Dag 396: Why I hate stage musicals and other assorted ramblings

Tonight will be my last in my current house. I am nowhere near ready to move out and although I have found somewhere pretty nice to move into I have no motivation to actually get round to moving in or fill in the forms or any of that other crap. After last weekend I decided that I wanted to get a flat in Edinburgh and get rid of my (t)rusty volvo 1800es and buy a Smart car instead. I found a suitable flat in the grassmarket and I was going to tell my agency that I was cancelling my move into the flat I had paid them a deposit on the week before. I was just about to ring the agency when they rang me asking me what time I wanted to meet my new landlady to get the keys off her on Friday. I immediately felt bad for being about to back out of renting her flat so I arranged a time and that was that. So I'm not moving to Edinburgh, but I still think I will get a Smart car.

Adrian recently mentioned that he had an anaphylactic reaction to stage musicals and so do I. They are one of the few things that I really hate in this world. I also hate many other types of stage drama - especially really dramatic and pretentious crap. In fact the only types of play that I like are murders/whodunnits and comedies. Everything else stinks. Some of you may have been reading this post with some feeling of growing excitement that you are actually going to find out once and for all why I hate stage musicals etc with such a vengeance, but I am afraid that your hopes are being utterly dashed. The heading is completely misleading as I don't actually know why I hate them so much. I have thought about it long and hard, but I can't really come up with a reason. I'm sure Adrian and I will be discussing this at some point on our up and coming trip to the land of the midnight sun, and if I come up with any conclusions you can be rest assured that you will be reading about it here first.

While we are on the subject of things that I hate, I also hate living in this country (and by that I mean the UK not Scotland) and would actually like to move to Sweden. In fact my ideal life would be having nothing whatsoever to do with drama and living in Sweden and having a left hand drive smart car. I would also like to be able to put my new Kent poster (that came free with my ltd edition copy of Du och Jag Döden) up in my own house!!!

I got one of those new two screen gameboys at the beginnning of last week and I have so far got 50 stars in Super Marios, which I think is pretty good going.

Yesterday Al came along with me to help me sort out a few things to do with moving house and I decided to jet wash my car for the first time (I have owned it for just under a year). The first roundabout we went round on the way back to work caused about a gallon of water to deposit itself on his legs and feet so I would like to offically apologise to him on the internet - to make it special.

If you get one of those things on a spring that you push down and it pops up at some random time later and stick it to the phone handle of one of our office phones with blue tack, when the things pops up the phone light comes on briefly.

Dag 378: Life in the slow lane

Last evening I watched The Missing. Reading the back cover it sounded like the ideal film for me to watch for the mood I was in at the time. It involved somebody who was seeing a therapist after her son was killed in a plane crash, but the therapist says she has invented the son and he never existed. I knew the film had a twist in it and when it was revealed it certainly was not what I expected. I won't spoil it by saying what it was, but the film did go down hill a bit when the twist was revealed (although it was still ok). There were two points in the film where I literally jumped out of my chair, which gives it a few bonus points.

As mentioned previously, I am being kicked out of my Scottish residense on 1st April as my land lady is returning from Australia and wants her house back. I have been torn between getting another place close to work or getting somewhere in Edinburgh. I am not the best person at making my mind up about things, but I started looking at flats near to work last week (in person) while looking for flats in Edinburgh on the internet. I saw a place near work last Friday that was really nice, but I also found a flat in the Grassmarket area of Edinburgh (so it was pretty central) and came with a private parking place which made it even better. I had the weekend to think it over. I decided I wanted the flat in Edinburgh, but Monday came and I thought about how if I took the flat in Edinburgh I would need to arrange to go and see it one night after work and it would mean driving all the way in and then I'd need to get a move on to get it all sorted by 1st April and moving my stuff might have needed more than 1 trip and so I ended up taking the flat near work out of sheer laziness. It is really nice inside and has nice views out over parkland at the back, but I can't help feeling a little disappointed that I was too lazy to go for the one in Edinburgh. Maybe when my new land lady comes back from her trip abroad (there seem to be a lot of Scottish ladies going on trips abroad just now) I will still be working on this same project and maybe I will have got my act together enough to make the effort to finally move into Edinburgh. Or maybe things will go even better and I will finally get to make my dream of moving to Sweden a reality instead.

Day 376: you and me death

When I arrived back at my normal home last Friday night the new Kent cd "Du och jag döden" was waiting for me. The first visual impression is that it is pretty black - the Max 500 cd that arrived a week or so earlier was black (like an old playstation disk) with black label and in a black sleeve, so I had kind of expected the trheme to carry on. This cd was also black like a playstation disk. The case was made of dark smoked perspex so you could just see the cover through it, which was also on black paper. The front cover picture is a skeleton playing cards with an ugly bloke, but on close inspection you notice that it isn't a bloke and she is a little odd looking (I hope it isn't based on a real life person - if so I hope I haven't caused any offence, and I'm sure you look good in real life). The pictures inside the booklet are also of this skeleton and girl - they are computer generated and the skeleton has quite a puppet like appearence, probably due to the fact that it has very long and very thin arm and leg bones. The girl has a big nose.

I didn't get chance to listen to it until Saturday morning on my way into town. The first track opens with a really great instrumetal section with some intresting drum interjections that got me liking it straight away. The whole cd has a real air of quality to the sound, production and arrangement. It has been a fair gap between Vapen & Ammunition and this one, but it is obvious that on listening to it it is going to be compared with it. V&A seemed, to me, to have some quite differring, but equally good songs that one could get into pretty much on first hearing. The songs on Du och jag döden seemed not to have the same instant catch to them, and each song seemed similar to the previous one. But I could tell that with more an more listening they would grow on me and probably reveal more depth than one tends to get from songs that hit you more on the first listen (as happens when listing to Peter Hammill). I do tend to feel that the more it takes to get into some music the more rewarding and long term the listening pleasure is (apart from stuff which is just plain crap of course).

I am currently on about my 7th listening and I am beginning to remember the songs more and as expected each one no longer sounds at all sumilar to the others (though there does seem to be more of a consistent style than the songs on V&A). Until now V&A was pretty much the best cd I had heard, but I di think the new one is going to at least match that. I'm really looking forward to hearing some of these songs at the concert in Stockholm at the end of May.

day 371: lost and found

Last wednesday night I went to Asda to do a bit of shopping and buy a DVD. My choice came down to Stigmata or The Green Mile (which were both available for just over £6 each). I had never seen either of them, but Al kept telling me I should watch The Green Mile as it is one of his favourite films. I have often nearly bought it, but always been put off by the fact it is set in prison and it may have some depressing bits in it. By this reasoning it may seem obvious that the best choice would be to by Stigmata, but I hadn't read any reviews of it and no one had ever recommended it so it could turn have turned out to be rubbish. The answer was at hand though, because Al was on call that night so I felt fully justified in ringing him up and making him earn his on call money by giving me a bit of film advice. He, of course, said I should buy The Green Mile, but I wasn't ringingv him to ask whcih film I should buy I was ringing to ask him if Stigmata was any good. If the answer was yes, I would buy that, but if the answer was no I would buy The Green Mile. The answer was a grudging yes, so Stigmata was what I bought. I was in a real mood for watching a film about a priest investigating stuff, so I really enjoyed the film.

We ended the week off last week by finally managing to upload our (mine and Als) pictures onto hot or goat (het eller get) and have eagerly been checking each day to see if the photos have been accepted, but they still haven't appeared in the line up yet. They say they will appear 1 working day after uploading them, so I'm not sure what we have done wrong - maybe the person who checks the pictures is on holiday or maybe he just feels inadaquate when confronted with our pictures. I should add that I no longer just have a picture of me with a monkey on my shoulder as Al took about 200 pictures of me on our night out in Edinburgh last Thursday night and the last one looked kind of ok so that is the one I posted up.

I have been reading up about psychiatry and the mind and all that sort of stuff lately. If you invite a friend round for dinner at 19:30 and by 20:30 they still haven't turned up you could feel one af a number of ways and how you feel may make you take a certain course of action. here are 4 examples:
The friend is now 1 hour late:
1. You feel very worried and this may make you call some hospital A&E departments to see if they have been admitted.
2. You feel annoyed with them and this may make you act cold and unfriendly when they do arrive.
3. You maye feel completely indifferent to the fact that they are late so you behave exactly as you would if they had been on time.
4. The fact that they were late allowed you to spend more time tidying up and preparing everything so you are actually more relaxed and in a better mood when they arrive.

So from this you can see that it is not the thing that happens that makes you feel how you do, it is what you think that the thing that happens means.

La Rossa extends her hands.............

Day 357: the tide of smiles turning

It is, yet again, some time since I wrote something, so here is the update (in no particular order):

1. When I access www.blogger.com on my Apple Mac I get loads of Japanese text for some reason, but once I have logged in it goes back to English. Does anyone else suffer from this?
2. I am being kicked out of my Scottish accomodation on 1st April, due to the return of my landlady from Australia, so I need to find some new accomodation before then. I don't seem to be able to motivate myself very much on this though. I guess I will feel a bit more motivated as April 1st draws closer.
3. I have managed to book flights for myself and Adrian for our up and coming visit to Sweden to watch a Kent concert. I am very much looking forward to it. I need to find some hotel accomodation and also think of some good stuff for us to do while we are there.
4. My copy of Max 500 arrived at the end of last week, so I have been playing that over and over again and am very impressed with it. I am already looking forward to getting the album when it is released later this month. In fact I have just pre-ordered it from www.cdon.com (I can't be bothered to put links in just now - but I may come back and sort it out later).
5. I saw a film called The Clearing last week with Robert Redford. It seemed to have some sort of twist in it and I realised I had got the twist about half way through and looked forward to finding out I was right at the end, but when the end came no twist seemed to be revealed. It is possible that it was revealed, but I missed it due to be just about falling asleep by that point so I will probably need to watch it again just to check. Apart from that I enjoyed it, but not as much as The Village.
6. When I finish work tonight I will buy a portion of chicken fried rice from the chinese takeaway in Mid calder and when I get home I will eat it out of a warmed up metal bowl while watching an episode of Jonathan Creek and enjoying a glass of Absolut Vodka and Sprite with 2 ice cubes. I have done this every week, on the 1 night I work late, for a very long time now and feel I may be getting a bit set in my ways.
7. I once read that each of us is a different person (or personality) depending on who we are with at the time. I have remembered this for most of my life so I guess, at least for me, that it must be true.
8. I find it fascinating to look at the stats for this site and see what searches people have entered that have led them to this site. Recently there have been a lot of searches on "Critical Mass", and we often get them from search strings including "Kiss DVD players". We have also had links from the following:
- Cremola Foam
- The plastic bits on the end of shoe laces
- Shirley Clamp smoking
and
- Wet f*nnies
Most of the funny ones have skipped my memory, but I'll see if Al can remember any more tomorrow and add them here if he does.
9. Al and I have tried to put our pictues up in Hot or Goat (there is a link at the right hand side), but we haven't managed to get our pictures a suitable size to get them accepted yet. Once we get our acts into gear we will post it here. Of course Al is bound to get more votes than me, but its only because he has hundreds of photos of himself to choose from, and I only seem to have 1 of me and its got my previous glasses and there is a monkey on my shoulder.