50+ and proud of it.

Yet again another example of so-called "Sat Nav Error" surfaced over the weekend. A lady drove her "£90,000" Mercedes into the river because her Sat-Nav told her to. She ignored the sign that said "Not suitable for motors" and the one that presumably said "Stop, river ahead", and the obvious clue that the road had changed from gravely-colour to ripply-water-colour and kept going, "No the Sat Nav fitted to a Merc can't possibly be wrong, the river is obviously in the wrong place". "In, 300 feet, turn, left, and drown"

Now I'm not normally one for getting scared about such things, but an odd thing happened today at work. We've recently moved offices from our satellite office in "town" to our main office "out of town" (which, incidentally is much better for me as I live on "that" side of town). We're all still in a complete state of disarray 1 and so we stopped on after finish time to tidy up a bit more. One of the Support guys came down from upstairs and asked who had been in the Comms Room. "Dunno, Why?" "Several of the telephone patch leads have been removed again and tucked under the racking." "Again?" "Yes, it's happened about three times already to my knowledge." Long conversation about scary stuff ensued and we decided that someone obviously was taking the key and getting up to mischief. I mentioned this to the night receptionist on my way out. "Ah. Let me tell you a story about the guy in the blue jacke...

So there we have it. 3 months of an hour here and an hour there. Someone mentioned planning permission, and "was there a slope on it to let the rain run off?" Um, the answer to both is "No". However the really important questio n is "Are the glasses underneath?" - we'll never know.

Well, after a fairly traumatic week (we said fairwell to Ellen) I managed to get on with the decking. My neighbour popped round to help. Help which was gratefully received as I was in the middle of trying to balance a 4.8m deck board on a workmate whilst trying to cut the 45 degree angle with one hand and hold the other end which was by now flapping in the breeze... We got on a pace and eventually ran out of wood. (Yeah, I know, I had enough short bits that all added up to the required length, but none long enough). We retired for a beer. His wife strolled up to see how we were getting on. "Hello dear, where are your glasses?" I was suddenly reminded of the "Carpet Fitter And Budgie" joke.

Sadly, our friend and neighbour Ellen lost her fight with cancer this morning at 3:00am. Our thoughts are with her two children and husband.