REJOICE....

....for we are celebrating a brand new dawn where the people of America have spoken and elected Barack Obama as their President. History in the making and we were here to witness it. Rosa Parkes, Martin Luther King and everybody else who suffered in the long struggle for equality can finally rest in peace. Amen!

Boo!

It's been so long since I posted in this journal that I actually forgot for a moment or two there which buttons I'm supposed to press and what I'm supposed to do with it!! Hopefully it's gonna be like riding a bike and the knowledge will all come flooding back to me as I progress though.

Welllll.........I actually headed over to catch up on news of my old buddy stonybloke bcoz he's been posting a load of piccies to his Facebook albums these past few days which signals the fact that he is still alive and kicking somewhere. If you're reading this I'm sorry it's been a while mate.....*hangs head in shame * For someone who is so telephone phobic I really miss the work-a-day chats we used to have. Needlesss to say I've got loads of drama and juicy gossip to impart and I'm sure you will have too eh? Oh....and I've hit the big 40!! now of course which should be an excuse (as if ever one was needed!) for you to rib me mercilessly....*LOL*

Ahhhh I wanna write more but I think I'm gonna need a sheaf of separate posts to mark the fact that T and I are not long back from another brilliant holiday in Turkey , many car club meets and other social occasions have been attended and enjoyed since I was last here and anything else that pops into my head to tell you. So....in the interests of not overdoing it I'm gonna leave this one here but I will be back later.

XXX

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Ahhhhh..........last weekend was a flippin' riot.

Had a great time driving Hal over to Bury St Edmunds with the music cranked waaaaaaaaaay up loud and my trusty sat-nav to guide me even though Mrs Sat-Nav-Woman clearly wasn't aware that some of the newly built roads around Bedford exist so she went into a bit of a re-caluculating tizzy and showed me on the display screen to be offroading!

Hooked up with our hosts Kev & Bex and the other overnighters (7 of us in total) at the meet point just before 3.00pm and then it was on to K & B's house for an evening of fun.

( Wonder what the neighbours thought? ;) )

Bex cooked up a storm for us early evening (thanks hon ) and we spent the rest of the time talking and giggling and drinking and pissing about on Kev's PS2 Singstar programme which was absolutely hilarious but I don't think I'm the only one dreading the meet footage Kev will burn to DVD.

I hit the hay at about 1.30am and went straight off to sleep but was woken again at 5.30am by the sound of Twister (Kevo) laughing like a hyena. He was sharing a room with Scout (Bob) and said later on that he only got about 30 mins sleep on account of Scout's snoring. Anyway they were obviously both awake and larking about again when their high jinx woke me and even though I managed to doze back off for a while I eventually got up about 7.30am and headed into the kitchen in search of some peppermint tea.

We left K & B's for the meet point just after 10.00am and even though the weather wasn't brilliant we got 16 cars in total and 20+ people with some of them having travelled all the way from St Helens (H & M - overnighters) and Cheshire. My good buddy Daz swapped my door grips out for his old ones God bless him and Twister also said I could have his spare boot cargo net coz I'd lent him my spare pillow the night before although I forgot to collect the net from him before I left but he's since texted me to say I can pick it up at the next Brum meet in June.

Off to the Pub for a pie and a pint then for a drive over to West Stow Anglo Saxon Village which is where this next pic was taken. It only shows 14 cars but there were 2 more off camera to the right. Hal is the left most of the two red GEN3's btw ie. the one nearest the centre.

( West Stow line up )

Drove back down the A14 with 4 or so other cars and followed one of 'em (Dave) all the way back to Milton Keynes in convoy. Got home about tea time and collapsed in a heap coz I was dog tired but have to say it was a cracking weekend and I really enjoyed it.

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Even though it's a weekday and a workday today has been a good day for a number of reasons.

My Dad has recently returned to France so T and I and my Mum went out for dinner at our local on "The Times Eat For a Tenner" Scheme. Our Romanian friends G & G were not working tonight but nevertheless they swung by on their way out elsewhere to meet my Mum and to catch up on news with much friendly hugging and kissing involved. I really am very fond of them both so it was also lovely to hear from them last week too when G texted me upon their return to the Pub from a 4 week period of absence (a fortnights holiday back home then secondment to another pub for the remaining period) to see if we wanted to meet them for a drink. They had brought a beautiful necklace back for me and a bottle of Romania's finest wine for T and their generosity was much appreciated.

Back to tonight though, and my Mum produced an envelope courtesy of my Dad containing a nice financial windfall. It came from money otherwise due to him out of his mother's estate. His mother (My Grandma) passed away earlier this year at the ripe old age of 94 after several years of degenerating health in a nursing home. She was little more than a shell at the end as the result of a brain anuerysm (sp?) she'd suffered some time ago which left her alive but largely vegetative so her death when it came was neither unexpected nor overly distressing. The formalities of probate have recently been finalised and it was most generous of my Dad to gift part of his share on to my brother and me. T and I desperately need a new kitchen so it will help towards that with the balance being squirrelled away into our running away fund.

And finally a message I'd been hoping for for sometime finally came through and it made me very happy.

I shall be away in Bury St Edmunds this weekend on a car meet I'm looking forward to (travel down Saturday and stay overnight to party with K & B and four other club members then hook up with everyone else at 11.00am for the meet on Sunday) and T is fast making plans to go out on the piss with his pals so it looks like we will both be enjoying our freedom.

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Hahahaha......it's so nice to swing back over here for a quick update/look-see and to find everything more or less as I left it (well, apart from the 116 entries you lot have managed in the interim!!) and lil' Barky still lazily blinking away at the top of my pages as the perpetual guardian of my secrets......*still loves that boy to pieces *

But other things have had a way of moving on and nowadays I find I simply don't have the time or, if I'm honest, the inclination to keep up with everywhere I want/need to be on-line so something has had to give. I'm no longer active on Media Boulevard (the place where I commenced my cyber wanderings about 3 and a half years ago) and, apart from hosting a cracking tune on its profile, my MySpace is also gathering weeds. The culprits for all this lack of attention? Mainly UKHCS (the car club) and FaceBook (I'm addicted to a handful of its applications) plus my MSN connection which links me to friends all over the world and so is lit up most evenings.

My journal is my journal though and I can't/won't give up on it altogether so I'm gonna see how I get on with updating monthly so as to keep those who do still read it and my family in the know. I'm sorry if that makes me somewhat of a bad friend (I'll see you when I see you kind of thing) but I can't find any other way to do this although it could all change again next week.

And so.......to some news at last...( February 2008 in a nutshell )

As mentioned at the end of the last post my Dad celebrated his 70th birthday last Thursday.



T and I bought him a sat-nav with Europe wide coverage to ensure he can always find his way home both here and in France in case of sudden and complete memory failure (dearer than an I'm Ian and I'm lost badge with his telephone numbers on I grant ya but I think you'll all agree....much classier ) and he and my Mum treated themselves to lunch at Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons with a chauffeur driven limo ride both there and back again. We've yet to catch up with them to see how it went but I'm sure they will have had a great time and as we'll be seeing them this Tuesday for pancakes they can tell us all about it then.

My Dad is an amateur poet who loves to regale all around him with his lyrical observations so a poem was bound to follow. Sure enough one dropped into my e-mail Inbox on Friday along with a "Thank You" card through the post and I asked my Dad for permission to re-post his verse on here coz I for one think it's a nice one and he was quite happy to grant it. So here you are.....in my Dad's own words....

On Entering my Eighth Decade


I wanted to pass through gently, did not want any fuss,

As I passed into my eighth decade, still rolling on life's bus.

This stage of life's now normal for most of us to reach

And there are now fewer lessons that I think that life can teach.



So I did not madly celebrate, I really had no razzmatazz,

No big balloons, no public flags, nor any of that jazz.

Just marked the day quite quietly as just another in my life,

And went out for a lovely meal with my even lovelier wife.



Any more than that, I think, would have been quite OTT,

And fancy celebrations, I know, are not my cup of tea.

I do not think my life will change nor anything will alter

Until, as it will, in some future date, my body starts to falter.



But I don't want to dwell on that, or on anything so gloomy,

My heart is full of friendships – it’s elastic and quite roomy!

I'm looking forward brightly for all life's surprises yet to come;

To think of anything otherwise would really be quite dumb.



So onward! And, yes, upward! I'll let the future's motto be,

And take things as they will arise, and just plod on quietly.

I'll spend more time in France, of course, but some in XXXXXXX too,

And in both places I will always welcome friends old and new.



So there we are. It’s happened. And it was some days ago.

I'm now started on my seventies, and still the couplets flow.

Sadly, then, for you my readers, you could still be in receipt

Of my vague versified meanderings: the collection's not yet complete.



Cheers, Ian

And now....I think it's high time we had some fireworks.

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Jesus! I flipped the calendar on the wall in my office over to the 1st of the month last Friday and was mildly disconcerted by the realisation that we've already waved goodbye to the first month of this New Year and there is then much truth and wisdom bundled into two small Latin words namely "tempus fugit"

So it must be time for me to make another note of what's been going on in this neck of the woods. Even if no-one else is reading coz I'm the first to admit my LJ has been a bit hit and miss of late (totally blames the addictions that are MSN and Facebook for that ) I'll be able to look back with a wry smile when I'm old and grey....*glares at anyone who was just about to say "That'll be next week then Sare"....and marvel at how exciting my life was.

And so to the more salient events in a nutshell.....

Nothing much to report on the work side other than to say it has been a bit slow of late, but it's always quiet in the world of residential property transactions whilst the cold, dark months are upon us. We use the time to put errant accounts in order and review our fish files (the ones that sit untouched for months up the corner and stink) It's also our one and only opportunity to have a quick snooze at our desks when no-one else is looking.

We celebrated my Mum's birthday on the 19th by going to a fabby little restaurant in Woodstock called La Galleria. It's somewhere my folks have been frequenting for some time now but although T and I have been before once many years ago it was lovely to be re-introduced to the place with it's quaint old style ambience and utterly delicious menu. In fact we were so impressed that we've booked a return visit this Wednesday when T and I will be celebrating 16 years to the day of meeting one another......awwwwwwww.

Last weekend saw me in Milton Keynes at the first UKHCS meet of the year. The last meet we had was in Birmingham towards the end of November and apparently it's unusual for anybody to organise a new meet until the spring has sprung. BUT, cars aside, the social aspect of the get-togethers is always a great laugh so this year some folk didn't wanna wait quite that long and were prepared to brave the cold. A January meet was suggested by Scout, interest was canvassed and enough people committed to make the meet viable so venues were sought and times arranged and on the day we got great weather, 12 cars showed up (although some of 'em had to leave after we'd been to the Pub so you'll only see 8 or so cars in the lake pics) and everyone had a great time. I didn't take a whole load of pics coz plenty of other folk do so I just swipe theirs and Kev usually makes a DVD record of the day as well but I've uploaded those I did take to Photobucket (mainly of Hal and my friend Naina's car coz she wants me to make her a banner) so feel free to have a squizz and a rummage through any of the other car albums if you want to (Clicky Clicky )

Not to be outdone by my mother my father celebrated his 70th birthday on the 31st . I'm gonna make a separate entry for that though coz I want to post a poem he wrote so this small piece here will suffice to mark the occasion and to congratulate my Pa again if he's reading....."Hi daddy"

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Just posted this piccie of the Jazzy cat lounging regally on her throne in a reply comment to one of sassysequins entries and am re-posting it over here in the hope that one of you might deign to throw her a pilchard.

( Her Ladyship )

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*looks at clock*

*sighs loudly*.....because this lazy weekend in which we've done absolutely nothing of any significance is rapidly ticking its way towards 6.40am when that damned alarm clock will go off signalling the start of the working week and the unrelenting daily grind.

Actually...having said that, I have to admit that whilst T is under a whole heap of pressure at the moment and he's had to hire some consultant in to assist him in getting ready for some impending audit of major import, my caseload was at completely the other end of the spectrum during the early part of last week (it did pick up towards the back end) and I was almost at the point of scratching around for things to keep me and my secretary occupied. It's always a quiet time of year for property based companies during these dark winter months with things traditionally picking up once again in the spring, but I think the current uncertainty in the housing market re house prices, mortgage interest rates and the roll-out of HIPs to 3 bed properties last September have all contributed towards fewer properties being put on the market and a more cautious approach from nervous buyers.

The high point of the week was that Cloud and Mrs Cloud (our Romanian friends G & G) texted on Wednesday to say they would be free the next night if we wanted to hook it up with them. We have to make social arrangements with them on short notice like that coz they work in the service industry (our local Pub) so their days off move with the rota, but it's always good to see 'em and we'd had to cancel them coming round over Christmas when we were sick so we were more than happy for them to come by. Even though we'd been at work on the Thursday a good night was had by all with us grabbing a Chinese takeaway for the 4 of us to simplify the food element then dusting off the PlayStation and laughing and jeering our way through as much as we could manage of driving game The Italian Job.

Tonight we watched the first episode of the Beeb's Larkrise to Candleford which I thought was thoroughly charming and something to look forward to while the series is on. I remember my Mum reading the book when I was no'but a youngster but obviously back in those days I wasn't particularly interested in period dramas so I don't know the story and it will be interesting to see how it unfolds.

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A bit of f-list reading over the last coupla days has disclosed the fact that many of my LJ friends have concise and well reasoned New Year's Resolutions whereas I on the other hand have some vaguely formed half-baked notions that, once again, I really ought to eat less crap and that I should also move around a little more in an attempt to introduce some action into my otherwise sedentary lifestyle.

So, in the spirit of embracing new beginnings (and so as to appear slightly more organised than I am) I have asked this machine for assistance and it has come up with the following....



Wonder how many I'll be able to tick off by this time next year eh?