Note to self: Moving whilst nursing a heavy dose of jetlag and also trying to manage a huge client load is not ultra-smart.
I'm back to blogging, something which I want to be doing more of. Quick recap for those I haven't had a chance to keep in the loop (something I'm admittedly bad at) – The good Mrs Kitcat and I have just returned from two weeks in Canada. My cousin was getting married so duty called (I wouldn't have missed it for the world to be honest). It had been a while since I'd last visited my family so there was some great catching up, compulsory installations of Skype and so on.
Then, as Mrs K hadn't been to Canada before, we hired a car and drove to Quebec City (gorgeous), Ottawa (ok, I love that Parliament has rabbits and groundhogs nibbling the grass there), Toronto (bleh, big city, nothing special though shoe museum was fun and we stayed with the maddest woman in town), Niagara (which I loved) and then up to Algonquin Park to visit my old camp and show off my canoeing skills. I impressed myself that I could still remember pretty much all of it. Sitting in the middle of a lake surrounded by perfect silence whilst munching a plum is quite divine.
This trip was fun by t-i-r-i-n-g so to be getting the keys to our new place the day after touch-down was a little trying. We've been running until 2am each night and getting up at 7 or 8am each morning in a desperate attempt to empty plus clean the old place while somehow bringing order to the new house. We have a garden now – plus space to park – and it's all a joy. Except…
There had to be one thing and that's our bed. A great deal from Ikea, a queen size bed with integral wooden frame. They don't make them any more and I couldn't recommend them enough, too bad. Only downer is the blasted thing won't fit up our stairs or through a window. So for the moment we're left to sleeping in the dining room. Not so bad but not really a long term solution.
So we're trapped in a delivery hell between Ikea, Furniture Village etc trying to get two single mattresses and bases to slip upstairs and put together. Everything we desire is out of stock and every order we make somehow is getting confused in the computers. How do people actually buy beds, I don't know.
On top of all this, somehow I'm managing the largest load of client work I can recall. It's quite odd as with our recent wedding and honeymoon I've done virtually zero marketing work so this is all word-of-mouth stuff. The best kind of new customer, I know, but also the type where you demand even more from yourself to ensure satisfaction.
Anyhoo (as they say) that's the story so far. I wanted to point to two blogs I've enjoyed during the bit of down time I've had here and there…
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Louise Ferguson has been most enjoyably blogging her struggles with a new Motorola Razr. I can sympathise – my father was nearly brought to tears by a Motorala's arcane menus a few years back. When a T-Mobile chap tried to hawk me a Razr I tried it for all of 2 minutes before rejecting it. The Blackberry I use is a bit slow and difficult to answer in a hurry (too many buttons) but otherwise I love it.
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I'm a new reader of the gonzo-ish Drunken Blog which I'm rather enjoying. It seems to veer dangerously between serious Mac analysis and wild rants about lack of sleep. Fun reading.
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Finally, not a blog, but I just finished Cory Doctorow's Someone Comes to Town Someone Leaves Town. It's a wonderful, weird, sensual novel. Damn that guy can write. It was fun to read just after having visited Toronto as it's set there. Also neat was the book's central theme of free wireless access. Across Canada and at the new house I've been kept going by open wireless nodes from neighbours. I'm keen to return the favour by opening my 2Mb connection. If anyone knows of some group I can register with and use a consistent node naming convention from then I'd love to know.
That's it for now.
Jason Kitcat 