At Home

Amazingly, for once I’m actually not travelling this weekend. I’m at home, in Manchester. It’s a very strange feeling. Friday evening’s are normally spent cursing Virgin Trains and abusing the text message system in order to vent ire and wrath, as well as information on my delayed ETA to whatever destination I’m aiming for.

This time I simply went home, cooked, and did feck all. Even more amazingly, housemate is staying here this weekend too – it’s the first weekend we’ve both spent in the house since she moved in three months ago. That’s a pretty scary average, all things considered.

Still, it’s nice – and even more surprising is that next week will be more of the same, although on this occasion Herself will be coming up here, and we’ll be seeing Cowboy Junkies in concert on Sunday night. But that’s next week – for now I’m just going to enjoy this one.

Bad Day

I thought I was having a bad day, but Scaryduck has convinced me I’m wrong. Don’t read it if you’re trying to look serious, or like you’re doing work.

Festering Season

It’s always nice to see common sense reigning for once. Aylesbury Council workers “got the date wrong” (because Christmas is such a moveable feast, and isn’t on the same day every year or anything) and put up Christmas trees in the middle of September.

After several complaints, they’ve had to take them down again, but I bet they’re back up by the middle of November…

Memetic – What’s on your Wall?

One of my regular reads, Terreus is trying to launch his own meme, titled “What’s on your wall?”. Or, as he puts it,

“Let’s all see what favourite work of art you have in the most prominent place in your home. You know, Vladimir Tretchikoff’s ‘Chinese Girl’ above the fireplace, or van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ on the bedroom wall.”

I quite like the idea of this, although I find I’m slightly stumped as there are a couple that I love, so I’m going to go with two that I’ve got, and one that is due to go up this weekend.

The first one is a semi-cliche now, but it’s also a painting I’ve loved for at least five years now, so what the hell. I do like a lot of the work by Jack Vettriano, but still I find myself coming back to “Dance Me To The End Of Love” as a favourite. There are others too, but well, this is the one that’s ended up in central position in my main living room. There are so many things about it that I like, including the feeling (which, as it turns out, is very like Edward Hopper’s work) where the people are actually quite solitary, no contact except for each other, and looking away from the “camera”. You don’t see their faces, everything about the painting is in the body language, and it’s just an image I love.

The other print I have in the main living room is a portrait shot of New York’s Flatiron building, and this print is huge – 100cm x 50cm. (approximately 3 feet high and 1.5 wide) yet the photoclarity is perfect throughout the shot. I’ve no idea what kind of lens was used, or what skills – it could be a wide-angle lens that’s been vertically aligned instead of horizontally, but I don’t know for sure. For some reason I love triangular buildings, as a result of which I’m also a committed fan of Manchester’s Urbis building too, and have even tried taking a similar photo of the Urbis, so I could have the two side-by-side. It’s never worked yet, but well, I’m getting better at this photography malarkey all the time.

And that’s where the newest print comes in. It’s been ordered, and as yet hasn’t arrived or been framed. That should happen this weekend, with luck. The basic underlying photo was OK, but then I decided to have a play in Photoshop, effectively thinking about adding “filters” in post-processing. It’s not something I’d ever really thought about before, and a lot of the things I tried were, to be charitable, “OK”, but nothing special. In a couple of examples, they were actually bloody atrocious. It’s all a bit of a learning curve, Photoshop’s such a huge bit of kit and I wonder if any one person ever uses more than about fifty percent of it.

Anyway, on this shot I played with some colour layers and opacity etc., and suddenly I’d got this, which I really liked. I just hope it works as well when it’s been printed. Oh, and if you want to see it at a bit of a bigger size, just click on the image.

Incompetence

Hmmm, it’s not just one of those days, it’s one of those weeks.

The people supposed to be doing the work to fix the leaking bathroom failed to turn up. Considering they were supposed to be starting at 9am, they finally told me at 2pm. Luckily it wasn’t me waiting, it was my housemate, who’s still feeling cruddy post-extraction. Instead, they’ll now “definitely” be there tomorrow. Useless twats.

And to top the day off, the agency I’ve been working for over the last two years sent out the paperwork for the contract extension. To the address I lived in until a year ago. No-one knows why, they just did. Lucky I checked up as I hadn’t received it yet, isn’t it?

Interview

The interview I found out about last week after three months of waiting was today. It went fine – so now we’ll just have to see what they say. I think Stinky®’s one is tomorrow. Comedy moments ahoy.

Bloody thing

Yes, observant readers will have noticed that I chuffed up and managed to post the thing below four times. Basically, Blogger had a fit and while it was actually publishing the post, insisted it wasn’t.

Still, all fixed now.