We're on a mission from god....

 
Yup, its all about keeping it real. We are doing walking basslines in year 8 at the moment, and I am getting the girls to all go home and watch the blues bothers at the weekend and compose a 12 bar riff. Great fun all round!

Fin, the computer wiz

 
Fin is getting really good at the computer lately. He can assemble duncan the train on the thomas the tank engine website with no help now, clicking and dragging all the way.
 
Here he is with his new smile. Every time we take a picture, he says "smile" but doesnt actually smile, so the only way to get him to smile is to ask him to show you his teeth.

POP!

 
I had a concert the other night where I was conducting a few nursery rhymes with one of my junior ensembles, so to spice it up a bit, in the middle of pop goes the weasel, i blew up a baloon and popped it with my really sharp baton. Scared the bejaysus out of the front few rows of the orchestra!
 
And i sharpened it with my new leatherman. I lost the old one in the back of a taxi so I got the next model up, it has 4 extra tools, ALL of which i used on the first day of having it to justify the purchase.

3 weeks of detox

 
Well, its been 3 weeks of detox. No booze or carbs during the week, then we can eat and drink whatever we like at the weekends. Check it out! Almost 2 stone!!! Unreal.
 

oh la la

 
In keeping with our european themed weekend, we headed for the hills and had lunch in a french cafe/cake shop complete with mini eiffel tower and everything

Molto Biene

 
We had an italian themed night out at the Witteks the other night (Magda and Martin). Italian food, Italian flags, Italian music and Italian beer.
 
Here is the italian phrasebook, it got minimal usage.
 
The italian tricolour was everywhere, in the decor and in the food!
 

pink rocks!

we are just back from pink! A friend was in the show and got us backstage passes, it was fantastic! She is a real performer, very professional and a very good production! I'm blogging this from my phone so sorry about the formatting.

What a show

 
We have started to watch this show again, its been about 3 years since we watched it last. 14 episodes and then the film. Its very entertaining, very good scripting, charachters and plots. I highly recommend it.

The beginning of the end.....

Remember that blog post last week about the robot uprising? Well here is more of it....

Fruit Ahoy!

 
Yup, its our first lime! Should be fully grown just in time for all those margherita's we are going to drink when we get off this healthy stint.

Cycling...again

 
It finally happened, I got back on teh bike. I have been threatening to cycle to school for about 2 years and I finally got up and did it today. It was great, I really enjoy cycling and listening to music in the mornings, so be prepared to see another few kilo's missing over the next few weigh-in's

Eurovision 2009

Did anyone see the Eurovision the other night? I hadn't seen it in years, and to be fair I only saw the last half an hour in a mates place, what a show! That stage was unreal. EVERYTHING was a screen. I don't think there was a single scene change in the whole show, even the FLOOR was a screen! And what about the winner, Alex Rybak, what a dude! Fiddlin his way to the largest Eurovision result in the history of the competition. I decided today at recess to arrange this for my string orchestra at school. One swift perusal of youtube produced the clip from last nights show:



and another 5 mins with the fiddle, managed to come up with the riff:
 
A few mins later out comes the 3 minute long, full whack, with viola solos all over the place, arrangment for string orchestra.
 
I am just back from rehearsal, the kids loved it. Woohoo!

Sugartime

 
Check out how much sugar is in a fizzy drink!!!!

Daily update

Im going to try to do a posting per day for the next few weeks so keep on tuning in bloggers & blogettes
 
I updated the software for my MBW 150 a few mins ago and it ROCKS even more than it did before! Beter battery life, and faster message scrolling and name of sms sender are three very welcome fixes, music controls still not working but fingers crossed for version 2.3 sometime soon.
 
And now I am off to conduct Elgars incredibly under-rehearsed Serenade for Strings and Brahm's Hungarian dance no.5 in Guildford Grammar, should be interesting.....

Brew ha ha

 
Its been a while since there has been beer on tap. Over a month in fact. On the stag/bucks day/night we drank over 120 pints of homebrew IN ONE SITTING and there was nothing in reserve so there was a homebrew drought for a few weeks. Now that things have settled down I can get back to the simple things like sleeping, eating at regular times and brewing. I made three of my favourite, a nice creamy stout (Ocean Sirocco for the wedding folk), a powerfull full bodied wheat beer and a nice regular lager. Here they all are brewing away this morning.
 

The no beer diet...

 
Week 1

So, after the wedding and all the associated parties and junk food, Jane and I ahve been on a bit of a detox for the last few weeks. No beer or carb's during the week then have whatever we like at the weekend. Check out the results after 2 weeks!
 
Week 2

Fiddlin on the road....

 
Yes is Jascha Heifetz playing a walking stick violin. I came across it on the net today while I was looking at portable and odd violins. The best one I came up with was this . I dont have that many hobbies. I like making beer, drinking beer, enjoying good company (with beer) and playing tunes with new people at gigs/sessions etc. (with many beers). More often than not when the urge takes me to take to the stage at any gig, I rarely have an instrument handy sooooo if anybody out there feels like getting me an extremely early birthday present then HERE is the order form ;)

UPDATE: Here is a youtube clip of some jigs on the wiplstix

What else did we do this weekend

 
Well, we went to see the new star trek movie last thursday. What a film. I have been a big fan of star trek since about 88 when RTE got its hands on the first season. One time I even wrote a letter to RTE when I was about 13 to let then know they skipped an episode (I had the compendium of each season) and they replayed it with an apology the following week. Nuts! Anyway, I have been a fan for quite a while, until recently when the quality of the most recent chapter, enterprise, started to lose the plot, but this new film has warped star trek right back into the captains chair! Even Jane liked it! It had it all, true to the original and different enough to stand alone as a new film also. Well done all involved!
 
And here we are yesterday, mothers day in oz, and I was the taxi at the park for the afternoon.

Barrack Roombama

 
This is a Roomba. It is a robotic vacume cleaner. Check the wiki here. It is a robot who scoots around your house, cleaning as he goes. Here is a youtube clip of him cleaning up our bar. It was a wedding present from Margaret and Hugh and it is the best thing since the discovery of beer. It is great fun to watch as he negotiates obstacles around the kitchen such as chairs and dogs. Below is a long exposure of a roomba doing its thing. As you can see it just randomly bounces around teh room until everything is clean. Of course you knwo that this is how it all starts, the whole robot slavery thing. It is not long until the robotic uprising...
 \
When the uprising comes, the first wave of hostile robots may be those closest to us. Be careful, your rosy-cheeked young servant robot may have grown up to become a sullen, distrustful killing machine. STAY ALERT. Pay attention to your robotic staff (they may be beneath your contempt as well as beneath your eye level). Watch for the following telltale signs in the days and weeks before your robots run amuck:

Sudden lack of interest in menial labor.
Unexplained disappearances.
Unwillingness to be shut down.
Repetitive 'stabbing' movements.
Constant talk of human killing.

Of course it's difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will destroy all humans or merely enslave us. One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the robots will soon be here. And I for one welcome our new robotic overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted tech enthusiast, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground silicon caves.

Now golfing pays better than work

 
Check out this article from the indo about a month ago:


Wednesday April 15 2009

I recently had a long conversation with a friend of mine who lost his job. He was in a reasonably good job and after a little bit of overtime was earning a gross salary of €35,000 per year.

So I asked him the obvious question of how he was going to cope now with four children to feed and, I have to be honest, the answer startled me.

He was actually a lot better off and now in a position to go out golfing every day while his children are at school.

Frankly, I did not believe him until I sat down and did the sums. On a salary of €35,000, his annual net income after the mini Budget was €28,854, after all deductions.

Now he is on the supplementary welfare allowance which -- with a wife and four children -- gives you €443.90 per week, or €23,083 annually.

As he also has a mortgage, he is entitled to mortgage interest supplement which pays all the interest on your mortgage. In his case, this was €1,200 per month of his €1,500 mortgage, or €14,400 per annum.

He is also entitled to back-to-school and footwear payment of €905 per year for four children, a medical card which is worth, on average, say €500 per year (probably more) and a heating supplement which I cannot quantify.

In total, he now has tax-free income of €38,888, an increase in his net income of €10,034 per year for working on his golf handicap.

Based on the calculations after the mini-Budget, you would need to earn more than €47,000 per year if you have four children to justify continuing to work.

This is even before taking into account the costs of working, such as petrol, car maintenance, tolls, lunches and so on.

Now in any civilised society, and especially in a society in a deep recession with a huge welfare bill, surely the government must give people an incentive to go out and work

Making the child benefit taxable or means tested later this year is just going to make the situation worse and encourage more people to give up work and rely on the State to live.

It could even drive our small economy to collapse as the welfare bill gets bigger and bigger as more people, including myself, ask: why should I bother to go out to work when it is basically costing me money to work?

Unless something radically changes, I will be joining my mate on the golf course very soon.

Andy McNamara
Drogheda, Co Louth

More stuff

 
Here is more from that footy game. Liam and I delighted at the state of affairs. The score was 33-10 and we were 5 beers up. Not a bad first quarter.
 
Here I am stocking up the beer reserves.
 
And here is an arty shot of the hounds