Brain dump, that is.

Delays
Things take time. Sometimes things that take time get delayed. I'm definitely having mixed feelings about March. On the one hand I can't wait for everything that's meant to happen to get on with it and start happening. On the other hand, I need to do a lot of things and wish that there were more time in which to do them. You can't have it both ways. I can't demand that the month rush by so that my bathroom can get installed and yet wish it would slow down enough for me to do various preparation tasks around the house, enabling other jobs, dependent on those tasks, to get done before the month is out.

Official Stupidity
It's confusing. But still, at least I'm not the sort of person who needs to read or even send a message explaining our company's change of address. The change of address comprises renaming the name of the building from "Old Company Name House" to, can you guess?, "New Company Name House". And they pay people to email everyone to tell them this scintillating fact. The email came with this subject line:



This may get an award for the most gratuitously overblown ellipsis at the end of a vacuous subject line. Perhaps it would have been better with exclamation marks:



Or maybe just, simply, the following:



Or maybe I'm just in a bit of a mood this morning.

Bad Start
I am a bit tetchy. I didn't get as much sleep as I wanted to, and I managed to fail to wake up when I planned. When I did get out of bed, I still didn't start the morning as I wanted to. The result of the morning was that I arrived in work in plenty of time to start the day. The annoying thing was that the builder, whom I was awaiting from the moment I hauled my sorry ass out of bed, didn't manage to turn up. Now, in fairness to him, he rang me up and explained exactly why he wasn't arriving, and rescheduled for the following day. Given that, a week ago, I was expecting at least 10 days' delay on him, the idea of him coming tomorrow to get started, to a degree, at least, is a brilliant one. However, he managed to get my hopes up on Sunday night by suggesting that he might be starting on Monday. It's not his fault that he can't make it today - there's been an emergency flooding situation in a house he manages. If I were him, I'd fit stuff around it.

The electrician was in residence for all of yesterday, and will be for some of today, he's fitted a new fuse box and replaced all of the electrical sockets in the house. He's also added some sockets, which is excellent. The house feels better for it.

DIY last night
Last night I took some filler to the gaps in my newly installed skirting board. It looks better for it. I also painted the screws over so they can be filled. I only did about 90 minutes' work in the place. I did a bit more plaster patching too, just to make the wall flush with the skirting board - that sort of makes sense. I stopped when my general inertia took over and when I realised that I didn't have the sort of filler I wanted for putting between skirting board and wall. I'll have to get some, then.

Tonight I'm off to see a musical, so there'll be little done in the house, though I might try to fill in the screw holes, since the filler for them needs to dry before I can do the skirting board sanding.

Oh dear, I got all DIY obsessed again. The DIY is certainly keeping me pre-occupied. It's a series of interdependent tasks, which I think appeals to my obsessive tendencies.

Comic Songs?
On the non-DIY front. I sat myself down last night and recorded some songs. Actually, I was standing. It was using my little mp3-player/recorder, so the sound quality isn't especially brilliant and the vocals sound echoey, as a result of being recorded in a large echoey room. Most of these songs were done in one or two takes. The aim of the exercise was to record either new songs which I've not learned properly yet (recording is a good way to force me to play them through without stopping) or old songs that I'll probably not perform on stage anytime soon. While I love my songs individually, I must admit that some are more capable of generating laughter than others. However, it's nice to have a version of them that I can go back to, since, if left unperformed for a while, they'll drop out of my head and be gone for good.

So, if you're interested in my comic song-writing (and there's a health warning on it) then you can go to www.ashleyfrieze.co.uk/songs.html where you will find a list of every song I could think of ever having performed on the comic stage (that I'm prepared to admit to - there may be a few I keep secret) plus some which have either never been performed, or have only been performed once. Those with icons next to them can be listened to. You do so at your own risk.