On Saturday we hosted the first Thanksgiving dinner at Chez Darlington. Due to the size of our kitchen this became a bit of a logistical nightmare but we persevered.
Well, I say “we” but pretty much all the cooking was down to B with me in more of a motivational role, insisting that the spinach and cheese casserole smelled really good and that the turkey looked great. I got the easy job as it was true!
As I mentioned previously, I am in the process of reducing the number of websites that I need to support. To that end, some time ago I moved the content from StephenDarlington.com to here with the intention of decommisioning the old site. That day is coming shortly. The actual domain isn’t going away for a while yet, but soon it will redirect to www.zx81.org.uk/blog/.
If you can read this, you are accessing my new web server. As with all of these things, there is no such thing as a completely clean transition, so if you notice anything amiss please do let me know.
On a similar note, moving my domain from my ISP to another provider has also affected my email. So if you have sent me email in the last day or two and it bounced back (or I’ve not replied) that is why. Please try again!
I’ve been reading the magazine Wanderlust for a few years now. It’s a great magazine with interesting stories about places that are often well off the beaten path — my kind of travelling! A couple of months ago I took the unusual step of writing a letter. It came in two parts, a comment about my time in Cuba (in response to someone who said he couldn’t find any night-life) and a second, longer piece about my time in Gdansk, Poland (as a counter-point to their piece on long-weekends for less than ?100).
It seems like only last week that I was at a friends wedding (in fact it was just over two weeks), but on Tuesday two more friends tied the knot.
I’ve known R since my time in Norway. We met up a few times in Oslo and continued when we both returned to London. She had dreams of travelling, going back to Norway or Paris, or, generally, elsewhere. But she drifted back to her home-town, Bristol. Later, T, a Polish tree surgeon, moved into the flat-share she was living in. She jokes that while I tried internet- and speed-dating, she just stayed at home but had greater success.
I went to see “An Inconvenient Truth” last night, a film about Al Gore’s global warming lecture tour.
It’s very well done. Gore delivers the talks with humour — he introduces himself link this, “I’m Al Gore, I used to be the next president of the United States” — confidence and passion. (If he’d had this passion in the presidential campaign things could have been very different!) Even for someone that agrees with the message there are some scary statistics. Perhaps even more scary is the lengths that some politicians go to to avoid acknowledging the problem, much less doing something about it.
Last night we went to see Dylan Moran do stand-up comedy at the Hammersmith Apollo here in London.
Here in the UK he is probably most famous for his role in the sit-com Black Books where he plays, well, pretty much himself it turns out. It’s a version of Moran who works in a book store with Manny (Bill Bailey).
It’s difficult to say much about his show as he doesn’t really tell jokes as such, more a stream of observations. A couple of years ago when I first saw him live his most memorable line was “Children are just small drunks.” This time it was about relationships: “The first time you meet your partner you are generally drunk. Why would you do that? You wouldn’t buy a toaster drunk. It’s too important a decision.”
It turns out that 2006 is a big year for weddings. I got married in April, a friend of my wife got married in May and my friends P and I had a Civil Partnership Ceremony yesterday.
Despite the poor weather, it was a great day for everyone. They tied the knot in Wandsworth Registry Office with nearly twenty people present. It was a short but touching ceremony. They said their vows and exchanged rings.
Introducing two new additions to the Darlington household…
Bob:
And Cornelius Maximus Wilmington the 4th:
This year has seen a lot of changes for me already and another one is in the process of happening right now. A few weeks ago I resigned from my job and in a few more weeks I will be starting a new one.
I don’t change jobs every year like some people I know, in fact this is the first time for exactly five years. There are a lot of parallels too. I resigned from SAIC on the 14th July 2001 and started at Anvil on the Tuesday after the August bank holiday. Similarly, I handed in my notice on the 14th July 2006 and will start at Aleri on the day after the bank holiday. They are also both small software companies that specialise in products for investment banks. I will even have pretty much the same job title.