’ve listened to the original Broadway cast with Idena Menzel this was a pale imitation. It’s still a brilliant show though, all the good stuff is in act one. Act two is more just of a tie in with the Wizard of Oz with quite a few easily forgettable songs. After she’s nailed the final note of defying gravity in the first half, the best is over. Again, we left smiling.

Got straight on the underground back to Paddington. Picked up a rather nice pasty. Jamie had yet another burger. Train journey home was uneventful, until a pissed football fan got on at Reading. He then started shouting about if the train was going to Reading. He babbled on that his favourite film was “Planes, Trains and Auto-mobiles’. I’m sure his favourite book is ‘Where’s Wally?’, which would contain nothing but selfies. Drove home.

It’s been a great couple of days. We’ve had a lot of fun. And that, as I’m realising is what life is all about.

New years eve. To me, by far the most depressing day of the year. I don’t know what it is, weather it’s looking back and thinking, shit, what have I done. Or the opposite, shit, what am I going to do. Anyway, last years was particularly crap. Everyone fell asleep, I made a great effort and ended up dancing with the dog. This year I vowed to be less crap.

We started fairly early, actually it was 8:30, I was up like a shot and fed the dogs. We then packed them up and took them to the kennels. As we walked back to the car they made a bit of a break for it and came running back to the car, they had to be escorted back. I should say that Sasha ran to us, Dillon sort of meandered along a few seconds later.

We packed up ourselves, which did require me finding a shirt that I had washed earlier and Jamie had hidden. We made it to the station in good time and got pricey parking right next to the door.

Train journey was uneventful, other than I had someone sat behind me who sounded like he was losing a lung and spraying mucus across the window. I survived into London without picking up any plague.

We took the underground to Leicester Square and walked round for a bit. We then went into the theatre for ‘Book Of Mormon’.

Okay, I made it a point not to do any research about this musical whatsoever, so I would have zero preconceptions. I’m not a fan of South Park, I didn’t go overly much on the film they made. I must say though, I pissed myself throughout it. It took things to the extreme, by discussing female genital mutilation, and then takes it slightly beyond the extreme and goes into baby fucking. I didn’t know a great deal about the actual ‘Book Of Mormon’, but it’s explained in such a beautiful piss taking way. The Song ‘I Believe’, which really kind of sums it up. It’s a very far fetched religion which makes Scientology look as sane as trigonometry. It had some great songs, sung by a truly amazing cast. We were lucky that some of the cast came from the American touring version, so we had some of the original Broadway cast. Elder Price and ‘Arnold’ were a fantastic duo. Don’t want to dwell on it too much, but the cast is basically split into white males and black males / females. All the white women are played by men. The black cast were amazing. It was designed to be controversial and boy does it succeed. We left very happy.

We found our hotel, which was about twenty feet from the theatre on Leicester Square. It was frighteningly expensive. We had a deluxe room, it had a huge bed. We actually had five hours to kill before we were due to eat. So we went out to eat. We ended up in an Italian chain and I had a pizza, Jamie had a hot dog. Due to a fuck up, I ended up with a free pint. We went back to the hotel. We got in bed. The sheets got messy. I had a shower.

We watched a lot of crap telly and spent ages cruising facebook and twitter. We then tidied up and headed out for our evening destination, ‘Planet Hollywood’.

Now, this cost a fortune and we had pretty low expectations. Considering the theming of their American counterparts, this one looks like the inside of a Primark. We were seated, had a glass of fizz and then our starter arrived. I went for goats cheese, it was fine. Jamie had the prawns. I started ordering larger, Jamie started on the cocktails. The music was loud, the clientèle were loud, we were probably loud. The steak was ‘well done’ but wasn’t, it was cold. Jamie’s salmon was better. Dessert was fine. We didn’t really come for the food. The live band started up, we had front row seats, they were fantastic. They stopped just before midnight, we got more sparkly in, watched the fireworks on the TV, which was quite ironic as they were only about 200 yards away. We were in the dry and in the warm, outside it was a howling gale and pissing down. The band then fired up again. We stayed another couple of hours and downed cocktails. We wandered back through Leicester Square to the hotel, it was now all pretty quiet. I went to bed and fell straight asleep.

For once. It was a great night.

So today started fine, my neck is a lot better now. Had breakfast and then cracked on. A list of things to do today. First thing I wanted to do really was to move the iMac, but this requires creating some space. Now I have a very old PC in the corner, by old I think it dates back to probably about 1996. It’s still in use. Every Saturday I crank it up and run Microsoft Money on it. It runs Windows 2000, an operating system that hasn’t had an update in at least five years, Internet Explorer no longer works on it, the only browser that does seem to work is FireFox and that keeps on moaning that it’s out of date. I installed Microsoft Money on my main PC and restored the backup. I’ve now got that all working, instead of backing up to a couple of dodgy floppies it now backs itself up to DropBox in the cloud. I didn’t want to destroy the machine completely though as I’d certainly like to keep a copy of it. So I installed VMware converter and let it do it’s thing. I forgot that this PC is so old it only has a 10mbps network card in it, so it’s happily creating a virtual image of itself at 7.8MB/sec. It’s taking a while, and the first attempt failed at 97% with a registry error, I fixed that and now have to go through the whole bloody thing again. Still, progress. I cleared up under the bench ready to move the iMac, but it will be tomorrow now before I do that.

In other news, Jamie has yet another cold, I’m sure it’s the same one he’s had for about four years though. Walked the dogs. Forgot to have lunch. Picked up the dog poo. Sterilised an awful lot of bottles and buckets. Transferred my Chardonnay, it will need doing again as it picked up quite a lot of sediment. Put the stabilizer in the Pinot, that will require a lot of beating.

We ate out at Frankie and Benny’s, the new one by the MOD. It was very nice, had a lovely burger. Cokes were pricey though.

Came back and created a new YouTube webpage, so this is the one my videos will be logged under. Still sorting out uploads and stuff at the moment, but with Jamie’s help it’s actually getting there.

Flying tomorrow, I’m sure I’ve forgotten everything now though as it’s been about three weeks.

So the day started fairly slowly with my neck killing again and couldn’t sleep at all. I took an absolute shed load of diclofenac or there was just no way I was going to be able to move and be the life and soul of any party. That slowly kicked in. So I did something rather weird and quite fun….I sat there with my iPad and made a twelve minute vlog with no editing, straight off the cuff. That was pretty good going. Then spend ages trying to work out how to upload to YouTube, using a combination of iMac’s, iPad’s and PC’s. Using more processing power than launched the first space shuttle I finally got it p there. The channel needs a lot more work, so I’m not going to broadcast any links yet.

I took the dogs out and found a dead cat. So I drove out afterwards and picked it up and dropped it at the vets, hopefully it was chipped. I then had lunch and trundled down to Whiteladies Road. Picked up a new wall planner and a Richer Sounds catalogue. Wandered back and got stuck in traffic. Got home, downed a load more anti-flams and had a shower.

Mother picked us up. Arrived at Sarah’s. Visited Daniel in his lair, he was orgasming over his PC. I visited Connor, gave him £20 for drugs or whatever and admired the smell. Meal was very good, yet another roast, but this time it was duck. I consumed a bottle of wine, was the life and soul of the party, ripped into mother at every opportunity. I gave the boys an Xbox One, aren’t I nice. I then spent two hours over the thrown feeling rather dizzy, this is the second time I’ve mixed diclofenac with alcohol, I should have really learnt the first time. You don’t really feel drunk, just very disorientated. It’s a bit like MDMA but without Modanna. After one or the other worn off I was fine. Played some odd game. Came home, ate cheese, read a book for a couple of hours. Actually managed to get some sleep.

Didn’t sleep much last night due to my neck, a muscle in spasm apparently. So stayed in bed in a comfortable position to try and get some sleep. Soon time to drive over to Gloucester Road area and meet up with an old friend.

We met in the ‘Tinto Lounge’ which is one of these ‘uber’ cafes. It was lovely to see him again, hasn’t changed a bit. We caught up on eighteen years of history. He had fish and chips and I had a chicken burger, food was very good. Conversation flowed freely and it brought back a lot of fond memories. I still reckon it was the best job I ever had. (For those that don’t know, it was a company called ‘Cyberdrome’ and we installed large scale Crystal Maze’s in bowling allies all over the world). I think the only odd part of the conversation came after about an hour when I had to explain that Jamie, wasn’t in fact my brother:) We nattered for about two hours.

Came back and walked the dogs. Then I set-up my new iPad Air. All pretty straightforward. Did a few maintenance bits on the PC and took some power readings, ready for the tax return. Also played around with iMovie for a bit and did my first ten second youtube video (it’s a private channel, so know you can’t see it).

Then I retired to bed to rest my neck with a hot pillow and the first three episodes of Dexter Season 7, all good so far. Now must be time for a bath.

I stayed in bed while Jamie went to work and read a book. The problem now is my neck is killing me. Jamie came home and put on nice pants. We eventually got up, had a light lunch then took the dogs over to the field where we chucked a ball about for half an hour.

Came back and I fitted a gyro to a CP2, it has interesting behaviour. I want to give it a try in the open really.

Tidied up. Mother arrived. We fed her curry. There was awkward small talk and ancient anecdotes. Food was fine. She was only here a couple of hours, it was painless and bless, only once a year. Now I really have to have a bath and get some heat on my neck. Tomorrow should be fun, meeting an old friend.

So this morning started off with a stocking, which contains amongst other things, a giant inflatable penis, a cock ring, some chocolate bums and some cola cocks. Still could be worse. I gave Jamie a couple of presents, some headphones and some socks.

I had breakfast, the dogs had theirs, Jamie eventually got up and had his. We packed the car up and set out. A boot full of presents and two dogs. We arrived in good time. The dogs started to be a pain in the ass from the outset, we gave them bones and stuff but they were full of it. After a couple of hours we settled down to dinner.

Now after the piss take we gave Alison a couple of years ago for her Yorkshire puddings and mash we were a bit shocked. Okay, my started consisted of a bowl of fruit from a can, but the prawn starter everyone else had look excellent. Then on to the main course, she had put some serious effort in there. Turkey slices, chicken leg, pigs in blankets (mine was only pigs, plus points there), red cabbage in apple, carrots in honey, real roast. It was gorgeous, I was stuffed. This was then followed by home made Christmas pud which was also fantastic.

We took the dogs out for a walk with Megan, while they cleared up. We were about half hour. Then came the present unwrapping. I got an engraved wine glass from Alison and a book on helicopter accidents, which really is my kind of thing. Jamie got me a new G-Shock watch, which is cool as the current one the buttons are knackered. I don’t like the strap but that can be changed. I also have an angry birds helicopter and a boy-band calender. Alison got her Kindle and a coffee machine. We were out in the kitchen when Jamie gave me another present, it was an iPad Air, so top points for that, and the special cover as well. It’s engraved, “From your loving husband. AKA Bum Boy”. Ah, he knows me so well. We stayed a bit longer but it was baking and the dogs were getting fidgety, so we made a move. Journey was all fine.

Sat down and had a glass of wine. Will now have a shower and probably follow it with another glass.

Jamie has one more surprise, but he will have to sleep on this one.