So this morning was thankfully back to a full week. Started reasonably on time. Today was trying to upgrade an SDK, which actually went okay. The problems came later when on multiple levels I was getting an annoying black screen. Something’s cocked somewhere, ran out of time today, so one for tomorrow.

Took the dogs for a walk in the rain. Someone had finally taken the radiator outside. Note to self, if you want someone to steel something, don’t make it bloody obvious and write ‘scrap’ on it. There was more chance of it walking if I’d locked it in a bank vault. Anyway, gone now. Wonder how long the next one will take.

The dogs have finally destroyed the hall carpet, so that will need replacing. Out with the carpet tiles again I think.

Jamie has gone to Nando’s with ‘Game of Thrones’ boy. We had Nando’s chicken last night. It’s also taken him about two and a half hours. I’ll check later if he put his nice pants on. He’s come back in a good mood, very suspicious.

Booked my class two medical for next week. I think I have a good idea for a vlog. I’m sure everyone will hate it.

Back to the normal routine pretty much today. Shopping arrived, coffee was drunk. I attempted to go for a run but it started pissing down as soon as I left the house so cut it rather short.

Today I was supposed to be doing an SDK upgrade, but ended up fixing a shader compiler problem which was pissing me off. I never really did find the cause of the problem, but at least I managed to find a way around it. Synced to the bank using Microsoft Money on the main machine, all worked fine. It’s good to see a program that is fourteen years old still serves me as well today as it ever did. I’ve never found anything else that has come close, or will indeed sixteen years worth of my dull accounts data. I’m sure one day it will fail, I will then have to die as I will no longer be able to trace my financial transactions. I then did the yearly cull of all the filing and receipts. Now gone to a box in the loft, where it will sit forever more for no purpose whatsoever.

My Gyro’s have arrived from the US, which is pretty bloody good going.

Went to the gym and did Pump. Increased my weights by 2Kg again. I’m now sweating in Pump, I never sweated in Pump before. I really felt it, which was actually a pretty good feeling. I did a couple of music CD’s for Laverne, so asked her for some free weights sessions in return. So I’ll do those when my neck is fully restored. Saying that, it’s actually pretty good at the moment. I think January I will continue to consume all the bad food and alcohol as I have yet more social engagements coming up, but February I think I need to hit hard. Sort the diet out a bit better, may be exchange the sausage roll for a chicken breast, get the protein up if I’m doing more weights. Cut down on the alcohol. Stop eating so much bloody cheese.

So tomorrow we are off to Bournemouth for Jim’s (Jamie’s granddad) 80th birthday bash. I’m sure it will be kind of fun, to some extent. As long as it’s not torrential rain while driving there.

Woke up fairly early, so started fairly early. Found out most people on my team were actually working which cocked up my plans a bit. Picked up the dogs. Dillon managed to bash down the gate and made a run for it, closely followed by Sasha. They ran to the car. I settled up and took them home. They spent the entire day sleeping.

I spent the entire day working on something I’m still not happy with. I think I’m going to end up reverting it all, goes like that some times. The rest of the time I spent calculating the average unit price for electric for the year 2012/2013. Then after that working how many units had been used. Followed by expenses for inter lines and server components. I then filled in and filed my tax return. They owe me about six hundred quid, so that was time very well spent. Also tried to catch up with some accounts stuff. Put up the new wall planner.

I went for a run. Then I went to Spin this evening. So slowly getting back into the swing of things. Will probably have another long day tomorrow, split between work and accounts type things, as well as some tidying up.

Looking at upgrading my SLR, just doing some research into it.

Just a note folks, you can follow me on Twitter @mannmansion or follow my vlogs on YouTube.

This morning started late. In fact it started at about 10:20 after a beautiful nights sleep. Even though our room was right next to all the air conditioning units. We got up and checked out. The weather was terrible to say the least. We walked about ten yards and stumbled into a small Italian cafe that was serving breakfast. Jamie had the full English which was fucking massive and I had a giant bagel, lots of coffee. Considering the hotel was doing breakfast for twenty quid and it was probably shit, this was a fiver for a plate the size of the sun. After the coffee had kicked in and my bowels had done a good download, we headed next door to the tacky ticket shop. We decided that we could either get very fucking wet walking around London or do another show. They had tickets for the Wicked matinée, so we grabbed those. We still ended up doing a bit of walking around London and went in a few places. We went in Tokyo toys and I picked up a great ‘Death Note’ note book. Went in ‘World of M&M’s’ which is just fucking strange. We got on the underground to Victoria.

We had a wonder around in the rain, but eventually just waited in the theatre. We’d both actually seen wicked before, I saw it years ago and fell asleep during the entire second half (I’d had a long day at work). We had good seats in the stalls, I had a bloke with a large head in front of me which was rather annoying. First half was great. Cast not amazing, but good. They could sing, but I have seen better. No disrespect to the cast, but if you’ve listened to the original Broadway cast with Idena Menzel this was a pale imitation. It’s still a brilliant show though, all the good stuff is in act one. Act two is more just of a tie in with the Wizard of Oz with quite a few easily forgettable songs. After she’s nailed the final note of defying gravity in the first half, the best is over. Again, we left smiling.

Got straight on the underground back to Paddington. Picked up a rather nice pasty. Jamie had yet another burger. Train journey home was uneventful, until a pissed football fan got on at Reading. He then started shouting about if the train was going to Reading. He babbled on that his favourite film was “Planes, Trains and Auto-mobiles’. I’m sure his favourite book is ‘Where’s Wally?’, which would contain nothing but selfies. Drove home.

It’s been a great couple of days. We’ve had a lot of fun. And that, as I’m realising is what life is all about.

New years eve. To me, by far the most depressing day of the year. I don’t know what it is, weather it’s looking back and thinking, shit, what have I done. Or the opposite, shit, what am I going to do. Anyway, last years was particularly crap. Everyone fell asleep, I made a great effort and ended up dancing with the dog. This year I vowed to be less crap.

We started fairly early, actually it was 8:30, I was up like a shot and fed the dogs. We then packed them up and took them to the kennels. As we walked back to the car they made a bit of a break for it and came running back to the car, they had to be escorted back. I should say that Sasha ran to us, Dillon sort of meandered along a few seconds later.

We packed up ourselves, which did require me finding a shirt that I had washed earlier and Jamie had hidden. We made it to the station in good time and got pricey parking right next to the door.

Train journey was uneventful, other than I had someone sat behind me who sounded like he was losing a lung and spraying mucus across the window. I survived into London without picking up any plague.

We took the underground to Leicester Square and walked round for a bit. We then went into the theatre for ‘Book Of Mormon’.

Okay, I made it a point not to do any research about this musical whatsoever, so I would have zero preconceptions. I’m not a fan of South Park, I didn’t go overly much on the film they made. I must say though, I pissed myself throughout it. It took things to the extreme, by discussing female genital mutilation, and then takes it slightly beyond the extreme and goes into baby fucking. I didn’t know a great deal about the actual ‘Book Of Mormon’, but it’s explained in such a beautiful piss taking way. The Song ‘I Believe’, which really kind of sums it up. It’s a very far fetched religion which makes Scientology look as sane as trigonometry. It had some great songs, sung by a truly amazing cast. We were lucky that some of the cast came from the American touring version, so we had some of the original Broadway cast. Elder Price and ‘Arnold’ were a fantastic duo. Don’t want to dwell on it too much, but the cast is basically split into white males and black males / females. All the white women are played by men. The black cast were amazing. It was designed to be controversial and boy does it succeed. We left very happy.

We found our hotel, which was about twenty feet from the theatre on Leicester Square. It was frighteningly expensive. We had a deluxe room, it had a huge bed. We actually had five hours to kill before we were due to eat. So we went out to eat. We ended up in an Italian chain and I had a pizza, Jamie had a hot dog. Due to a fuck up, I ended up with a free pint. We went back to the hotel. We got in bed. The sheets got messy. I had a shower.

We watched a lot of crap telly and spent ages cruising facebook and twitter. We then tidied up and headed out for our evening destination, ‘Planet Hollywood’.

Now, this cost a fortune and we had pretty low expectations. Considering the theming of their American counterparts, this one looks like the inside of a Primark. We were seated, had a glass of fizz and then our starter arrived. I went for goats cheese, it was fine. Jamie had the prawns. I started ordering larger, Jamie started on the cocktails. The music was loud, the clientèle were loud, we were probably loud. The steak was ‘well done’ but wasn’t, it was cold. Jamie’s salmon was better. Dessert was fine. We didn’t really come for the food. The live band started up, we had front row seats, they were fantastic. They stopped just before midnight, we got more sparkly in, watched the fireworks on the TV, which was quite ironic as they were only about 200 yards away. We were in the dry and in the warm, outside it was a howling gale and pissing down. The band then fired up again. We stayed another couple of hours and downed cocktails. We wandered back through Leicester Square to the hotel, it was now all pretty quiet. I went to bed and fell straight asleep.

For once. It was a great night.