Sorry not this blog. Did you think I might? I might indeed, but it is still helpful. No, what I mean is that the birds keep on coming. I thought I was safe this weekend. I needed to be safe, I wanted to be at home. And what happens? I'll tell you what happens! A bleedin' Ivory Gull flies past a bit of north-eastern coastline is what happens. Now before you go all "but you don't have to go", you're quite right. I don't. And I would not have done. But the thought of what is out there is irritating. I would much rather that nothing were out there until I am good and ready, which is not this weekend.
So what have I been doing? Well, it has been very exciting. Exciting and annoying. The highlight of the weekend so far, other than the 2004 St Joseph, has been the installation of a new surround sound system in the front room. This will come as a surprise as I'm not a big TV watcher. The last time I knowingly watched TV was probably the 2012 Olympics, but I do enjoy the odd DVD, or whatever the format is these days. As such I have one of those systems where you have speaker behind your left ear, and another behind your right. It died about two years ago, and replacing it has remained very low on my list of priorities since then. However about a month ago I bought a fridge blackboard. Mainly this was for Mrs L's benefit, to act as a constant reminder of all the boring things (i.e. not to do with music in any way) that she had to do, and that had remained close to the bottom of any metaphorical list she might keep. In other words, close to the top of the list that I keep for her. However any time I so much as mentioned anything on it, this had the capacity to start a chain reaction of small explosions culminating in mention of the fact that she had just been on the cusp of doing something, but now that I had mentioned it she was damned if she was doing it. Thus nothing ever gets done.
Enter the Blackboard of Unhappiness. To keep things fair, I also wrote a pile of the things I was least interested in doing on it, and one of these was to replace the speakers. You would think that most blokes would relish a task such as this, the chance to do a pile of research on electronic gadgets, and then do a spot of tinkering - screwdrivers at the ready. However I am not most blokes, and installing a home cinema system holds practically no interest for me whatsoever. As such I've happily lived without the magic of Dolby 5:1 for quite some time. But I had to go and write it on the blackboard didn't I, and there it gnawed at me, until yesterday I finally caved, and ordered some damn thing on Amazon as part of their Black Friday deals. It arrived today.
I didn't hold out much hope of being able to correctly install it, but my mood cheered when I discovered that the brackets on the old speakers had exactly the same thread as the new ones. Despite my native stupidity, the thing actually worked first time - idiot proof I think they call it, nicely referred to as plug and play. Nonetheless taking the old one out (found several spiders, a missing mitten, several nerf gun bullets and a coloured-in tennis ball) and sticking the new one in took the entire morning. The big annoyance, as eluded to above, was discovering right at the very end that the cable for the furthest-away speaker was approximately 45cm too short, and thus rather than the wire being neatly hidden by the picture rail, there is a little bit of corner cutting..... Fuck it, it works, and if I'm looking at the telly I can't see it as it's behind my head. And anyway, I spend next to no time in that room anyway so who cares? Mrs L cares, but she knows how ill-equipped I am for this sort of task and seems fairly relieved that nothing went too drastically wrong as at one point I did have a hammer out.
To end, here are two questions:
1) Can you guess what the first DVD on this afternoon was?
2) I've now rubbed out most of my tasks on the blackboard. Can you guess who hasn't?
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