Hard to believe Jack was 5 last Thursday. He spent the day at Woburn Safari park. On Friday we took him out for a pub lunch at the Fancott Arms. We got to go on the miniature railway that they have.

The rest of the weekend was a marathon of Zelda (Twilight Princess) which he loves. When he first saw it a few months ago, he liked telling me what to do, but was reluctant to try it himself for fear of failing. He's gradually got better and better at playing, though he still gets easily frustrated if there's something he can't do first time.

Tags: birthday, jack
Current Location: home
Feeling: happy

Yesterday was our tenth wedding anniversary. As a surprise I took T down to London. Things started off well on the train there, when we were given complementary drinks because the tea making equipment had broken down. One of the perks of traveling first class.

I'd booked a suite at Waldorf Hilton in Aldwych. On arrival, we were guided to a special check-in area, with free drinks. Then we were shown to our room by our concierge, Pam. We mentioned to her that it was our anniversary on the way up.

The room was amazing, it had a separate living room and bedroom, and the decor was nicely clean and modern.

T in our Suite at the Waldorf

After about half an hour, room service delivered us a bottle of complementary champagne, which was a lovely surprise from Pam. We spent the afternoon drinking it and watching Music and Lyrics in the room.

We went down for dinner at six, all of the staff members that we met wished us a happy anniversary. The food was lovely. T had soup and a pasta dish, I had wild mushrooms and chicken. During the meal they gave us another couple of glasses of champagne, and afterwards they bought out a small, cream filled, strawberry tart with "Happy 10th Anniversary" drawn on the plate in chocolate.

After dinner, we headed next door to the Novello Theatre to watch The Drowsy Chaperone. I'm not a huge fan of musicals, but I was laughing out loud at some points. I've a feeling that if you are a musical buff, then there's a lot more in-jokes in there. T loved it.

Afterwards we headed back to the room and ordered another bottle of champagne. We watched Ghost Rider, which was woeful, but it didn't seem to matter.

I'd like to thank the staff at the Hilton for spoiling us, it made it a wonderfully special day.

Tags: anniversary, hotel, photo
Current Location: home
Feeling: happy

Too funny. I challenge you to not laugh out loud at #4, maybe that's just my juvenile side showing through.

Tags: humour
Current Location: work
Feeling: amused

After about four years, I'm finished at the orthodentist. My teeth are now very straight.

A summary:

• Three teeth extracted
• Three years of braces
• One general anaesthetic
• One concious sedative
• Jaw bone drilled twice
• One implant
• One chain
• Gums lowered in two places
• Five local anaesthetics (that I remember)

All in all about £5,500 worth of treatment, eek, and they didn't fix the problem I actually started out wanting fixed. I'm very happy with the changes though.

Tags: dentist
Current Location: work
Feeling: happy

Since getting bags for life from Tesco, I've a 4 out of 10 record for remembering them.

Web 2.0 or Star Wars?

I got 30, not sure if that is good or bad.

Feeling: amused

Finally got round to writing about this, only a couple more entries to go

We had breakfast in the hotel in Ballachulish then headed off on the road to Aberdeen. About 3 miles in to the journey the exhaust started dragging along the ground. We pulled over and called the RAC. It took a couple of hours and numerous phone calls for someone to appear. During that time we saw a couple of jets flying down the valley. Also a friendly chap from a local B&B tied the exhaust back on. The RAC man, when he arrived, said that that was all he would have done, and that there were no nearby garages that had a replacement available. Rather foolishly I asked him whether it would get us to Aberdeen, and he agreed that it would.

We had a quick lunch in a Fort William, before heading across country towards Aberdeen. It was a lovely sunny day, the scenery in the highlands is quite spectacular. About a third of the way there, the exhaust started dragging again. The heat of the exhaust had worn through the tie. Luckily there was a bit of discarded rope on the side of the road, so I used that to tie it up again.

We carried on in to whiskey country, the weather started to get a bit grimmer over towards the east coast. The exhaust fell off once more and I got rained on fixing it back with the remains of the rope. We started hitting some bigger towns, and eventually found a big retail park, where I bought some garden wire. We then got to Aberdeen without further incident at around 5pm.

I phone around for a Kwik Fit, and managed to drive out to one. The exhaust fell off one more time, and I used the garden wire to put it back. They didn't have my car in their books (didn't think a Peugeot 307 would be that much of a problem), so it would have taken 2 days to get a replacement part. The guy took pity on me and offered to cut the offending bit of the exhaust off. I got the impression that there were plenty of people wanting this operation done for the sound of the engine.

The hotel we stayed at in Aberdeen was quite nice, very pretty from the outside but a bit old and fusty inside. It didn't help that we had a smoking room, and I suppose the fact that we'd been so spoilt the night before counted against it too. We did have a nice meal there, before heading off to watch the end of the England friendly in our room.

Tags: holiday
Feeling: cheerful

The Federation of Rodent Cheesemakers. It had 3 of us cracking up on a VOIP call at the weekend.

Feeling: amused

Ged and Jack came round on Friday and Saturday. At some point we were reading, with the tennis on in the background. Nadal was playing and Ged commented that he had nice arms. Everyone went back to reading for a bit, then T-Burd looked up and agreed that he did. Except on closer inspection Nadal had since won and Amelie Mauresmo was now playing. Oh how we laughed.

Feeling: amused

The lights in our office at work are attached to metal pipes. We have 6 fittings - each fitting is about a metre and a half long. The pipes make up an E shape with 2 fittings on each prong. The pipes are screwed in to the ceiling.

Yesterday half of the piping came off the ceiling. Had my colleague been sitting in his seat at the time he'd might have been seriously hurt.

The cause was using the rawl plugs for concrete rather than those for plaster board.