Hello everyone and especially london based people!!

This coming friday I am passing through london on my way to see the world, unfortunatly I don't think I will have much time to stop and see people, however (and this is were it gets exciting!!) I am returning the weekend after and I have the evening of friday the 30th free!! Huzzah!! so, if anyone fancies meeting up for a drink let me know, I am staying at Chez Turnbull so suggestions for a location (and directions!) are very welcome.

Looking forward to seeing you all

Matt

hey, hey!!

went to see "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Mans Chest" and what fun it was, I think queenspanky covered most of what I have to say, although I would say that too much time was spent rolling down hills, also there is an awful lot to be tied up in the next film, but thats just me.

found this today, shiny

I was working last night till about 5am, the last hour of which I was packing more kit into a van than really possible, it was a fine pack. Anyway, during the pack i noticed that there was a note on the kit reminding my driver to pick up four DI  boxes from the warehouse, the note was written on a purple piece of tape and I left it stuck across the delivery note clipboard in the cab. There was no possible way in which he couldn't have seen it, if not when he got in the van when he delivered the kit, so you would have thought he would have either have picked the DI boxes up or he would have called me to say he had forgotten. You would have thought.....

No.

Sometimes the people I work with are so unbelievable dumb. "Common Sense", "Initiative"? Foreign concepts.

So I had to drive to Dunfirmline. On my day off.

you know when, after hearing some news , people say " i just felt numb",  well I never believed them until now.

life is a bitch. 

Today this post is broken down into bits, feel free to miss out any you like or all of it.

Music

Recently I have gone on a  bit of a spending spree  on the music front,  during this I have bought the following albums:

Dirty Pretty Things - "Waterloo to Anywhere", like many of my albums I bought this because of one song, in this case it was their first single "Bang Bang, You're Dead", which is tres good.

The Band - "Remasters", apparently The Band are an incredibly well known group from America in the sixties and seventies, I only heard about them as one of the guys at work lent me "The Last Waltz" which is a film of their last concert, it was filmed by Martin Scorsese and guest starred such performers as  Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Neil Diamond and a host of others. Anyway, its a great film andif you ever get the chance to see it I would and after watching it I decided to buy an album by The Band and...

Neil Young - "Greatest Hits", who knew this guy was still producing albums? the man is unstoppable. This is one of those albums I have seen several times in music stores and felt I should buy but never really had a reason to, now I did and that is why the lyrics to "Helpless" appeared in this journal recently.

Leonard Cohen -"Greatest Hits", does it annoy anyone else that there are so many albums called "Greatest Hits" or "Best Of..."? Its really starting to mess up my Itunes ordering. Needless to say Leonard Cohen is a genius and if you don't know the man you will know his songs as they have been covered by pretty much everybody, my favorites include "Suzanne" (on this album) and "Dance Me to the End of Love" (not on this album).

Jose Gonzalez - "Veneer", hopefully you will have all seen the Sony BRAVIA tv advert by now, I was recently told that they actually filmed that live with all those bouncy balls, this pleases me (please don't tell me if this is wrong, I like to think of someone in the street one day being confronted with 10, 000 or so day glow bouncy balls coming towards them), anyhow, the soundtrack to the advert, "Heartbeats", is taken from this album.

Shoes

I finally got round to buying a new pair of walking trainers to replace the pair I lost in London in the "Endless Shoe" saga. this has pleased me muchly as it means I don't have to wear my steel toecaps all day and, as my job now pretty much consists of being in an office most of the time, this is good.

Van

WE GOT A NEW VAN FOR WORK!!!

This is hugely exciting as Simon has been promising a new van since before I started (15 months ago), I think what tipped the scales is when the lock on the rear door broke so you had to kick the door from inside the van to open it. So we have a new van (well, second hand, but the rear door works) and this was good, then this became funny when we realised that Simon had locked the keys in it as soon as he had parked it for the first time, well, it turns out that breaking into a van, without damaging it, is really easy. Which is mildly concerning.

Right now

I am currently listening to "Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini" by Rachmaninov, this is a fine, fine piece of music, at 8pm Rachael and I are going to watch "Top Gear".

Relationships

Oh the tangled webs we weave. At least in my mind.

so long kids.

Ruth and I broke up.

This happened last Sunday. Sorry for not telling you all until today.

Once again I have failed to keep this updated in any way shape or form. oh well.

Work News:

we have had several new people start at SKL recently, Tim Barker and Matt Thompson have started as project managers, and there is a guy called Paul Conner who has started as an installation/repairs technician. This (briefly) brought our number up to twelve, unfortunately one of our guys was called away to do national service, in Poland, because he is Polish. Which is quite cool for him but not so good for us, however, hopefully he will be back and if he still wants his job we are keeping it open for him. Having all these new people meant that we had to move our offices, we were lucky enough to get access to the building opposite our old one which meant we had more office and warehouse space (we now have 11, 000 square feet of warehouse space, which is nice). The other thing about the new guys is that, while theoretically my workload has decreased, I seem to be doing alot of helping out and showing the guys the ropes etc. Obviously this will quieten down soon but for the moment it seems to take up much of my time.

On a brighter note I was able to go to a small trade show on tuesday in leeds which was really fun (apart from the fact that we had to get a 7am train, urgh) but it was good to see some new kit and meet some of the dealers.

However, it has been really hectic since then.

Other News:

I got to see my sister twice recently (unheard of) as she was passing through on her way to and from the north of Scotland to go walking with my brother, so that was nice.

Ruth is pissed at me again.