Ben Shephard

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything so I’ve got a bit of catching up to do. I’ve been spending a lot of my time with Janine lately especially with it being Christmas. I’ve been I’ll for much of December which hasn’t helped much either. There just don’t seem to be enough hours in the day any more. I started the month with a bad throat / cold I picked up at work and that went away after a few days and I picked up another cold one of the kids brought home from school. This time it was on my nose and sinuses but it proved much harder to shake than the last one and I ended up going to the doctors just before Christmas and they gave me some pills which seem to have done the trick.

I wanted to be better for Christmas since me and Janine had all manner of family occasions to attend most of which would mean one of us being introduced to more of the others family and I think we both had our worries. On Boxing day we went to my parents and took the kids and it was the first time they had met any of my family but they had got a Nintendo DS and a Sony PSP for Christmas so Janine made sure they were fully charged to keep them entertained for the evening. There were a few minor bumps in the road but all went pretty well really. On the way home Janine let the kids play with their games in the car and this turned out to be a bad idea as they can get travel sick. Thankfully they weren’t sick in the car but as a rule now I wont allow them to play games in the back of the car if they can get travel sick on a two mile journey.

I think I’ve now met most of Janine’s family and friends but now I’m being introduced to some of the more distant relatives and it’s getting hard to remember everyone’s names. I’m usually pretty nervous when put in a new situation with people I don’t know but so far I seem to be doing OK. It’s definitely been a different kind of Christmas to what I’m used to and trying to split my time between two families feels a little strange. Christmas with kids is a whole new experience for me but it appears they can be as happy with a new toy gun as they can a Nintendo DS. People keep telling me Christmas with kids is great but perhaps things still feel a little too different for me for all that to sink in for me yet. It’s been an experience that’s for sure. Meeting the family for me wasn’t a big deal until the kids came into the equation which made me a bit nervous because they can be so unpredictable.

In other news just as I came home with my Christmas food shopping I realized my fridge had broken down. It’s been working intermittently since but I think I’m going to have to invest in a new one in the January sales. I’ve also attempted to fit the hard drive I bought for my net book but I failed miserably as the cable is the wrong type and I’ve had to order some more off E-bay since I managed to chew up the end trying to fit it into the hard drive. This now leaves me without a laptop as my battery has packed up in the Lenovo and my net book has no hard drive. I also managed to have a minor disaster with my Android phone today. I flashed the firmware and accidentally flashed the recovery image too so I had to re root the thing to get the right recovery image back on to it and restore it to where I started. I wanted to re flash it to get rid of the speech synthesis data I installed but couldn’t remove and it was sapping all my space for apps on the thing. I’ve got it all rebuilt as it was now minus the speech data meaning I can now install CoPilot sat nav. I decided to stay behind after work and use my work PC to try and fix my phone since laptops are getting a little bit thin on the ground in my house.

I just hope nothing else manages to break. It’s been an expensive month as it is so I’ll be spending the next six months or so trying to put back what I’ve spent this month. I don’t think there will be any fancy holidays in the summer of 2010 anyway not that there is anywhere I want to go. I’ve not been to one gig this year so perhaps I can manage to go to one or two in 2010 but I’m still avoiding the festival thing for another year.

Hope you all had a good Christmas

Ben

= 6.6