MidnightReign.org

Our bathroom has been looking a bit tacky of late. The previous owner had painted the tiles, and since paint doesn’t stick to a glazed surface particularly well, the paint had started to peel in places, and we just weren’t happy with the way it looked. So we decided we would re-tile. I was happy with just doing that.

Then we decided we might as well do the basin as well, since that looks grotty too, and the taps just suck. And suddenly we have a new toilet to install too. And because of that, we have to re-tile the entire floor. Gah. I have a shitload of work to do. I’ve taken a couple of days off work to get it all done.

We’re on day two of the project. So far we’ve removed 98% of the existing wall tiles, and I’ve started removing the floor tiles. What a bastard job it is to do by hand. I’m gonna go hire an electric jackhammer tomorrow, I swear. My hand is so frikkin’ sore from wielding the hammer, it’s just not funny.

• Wall tiles – R1700.00
• Floor tiles – R200.00
• Removing existing tiles by hand – Priceless

My in-laws had invited us to join them on a (long) weekend away at a resort located about 2 hours out of town over this past weekend. We’ve gone away with them several times (though not to this particular place), and we’ve always enjoyed ourselves, so we agreed to go, despite that this past Saturday was our 5th wedding anniversary.

The place we were at was very nice, though heavily populated by “hairy backs“, as my father-in-law like to refer to them. On the whole, the weekend away was great, because it has been quite a long while since we’ve been away, however I didn’t really enjoy myself:

Shortly before we arrived at the resort, my wife told me that Nana would also be at the resort for the weekend, but we would each be keeping strictly to ourselves. Right right.

Early Saturday morning, guess who pitches up? You got it. Nana. A little while later, his girlfriend pitches up, and they settle. Turns out, they’re camping, while we have a cabin, so we have TV, and they don’t. He basically just came round to watch a rugby game, and have breakfast. A little while after the game, they both leave, but not before making arrangements to join us for supper.

Sunday – same deal, almost exactly, except he arrived at 07h30. This time to watch a grand prix. I don’t know exactly what happened, but somehow I don’t think it ended up being on any channel that we could get. After breakfast, they left (but not before making arrangements to join us for supper).

Monday morning – you guessed it. I’m not sure what the reason was exactly, but we had breakfast together again. Thankfully, we packed up and went home around 10h30.

Don’t get me wrong – He didn’t mooch off us at all. He provided quite a lot of the food that we ate (as far as I know). All in all, he’s not a bad guy, and his girl friend is a really nice person – but I really did not want to spend the weekend with them, especially when they weren’t invited. Damnit.

So that’s why my weekend sucked.

The part of my weekend that DIDN’T suck was getting to spend some time with my wife and kids, away from the house. I love you guys.

This past weekend was quite different from recent past weekends. For one thing, we were both up early on Saturday with the kids, and we were out of the house to go shopping for things. It was a planned event. Usually that kind of thing just doesn’t happen. The funny thing is, we just happened to notice that our daughter sprouted her first tooth. No mess, no fuss. It was suddenly there on Saturday morning. Cool.

I had to be up at 03h30 on Sunday morning so that I could be at work around 04h30 to begin testing some systems at 05h00.

Anyway, the testing went well, and I was home again by 07h30. To make a long story short, I didn’t get a chance to get some sleep until around 22h00. Gah. I got home, had breakfast, we went out shopping. Shortly before we left, my daughter decided it would be a good time to take her first(!) steps. Came home, decided to drop the kids off at my in-laws, so that my wife and I could get some sleep.

We get back home, and I’m literally preparing to get back into bed, when we start talking about the impending renovation of our bathroom. So I decide to forego sleep so that we can go back to the tile store we were at on Saturday to do a further look around.

We finish that, fetch the kids on our way home, and by the time we get home, it’s 20 mins until Gav & Amore arrive for tea/supper.

It was a great evening. I don’t know how the hell I didn’t just keel over from tiredness. I didn’t feel really tired until I got into bed, which for me is unusual. It must have been the vitamins I started taking the previous week.

So I’m dozing off Sunday night… after having been awake since 03h30. And my phone goes off. A message from Gav, thanking us for the evening. I respond by telling him no problem, now fuck off I’m trying to sleep. I doze off again. Beep. Damn. Gav again with Some innocuous reply. Fucker. Stupidly, I respond. Doze off again. Beep. Grrr. Gav again, with some other drivel which I’m sure he thought was funny at the time. I didn’t. I threatened his work email. Beep. Ahh screw it. I ignore it, and finally, finally, finally, fall asleep.

I still haven’t quite recovered.

There’s one thing I’ve learned about being a parent. Man, you have to watch what you say when the kids are around. I’m going to have to consciously watch my language around them. I heard my son yelling ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck’ this evening. Talk about your hair standing on end. After carefully telling him not to use words like that, I gave myself a mental slap. It’s my own damn fault. I know I’ve been swearing too much lately. I’m quite conscious of doing it, and every time I do it, I tell myself that I need to watch what I say… and do I? No.

I am guilty. I made a promise to myself when I rebuilt the site that I would post an entry almost every day. I have failed to do that. Oh well, stuff happens.

It was me birfday yesterday. 29 years old. Shared it with a sore throat, how exciting.

I’m finding that the more birthdays I have, the less I care about them. I remember when I was little(r), I used to look forward to my birthday coming around, mainly for all the presents, I guess.

I look forward to my kids’ birthdays instead. Then I can play with their toys, heehee.

This article, and others like it, really lead me to believe that one day soon, there are going to be more and more garage startups where people are going to start building ‘Open Source‘ hardware.

I mean, think about it. With hardware manufacturers building more and more restrictive hardware, what are people going to do about it? I’m sure as shit not going to upgrade my mobo’s bios to one that supports DRM. Not because I don’t believe in it (which I don’t), but because I don’t want my hardware dictating what I can and can’t do with music (or any digitial multimedia content for that matter) that I own.