No shitting in the toilet

So, early morning alarm call. Roughly 6am, to get the 0750 flight from
EDI (Note the technical travel speak). Quick taxi to airport, no queue
at check in, all is well with the world. Then the announcement came.
"Due to technical problems, flight globespan xyz will be delayed for
an hour". No big deal, let's go get breakfast. 12 hours later flight
globespan xyz finally left the ground, 0200 we get to the apartment in
Majorca (Puerto Pollensa), which is nice.
Apparently you can claim something from your insurance company for
this, but I haven't really looked into that yet.
Anyway, awake the next morning and open the curtains for a look, it'll
be nice to see the sunshine after a long Scottish winter. It was
pissing down. No, I mean it, real rain hammering from the bleak, dark
skies and bouncing off the pavement below. "Better pop out for milk
and water and stuff then", I think cheerfully. The town (village?) is
pretty small, and a lovely place. Nice harbour and waterfront and
little squares and thing of that ilk. We're a little out of the
centre, with an apartment facing the beach. Three bedrooms, living
area, dining area, kitchen, couple of bathrooms and a balcony both
back and front. This is great, but a lot of heating when the weather
is poor. So, we grab a car for 3 days, only 60 euros to tour the
island and enjoy the horn beeping drivers that prove their masculinity
by showing how they can be aggressive with a couple of tons underneath
them.
The sun came out on Wednesday. I liked that. We went to the beach, and
I dug a really deep hole for the wee man, who fought a bit, but
eventually I managed to drag him out to see it. Four hours well spent
then.
Obviously I got my back burnt. It hurt. Now it itches. A lot.
So, back to the airport on Friday. Flight was delayed.
Saw a sign on the wall though - apparently the EU say that if you're
delayed for 5 hours you should get a bonus payment and the people from
the flying company need to come to your house and shower you with rose
petals. Or something. I was tired.

Dag 411: min svenskt har inte blivit bättre

Its now about a year since my last Swedish lesson and every day in every way I feel I am forgetting more and more. If anybody out there wants to write to me in (simple) Swedish it would be most welcome and I will reply to the best of my current ability - which isn't saying much. That way I may be able to start crawling back up the slope of Swedish knowledge that I am steadily sliding down. Maybe I should try doing my next post entirely in Swedish.

Next month I will be visiting Sweden again and (as always) this time I want to try and get by using as little english as possible.

Once upon a time my posts seemed to revolve around a single theme or story and often contained a number of in jokes that no one other than me would even notice were there, but lately my posts seem to be more of a list of disparate statements.

Here comes my latest list of disparate statements:

Last weekend I collected my new Smart car. It is red and silver and I very much enjoyed driving it from Yorkshire up to Edinburgh last monday. I have fitted my Blaupunkt Stockholm cd player that I bought about a year ago, but never got around to fitting in my old Volvo. I have also installed an ICE iPod thingy that allows me to listen to my iPod in the car, but as the cd player is such an old model it doesn't fully integrate so I don't get the title of the current track being displayed on the blaupunkt display. Next I will be getting some better speakers.

About 12 years ago I had a fairly basic home recording studio setup and used to spend most of my time writing and recording songs. Ocassionaly I would add some singing to the songs, but only when the house was empty and I would never let anybody hear the songs with me singing on apart from the fact that I once sent a tape with 4 of my songs with singing to a magazine called Home and Studio recording. The tape was eventually reviewed and I was pretty pleased with what was said, although it wasn't exactly a glowing review. The last pieces of music I recorded was about 8 years ago and I still have a copy of those last two (instrumental) tracks on my iPod, but most of my recorded output is currently lost. Recently I have been regrettingb the fatc that I haven't played any music for such a long time so when I drove my Smart car up last Monday I brought my old Korg Prophesy with me and this week I ordered enough stuff to be able to start some simple recording onto my apple powerbook. If it goes ok I will bring a few more bits of kit up here and expand my setup. Things have moved on alot since I was last doing this sort of stuff. I can remember when Yamaha brought out the first sub £10,000 cd recorder and recording to hard disk was unheard of back then. I'll let you know how it goes.

Yesterday Evening on my way home from work I spent one hour in HMV trying to decide how to spend some of the money I got from selling my old Volvo, which I no longer needed because I had bought a Smart car. I picked up various DVDs and CDs, but kept putting them back. I had a wallet full of money and could have bought a whole stash of stuff, but I kept thinking if I spent all the money then I wouldn't have any left. In the end I bought the new cd by Tori Amos and the Smiley's People DVD, and thats all. I could have spent about 5 times as much as I did, but for some reason I didn't. The other ground breaking think that happened in that HMV shop was that I bought the first non scandinavian cd I had bought for a very long time (at least 2 years).