Life in the Bus Lane

Following another trip to Ikea this morning, I now have a sofa to match the armchair I bought on Monday. It was slighly too long to fit in my X-Trail, but fitted perfectly into Father’s C5 estate.

The old armchair went to the tip first thing this morning, then once we were back with the new sofa the old one was taken to pieces, loaded into my car, and taken to the tip as well.

The dark brown leather does make the front room look a bit darker, but that’s probably also down to the crap weather we’ve had all this week, and it doesn’t look like it’ll be any better next week.

A group of us from work should have been heading round the Approach Golf course after work tonight, but due to the rather moist conditions settled for a few pints in the pub instead.

Annoyingly it didn’t actually rain whilst we were in the pub, but to make up for it theres torrential rain at the moment.

Somehow I’d got through life without having seen this film, something which I’m glad I rectified last night. All bar a couple of minutes of the film are set in one room, and it’s entirely character-driven. Something of a rarity these days.

Coming next: Life of Brian

We headed out to Ikea last night in pursuit of a new armchair, after 12 years or so I’ve managed to wear the old one out, probably by sitting in it too much, nothing lasts these days.. Fortunately Ikea had one that I liked, in a size that would fit in the car, and more importantly a size that would fit through the front door and into the house (the last sofa and chair necessitated the removal of the front window).

The first thing we did when we got there was order the chair as you have to collect it later, they reckoned it’d be ready in 30-45 minutes, time to get some food. However the queue for the food was huge, so we did the rest of the shopping first. Heading back to the restaurant later the queue wasn’t any better, and wasn’t even moving, time for plan B.

After driving into what seemed the middle of nowhere we found the Ikea collection point, a very badly parked Discovery, and a queue. Thirty minutes later a plastic-wrapped chair-shaped object appeared on a trolley and soon made it’s way into the back of the car.

I lieu of the missing meatballs, we had to settle for picking up a curry on the way home.

The chair is still plastic-wrapped and sat on the floor in the dining room, I’ll endeavour to swap things around tonight before trying to get the old chair to the dump one morning. Then I need to go back to Ikea and order the matching 2-seat sofa taking advantage of their 0% credit for a year.

Just for a change it wasn’t raining today, so I decided to drag myself out for a ride to see if I could still ride a bicycle properly. The climb out of town was a bit of a shock to the system, but other than that it was excellent fun.

Parts of the ride were very muddy in places thanks to our summer of liquid sunshine, yet some parts were bone dry and dusty, so I came homesplattered in mud and with a light coating of dust.

It’s forecast to rain again tomorrow for a change.

One of the delights of the local pub is the pile of old games in the corner of the bar. After we moved back inside about 11pm ‘cos it was getting chilly we settled down with our pints for a game of Frustration, followed by a session on Screwball Scramble. It certainly makes for an amusing way to spend an evening with friends, even if Al did get a bit wound up by his inability to “roll” a 6 while playing Frustration.

I’m sat here looking at a copy of M*A*S*H Season 1 on DVD, and the character taking pride of place on the top of DVD 2 is B. J. Hunnicutt played by Mike Farrell.

The problem is that B.J. Hunnicutt doesn’t appear in M*A*S*H for another 3 years.

An early start means we had time for this lengthy masterpiece tonight.

I believe Schindler’s List was about 14^o

Back to work today after an extended weekend off. Minor excitement was provided by someone breaking into the old school that forms part of our offices, leaving us a sausage roll and a pasty, and nicking the worst monitor in the building. Other than that it was dead quiet as a lot of people are on holiday at the moment.

It’s “Beer and DVD” night later, we’ll have to come up with something good to watch.

“It’s OK, we’ll just go for a quick pint with the girls”.