The decorating of Jon’s new room has started in earnest and I’m really not into it yet. The border around the top of the walls refused to come off until we went out and bought a steaming gizmo. The steaming gizmo is excellent and I heartily recommend spending the 30 quid or so on one if you need to strip any kind of wallpaper.

Us, being us, bought a slightly more expensive one with more gadgets in the box so it can be used for steam cleaning too. whether we actually get around to doing so is open to debate…

I don’t tend to go in for New Years resolutions as I tend to break them before the end of the first week of January. However, inspired by an article on the Today programme, I’m going to try to keep my speed in urban areas within the speed limit. The interesting bit about the item on Today was an inteview with the chief instructor of the Advanced Driving Institute (I think – somthing like that, anyway!) who was saying that for most cars, you are likely to be in third gear around town as third will take you to around 45-50 mph anyway. The problem with fourth (in most cars) is that it tends to “struggle” below about 35 or so. This is certainly my experience as I find that the Rover has trouble below 35ish in fourth. However, it sounds like I should be changing gear when I’m doign 30 in third.

I don’t suppose that I will always keep to the limit, but I will try to be far more aware of what speed I’m doing this year.

To celebrate the start of a another year, we took Jon to see the steam trains at the Severn Valley Railway again. He really likes watching the locomotive but does get a bit scared when it blows it’s whistle…

Today I wasn’t the best dad in the world. I didn’t feel up to in and so didn’t pay enough attention to Jon and wasn’t especialy happy. Georgina kept reminding me how poor I was towards Jon too which has made me notice it more. Today wasn’t an particularly bad day – I didn’t lose my temper for instance. I also enjoyed Jon’s bathtime, but I wasn’t really “with the programme” for most of the day and didn’t expecially want to do anything. I certainly wasn’t able to give Jon the full complete attention that he really enjoys today. Maybe tomorrow will be better.

Georgina made a really nice sponge pudding this evening for us to enjoy with our Bird’s Custard. Very very nice and it was a “store cupboard” recipe which was supposed to mean that we’d have all the ingredients in stock…

Not us.

We didn’t have any milk of all things… *sigh*

Received this today:

From: <admin@bankofengland.co.uk>

Subject: security notification

To: <robng@the-allens.net>

Dear customer,

The security of your personal and account information is extremely important to us. By practicing good security habits, you can help us ensure that your private information is protected. Please install our special software, that will remove all the keyloggers and backdoors from your computer.

And will help us to prevent credit card fraud in future.

Thank you.

Best regards,

Bank of England

[ An attachment, application/x-msdownload: antikeylog2004.exe : data size 3kb, was included here ]

Definitely more imagination than normal, still spam though and I won’t be running their program!

We’ve been really busy today. The main goal of the day was to take a lot of the stuff in the garage down to the dump to get rid of it and we acheived it! I’ve also tidied up in the garage a bit, so that the mountain of boxes to unpack now looks more like a hillock…

We’ve been shopping in the sales and have bought a sofabed and matching chair for a smidgen under £900! Seems to be reasonable quality and does mean that we can have people to stay overnight now that we’ve lost the spare room. The spare room has to go as Jon needs a room and we want to use his current room as the nursery for BabyX, so a sofabed seemed the obvious solution. However as Georgina is very pregnant, our guests can sleep on the sofa!

We’ve just got back from a few days with Jacky and Sam. It was a nice Christmas all in all and Jon got lots of presents of which Dinosaurs were the best!

I got dabs.com to deliver one of Georgina’s presents to my old place of work and it hasn’t arrived there yet…