Oliver's Blog

In preparation for our house move next month I am in the process of moving all my hosted web sites from my server on to external hosting. I’m going to start with this blog which will be moved next week.. hopefully there will be minimal downtime as I swap from one to the other, but you may notice the whole site being unavailable for a couple of days (sorry to all my avid readers, I know you’ll be disappointed.. er, are you there??? hellooo????).

I was taken on my first proper mountain biking experience today. Tom and his mate Sven came over and demonstrated how to cause extreme pain and tiredness. We went to the Afan Forest Centre and attempted a trail known as ‘The Wall’. 26km long, with a 500m ascent and plenty of rocks, narrow runs and tree stumps.

Welsh… it’s all bloomin’ foreign to me. Having got through pages 1-9 of Usborne’s “Welsh for beginners” I am now thoroughly confused as to how a language can get by without the letters J, K, Q, V, X, or Z in the alphabet whilst having at least three letters dedicated to covering my computer screen in spittle. I would like to say that I am now capable of advising people what my name is, asking them the reciprocating question, introducing other friends and greeting random Welsh strangers. But I can’t, the words went through my ears and never made contact with any brain matter along the way. I think I shall have to dedicate my car journeys to listening to the CD more, hopefully without being pulled over for driving with the book on the steering wheel (joke… mom, before you panic! I’d obviously put it on the seat next to me and keeping leaning over to read it). Further topics I shall look forward to include “Looking for things”, “Table Talk” and “Shopping”. The only problem I can see with my current learning methodology is it doesn’t include the most useful features of a language that everyone should have a basic understanding of: slang… I will need to cover that before Poppy starts learning Welsh at school so I can at least know when she’s added an expletive to whatever the translation of “that’s so unfair” is. The worst I can manage at the moment is calling someone a chimney.

In house news, I’ve just found out that our mortgage has been approved… just need to hope our buyer gets one too.

Yesterday was the official packing away ceremony for my Scalextric track. I gave it a good couple of hours of ‘testing’ before putting it in to the box whilst also sorting out a couple of bin bags of junk. Hopefully there’ll be a better place to set it up in the new house (hint hint…).. or maybe I could leave it in the box and just put a telly on the lounge wall instead

And when I arrived back on Friday evening I was greeted by the long awaited ‘Sold’ sign on our front driveway.

It’s our five year wedding anniversary today. Apparently that is our ‘wood’ anniversary (cue for humorous puns and forthcoming giggles as appropriate). Luckily my calendar reminded me so I was able to remember to purchase the customary marriage tax that is a bunch of flowers (oh how romantic am I!) and to my amazement they were actually delivered this morning… unlike Interflora from last year (or was it the year before that?) who ended up sending an apology bunch of flowers several days later – they were however much better than the ones I’d actually ordered anyway. I’m off tonight to the quiz in celebration. Well, maybe not in celebration but I’m going there anyway. Come on you Village People!