Wednesday, April 23, 2008

It's alive.....

It's been a while since I last wrote anything which is probably due to a lack of enthusiasm on my part rather than a lack of anything to write about, or as Captain Jack quite rightly states, I've been enrolled into the Marine Corp and currently spend most of my evenings blasting away on Call Of Duty 4 still (it's a bloody good game!)

It's not all been COD action though and I still manage to cope without it for the few on hours on a Thursday night that we spend up the hotel for our weekly dose of karaoke. If you've been reading Captain Jacks blog then you will already know that our regular Thursday night KJ and good friend Andy King has been unceremoniously dropped from his spot (bad landlord!!) to be replaced with DJ Gaz (who does the Sunday slot too) who along with the karaoke now hosts a quiz as well. The quiz doesn't intefere with the karaoke too much and it's still quiet enough to get a few songs in each. Andy's still there on a Tuesday night so I'll probably pop up then every so often to catch up on things but for now my main night will remain the Thursday night. There's a couple of reasons for this, the most driving one of course is the fact that I don't have to go to work on a Friday and so can have a few drinks without the worry of working with a hangover! ;)

You may remember me posting last year about the wife, the brand new Renault Scenic and her driving it into the wall 15 minutes after driving it from the showroom. You don't? Well, then head over to here and you'll see what I'm on about! Anyway, we finally got around to knocking it down to widen the opening this week. When I say 'we' I do of course mean our handyman brother-in-law came around to knock the wall down :) I helped by making him cups of tea which I must have got right as he had at least 3 that I remember! Even the little uns were helping out as you can see by their 'eagerness' to brush up the rubble. It's currently taken down and we just need to slope off the drive a little as it's left a 'step' where the wall was and also to rebuild the column in it's wider state. Hopefully that'll be happening this weekend.


Treated myself to a new camcorder this weekend. After reading some reviews I finally decided upon the Sony Handycam DCR-SR55 based upon price, storage options, connectibility and reader reviews. You can find the tech specs for it over on Amazon but basically it's got a 40Gb internal hard drive which it records onto directly in MPEG-2 format. You then connect it to the pc via USB and it shows as another drive from which you can simply drag and drop your ready made videos from to store or burn to disk. How easy is that! Certainly much easier than it was to get the film off the Hi-8 digital tapes that my [6 years] old previous camcorder used. The new one is also about a third of the size of the other one two as you can tell by my picture of them both side-by-side. I haven't had a real good play with it yet but tested it out quickly when we were watching the above wall being knocked down. It's not much but here's a little clip of the little uns with the brother-in-law working away knocking the wall down!


The main reason I bought it was to get some decent footage from our upcoming holiday :) Yep, we're off to Disneyland soon, Paris not Florida, for an extended weekend which the kids are excited about. Josh wants to meet Buzz Lightyear and Amy wants to meet Mickey Mouse. Hopefully we'll have a great time and they'll enjoy it. As usual I'm not looking forward to the flight (I really hate flying) but fortunately it's only a short (1½ hours) journey so we should be getting off as soon as we've got on! Can't wait and I'll be posting up whatever piccies and videos I that are worthwhile once we're back.

Well, I think that'll do for now otherwise I'll be challenging me ol' shipmate at the amount of words-per-blog!

Take care people and see you later :)