Pictures Speak Louder Than Words

Indeed they do, so I'll let them say it all.

It's gotta be said that all of these blokes are really top. Here we have Mick & Steve, chippies extra-ordinairre. I think that they think we are great this week though because we've given them biscuits and choc-ices.

Here are today's. Not a lot of difference to be seen, but lots of work...........






Quick word about tomorrow. We're getting up at about 4am, driving to the coast and watching the sunrise on the beach. Cool eh? We got soup for a nice hot flask and gonna buy some nice rolls on the way - oh the joys of 24hr Tesco :o)

So, expect some good pics tomorrow.....maybe.

Walking.........

I did mean to post this on Sunday when we got back. It would have been far more relevant.
Anyhoo, it was a nice day and we decided to take the beast to stretch his, and our, legs.
Ended up somewhere between here and Norwich. Went for about 6.5 miles and covered it in about 1hr 45 mins. It would have been less, but someone had removed their t-shirt and tucked it into the back of their shorts - but not very well. Part way in and said t-shirt had removed itself, so retrace steps, pick up t-shirt and proceed once more!

It was only with about 15 mins to go that I thought - wish I'd brought a camera. All was not lost though, camera phone to the rescue.
So here they are :





Building wise. Well, today has been super day as far as the weather goes at 28º. There have been four guys on the go all day (just finishing). I'll go out shortly and see how they've got on. Fingers crossed for some serious roof work this week.

Time Off For Good Behaviour

A Friday off is always good. Fridays are good days as it is, being the end of the week an' all, but can't beat a nice day off.
Nice it is too. A bit windy, but fine and bright.

So what news?
Well, if I don't mention this, there will be fireworks so........ B2 got results yesterday and ended up with exactly what she wanted. 'Tis good news for everything but my wallet!

TOM (The Old Man) has been in touch from faraway. He should be internetting fairly soonly. Attempted connection last night, but was hit with slight language problems.

It's another test over these few days. SHould be good if it's similar to the last match. England off to a pretty good start. Just need a good start to the bowling now.

House wise, not a lot done. The weather has been pretty foul, so that's not so good. Forecast looks better for next week, so I'm thinking roof things.

Myself and WW are both off next week, all week. Something that we've really been looking forward to. The week finishes with a nice long weekend with friends at a nice place down the road.

Maybe more later.......

House Stuff

Straight to the latest photos. I'm sure that most of you will be relieved that you don't have to put up with my ramblings.
Incidentally, I'm noticing that there are many visitors to this Blog, but not many comments. I don't mind that so much, but it would be nice to know who is looking in. Feel free to leave a comment, even if it's only a quick "hi!", you can hide your identity if you wish, just leave a clue so that myself or WW know who it is :o)

On with the pics..........

Came home to find this on the landing!


And then this! I went into the spare room and wondered why it was dark!





The spare room, from the outside:


Our shed:


And finally, a quick shot showing our beast of a hedge that I have got permission to rip out!


Enough for now.

Was it really Thursday when I last posted? Blimey. Time flies eh?

So what's been going on? Strangely, the weather has been odd. Earlier on in the week it had been forecasting mid to high 20s all week. It got round to Thursday and I checked the forecast and it said heavy rain on for Friday!
Well, the reason for my comment is that myself and B2 were going to head off to the coast on the Friday. Having seen the change in forecast, we decided to go walking on Thursday afternoon instead. Having driven all Thu morning, I really couldn't be bothered with driving out to the coast, so we did a local circular walk instead. Hot or what! Blimey.
Poor old Jack was suffering, but towards the end, we headed down to the river side and he had a plunge.

Friday came. It poured. All day. As we've got part of the living room bay window roof removed, it was coming through the ceiling and dripping from the brackets holding the curtain rail up. At one point, I had five bowls all stategically placed along the windowsill. Also had to empty them about once every half hour.

So here was Saturday. WW very relieved to have a day off, having worked her socks off all week.

This afternoon we headed off to the cinema to watch Charlie & The Chocolate Factory. The original takes some living up to. Gene Wilder really made a fantastic Wonka. But Tim Burton and Johnny Depp - sounds like a good combination.
I'm not really that fond of cinemas. I went earlier this year to watch Revenge Of The Sith. This was the first time that I had been in over ten years!
Well today's event wasn't so bad. The film's been out a few weeks and so the rush had died. The place was less than half full, which suited me.
And the film? Well, the three of us really enjoyed it. Depp was brilliant. The kid who played Charlie was also very good. I seem to think that it had more to it than the original film, but it is a while since I saw that. All in all a good 8.5 out of 10.

Also today I finished off HP - The Half Blood Prince. Very similar to the others in the series. Quite hard to put down, very readable and a very edge-of-the-seat last couple of chapters. It leaves you with quite a few questions to be answered in the final(?) book, but nothing that old JK shouldn't be able to tie up nicely. WW and me were having quite a few debates about Snape's character. All good stuff.

Travian - still a bit addicted and a bit obsessed. Hopefully these feelings will ease!

I Used To Be Ruthless, not now.....

Just got a quick ten minutes before I go an pick up B2 (Tilly), so a quick update with pics.

Firstly, the titles of these postings. Now a certain person seems to think that they are a bit cringeworthy. Now, I've got to agree and from now on they will become as cheesey as I can possibly make them!

So on to the roof! All of the trusses arrived at about 7.30 yesterday morning. (Un)fortunately I had to go out in the morning so didn't get roped in to lugging them off the truck and up the scaffold.
Very warm yesterday, about 27ºC. Not very good for manual labour, but the boys did well.

Here we is a few showing our "roof"

It's all in the smile

It IS possible you know. Yes, it really, really is. It IS possible to go to a dentist and for him to turn around and say "very good, no treatment needed"
This thing makes me very happy. You see, wind back eight months and I had a real phobia about dentists. Just ask WW. I would have been happy to never have to visit a dentist again, but some things make you rethink......... a rotten tooth, for example.
There's no pain like bad toothache. I'm not saying that toothache is the worst pain in the world (I believe that childbirth and passing a kidney stone compete for that trophy), no but there isn't really a pain like it. This was very bad toothache though.
To cut a long story short I built up the courage to go to the dentist for him to stop my pain - this in itself took some doing. Six weeks (and a large bill!) later, and I had sound teeth again.
Today was the acid test of that. I passed!

Travian. I'm getting a bit obsessed. There's link to it over there [points across to the left hand side]. It's a bit of an addictive game. Fortunately it's not one that you spend hours and hours on though, you do a bit then wait a few hours for things to pan out.
We've got an alliance going on there. Just a few guys from that forum. I'm making steady, but sure progress which is fine. There are some mighty fine armies on there, but we'll get there. Give it a go.

House building. Well, exciting things happening tomorrow so I'll report about it tomorrow.

Other things......... [waves at B2] my most loyal reader! She's visiting on Thursday and much fun to be had!

Right that's it for now, don't want to spoil you with my superior intellect and wit (oh yes, sarcasm is alive and well on this blog)

More House Stuff

Much of a lay in? Nah not really.
I've got a week off this week. Somebody said to me "what have you got planned?", the straight answer is - nothing. Good eh?
I've got a dentist appointment tomorrow late afternoon, and picking Nat up on Thursday morning but that's it.
Been watching a bit of cricket this morning. Entertaining stuff.

Firstly, a wave to Clare & the boys. Thanks for the comments, good to hear from you.

Decided to have a bit of a lay in this morning. I think that I managed about 30 mins between WW leaving and the builders arriving. So what's been going on today? Well, the scaffolders are here again. They're increasing the height of the current stuff, i.e. taking the level up to the roof to allow for the roof trusses to be fitted and the high level brickwork. They're also scaffolding up around the existing roof to allow for the tile removal and refelting. I haven't go any photos of the front of the house, as they're putting that scaffold up as we speak.

Here we go. This first one is from a slightly different angle, but you can see where the chimney is.



This next one shows the side of the new bit.



This is the familiar angle so you can see the progress since the last lot.



This next bit shows our outbuilding. We're still keeping it so that we've got somewhere to store stuff like the lawnmower and bikes. We've had to move the door though. If we'd have kept the current one, that would have opened straight into the dining room! Here is the door, newly bricked up.



And finally, here is the same building showing the new doorway. Dave and Terry are busy working on getting the walls ready for a new roof to be fitted.



All in all, well pleased with progress still. We had really awful weather over the weekend. It poured with rain and because we haven't got any roof, as such, over the bays, water was really coming into the rooms big style. Not good.
Now though the sun is shining and it's forecast good weather for the whole week.

It's raining! Got your Mac?

So today. It raineth. This means that the cricket hasn't started which means that England can't capitalise on there 444 lead and force the follow on. Such is life.

Okay, it's time for me to sing the praises of Apple a little bit. It's quite surprising that I haven't done so already on these pages. Firstly a little potted history on me and computers. My first was as a 10/11 year old with a ZX81. Then came the Spectrum then an Acorn Electron. Then there was a pause before my first PC at about 20 years old. This was a mighty beast with a 286 processor, 1 MB of Ram and a 40MB hard drive. I kept this for about 3/4 years before selling it on in about '95. That was it......... until this year. Myself and WW had been maybe deciding it would be a good idea to get one and this was it. MACs started to take my eye and I made a few enquiries. The more I learnt about them, the more I knew that these machines were what I wanted. The rest, as they say, is history.
So why mention them today? Well I borrowed a digital camera from work - more of the reason why in a minute. At work I dug out the software CD, the USB cable and brought everything home. Something about MACs is their properly, brilliant plug & play ability. SO I tested this out. Plugged in the cable, plugged in camera, turned it on and blam! iPhoto (Apple's photo software) started up, it connected to the camera and downloaded the images. Easy as that! No messing around with installing software (90% of which you don't need), no messing around with on-line registering, no restarting PCs, no conflicts with other programs. THIS is how it's supposed to be!!!

Okay, so why the camera? Well we had a bit of a boy's night at the bowling. 'Twas muchos goodos funnos. Here's the pics to prove it......


Tony & John arguing over a ball!


4P not looking so happy. He should be though, he won two out of the three games.


Kirby taking it easy.


Poser of the day award goes to John.


Yes, all in all, a good evening. Finished off with a beer in the Livvy and then home in time to watch the final few get kicked out of the Big Brother house.

What a difference a day makes

The title of this post is probably a bit misleading. It actually means nothing at all. You probably read it and thought "Blimey, what has happened in the last 24 hours?". It was the first thing that came into my head. I will now have that song going through my head for the rest of the day. (the Jamie Cullum version, just to clarify).

Wow! Some comments! So it is true, Big Brother is watching!

*Waves at Tilly*

Let's clarify something here too. The time is 12:48. I'm not exactly writing this Blog on company time, so no grassing me up okay? I'm actually at home briefly. Been to Norwich this morning and need to pop to the bank, so thought I would do a quick update.

It looks like rain. This is not good building wise. Photos needed I think. Things have shot up a little and an update is needed. I might go and do that now actually and then post them a bit later.

Okay until then............

So here we are.

This is the first from a similar view to what I've done before to give an idea on what progress has been made.



We do like the brickwork above the window spaces.

Next



Bloody "Dave the Brick" eh? I asked him to move out of shot and he told me to bugger off. "This is my handywork and I'm on the photo" (he might not have actually said this!)

What else have we got :



Not that exciting really, it's only a bloomin' chimney! But hey, what the hell.
Notice the bits of blue polythene towards the bottom of the shot. That's where Dave has fitted some of our old tiles onto the chimney. I like that. It's like putting some of the old into the new. Helps give it more character.

Expectant Visitor

Well, it had to happen......... somebody has been making enquiries about the JA Blog.

I guess it's only fair to tell you that said person has already been mentioned on here a few times. Yes, that's right it's TG. Hey Ho.

A bit of excitement........ the entry before this one, I tried to enter several times, and it didn't work. Why? I dunno. Anyhoo, what I did end up doing was to delete my whole Blog. Ooops. I realised this about 30 seconds after the act itself. Bugger.

I panicked a while and then appreciated the fact that I've only got about five entries that I had hoofed into the abyss. Never mind, sort of.
Well I got in touch with those awfully nice people at Blogworld and someone called Stephanie was able to retrieve everything! Hurray.
Of course, the cynical side of me insists that they make this "delete" option very easy for you to do, and therefore you think them such a wonderful company when they get it all back for you!

Much house things been going on. The brickie chaps have been making great little arches above our new windows. Looks very good indeedy.

Short entry for tonight. I'm hoping for comments soon. Well am I? To be honest I'm really not bothered. I enjoy writing this just for me. I think it may put extra pressure on to know that other people are expectantly reading. Then again, it's a nice feeling to know that you may be offering some form of bizarre entertainment in a way. So the upshot is - I don't mind.

Okay, that's all for now. Need to crack on with HP reading.
TTFN.

And the weekend went where?

Blimey! Did it ever go quick?

Great start to Sunday this morning. Got up had a coffee and then proceeded to watch the cricket for a couple of hours. Fantastic!

Got to admit to WW not being as optimistic as me about the win. It was a bit tight at the end and the Aussies put up a great fight at the end. Still, they did lose!!!

What else to tell today. Not a lot really. Decided to get a fillum out to watch tonigh before Topgear. Ummed and Ahhhed between "Hostage", "Vera Drake" and "Hellboy". Settled on the last one as heard some good reviews about it. I'll let you know.

Right. Short and sweet as got a beef roast dinner to get sorted.

Have a good rest of the weekend!!!

Bit Irritated

Bloody cold sores!

What good are they eh? They start with a little twitch in the corner of your mouth and then after a few hours, you've got the full blown thing. They sit there causing a little discomfort, a little irritation. The worst is when you want to eat something. To eat you obviously have to open your mouth and that's when you cause more bother. I think that the cold sore sits there trying to seal the corner of your mouth up so that when you open up your mouth, you undo all of the "good" work that has been done. Stubble gets involved which makes shaving hard work. I don't think that it's peaked yet though.
So what of the cures? Well you can get cream. What does it say? For the "relief" of cold sores. Well yes, I do want it relieved, but I also want it CURED. What about a cream that "cures" cold sores eh?


Little Villages

I've started an on-line games called travian (www.travian.com). It's quite good really. You're on an immense map with thousands of other players and you start with a one building village and a population of four. Steadily you reap crops, dig clay, forest trees etc and your village grows and then you have a couple of choices - got to the dark side and invade other villages, steal and plunder or form alliances and grow. I'm very early on in the game, but I'll let you know how it goes.


Spelling

WW (Wonderful Wife) had a read of my Blog last night. She spotted a couple of typos. Gah! I hate that. I'm normally pretty good at such things. There's even a spell checker on here. I must try harder.


Publicising

Well, I've dropped this URL into my sig on THAT forum. Be interesting to see how long (if ever) it takes someone to spot it.


Bring on the photos :

Okay, these are the latest -







Pretty good eh?
We're please with progress, despite the rain over the last few days. They've also put the first floor joists in since these photos, so a little bit more progress there.

Bring on the other work! Should be done by end of Oct.

Hurray for Fridays

Just diving in quickly for today's post. Got to shoot out again in a bit.
Must make sure that I'm back for a certain reality TV programme on Ch4 (need any more clues then that?)

What is it about Big Brother that makes it so much compulsive viewing? That said, there was a period in the middle where we watched all the shows. This week, we've caught a little of some of them - in total less then 30 mins.
But, tonight is eviction night which always makes for a bit more entertainment. It is so much like a pantomime with all of that booing and stuff.

What else? Well, I'm thinking about expanding my readership - not that I can force people to read this or anything, but I could at least publish it a little. Let's see, currently there's only Mr TG and Mr J-A snr (but he can't count 'cos he isn't able to have a look for a good 2-3 weeks). I suppose that there's Mrs J-A. I'm sure that if she could find time, she'd have a look. Maybe when I'm out later. Shuld I leave a note........ "Please read my Blog". Mmmm maybe not.
I was thinking about shoving it into my signature on a forum that I go on regularly. It really is THE best forum out there. I'll tell you a bit about it sometime, but not right now. There's also anothe chap who I think might be interested in reading it. Mainly because of the house stuff, but these things are a bit addictive aren't they? I only started looking at Blogs a bit closer earlier this week and here I am with my own and another two that I'm following (so far!).

The weather's been a bit odd today (talking about the weather in a Blog is a bit lame isn't it. Best get it out of the way eh?) It's 5th August and this morning it was pretty cool and pouring down! Warmed up some now though and the sun's trying hard.

Mmmm looking back at the names, I'm gonna be a bit more adventurous with naming people. Obviously real names are out. Maybe I'll use made up names that sound good as the people that they are in real life. Either that, or I could use mini-descriptions e.g. Short-Trousers. Not that I know anyone who Short-Trousers could apply to. That was obviously an example.

Oops. Time marches on. Must dash.
More later or even tomorrow - with photos! Now there's something to look forward to!

Good evening one and all! Well, it's probably just the one reader and that'll be me. I don't care though, these things have got to start somewhere.

I've decided to give uploading the photos a bit of a miss for today. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm getting a bit bored with seeing so many of them.

So. What else to talk about? Well, I've so far told two people about my Blog, the first being Mr J-A senior and Mr TG. The former was so impressed that he's printed it off to disect in greater detail - good eh? Well, if the truth be known, he's actually not getting on-line for a few weeks.
So Mr TG (you're famous, you're being mentioned on t'interweb). He's getting a bit of a reputation for saying that he will visit sites and then never doing so. He said that he would visit here and leave a comment. Has he? *double checks* Nope!

Still, I shall not give up hope. My readership may be very small, but therefore, it can only grow. Jack, come here and I'll teach you how to read.

Okay. That's all for now. I do have the nagging feeling that I'm lagging behind in getting the house pics up to date, but there will be time - I'm sure that I can post pics quicker than they can build!!

More Pics

Bored with these yet?

Blimey, this one looks a bit big. I'm trying something new - posting straight from Photobucket. I might have to edit this later to make it more viewable (EDIT : yes, I was right!).

Just two shots here which show the first few courses of brickwork. I've got to download the latest pics from my camera and then I'll post them up this evening. That will get us bang up to date with proceedings and I will be able to crack on with talking to you all rather than just posting photos!

Here are the photos :

Up and Running

Okay, later it is.

So, one of the reasons that I wanted to set up a blog was to publish and share some of our house renovation stuff.
It all started on Monday 11th July.

After two days, this is what had been achieved by Brian & John (top builder type blokes) :



And here it is from a different angle :



That's Jack by the way. He has a little something to do with the naming of this Blog.

So, a couple more pics to try and get us up to date :

The Beginning

And here we are...........

The very first Jack-Attack blog entry. It's gonna be short and sweet. More later.