Slick-U-Blog

Well, we’re back from the wedding and it was awesome.  I’ll probably do a proper blog update at some point, but for now i’ll just add a link to the photo’s.

Mr Matthew and Hollie Hewitt

No, i’m not dead.  I am infact still alive and kicking.
Its now less than a week to Hollie and Matt’s wedding in the Lake District, and because of this I am on yet another 4 day week (after the bank holiday last week) so whoopie for that :)  It should be an event of special magnificence as the hotel is lovely, the location is superb and everything has finally come together and it should be amazing.  Matt and Hollie seem perfect for each other in the short (almost a year) time I have been fortunate enough to know them so there should be no Wedding Day nerves or Jitters from either camp.

Well, what have I been doing with myself.  Two words “Rock Band”.  No, not a real band, but the game on the Xbox 360.  Its currently eating up any spare time I have to myself these days, when i’m not off to Christenings like this morning, or off around town shopping, or trying to sort out stuff with the house .. i’ll cover each of these points in a new post over the next few days as a lot has happened and I don’t want some sort of uber long post which people will get bored of reading half a-ways down.

So, expect new blogs over the next few days on the subject of:

• Matt and Hollies Wedding
• House update
• Rock Band / General Gaming
• My own Wedding
• Clearing up of the retro room
• Driveway
• Contacting relatives about my wedding (might take me a bit of time to write this one as there is a lot to cover).

So I hope to see most of you again in the next few days.  I’ll also be upgrading Wordpress tonight to 2.6.1 as i’m on 2.5 and its out of date again.

Myself and Laura have been busy this weekend (I tried to explain the concept of a “day off” to Laura .. to men it is a day off, a time to do very little as they are days when you are not in work .. when you are working. To women it is time to do the odd little chore around the house including repainting entire rooms or clearing out entire rooms or something else involving entire rooms … I just don’t get female logic … anyway) redecorating the kitchen. We have changed the decor by simply giving the whole room a lick of paint.

I think it looks good, Laura also thinks it looks good and we both now ache from all the painting and moving and clearing. If you want to see a few before and after shots of the Kitchen (I don’t know .. perhaps you have a kitchen fetish?) then you can find them in the Gallery by clicking http://www.emulators.co.uk/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=Kitchen

Just a quick post to say that Laura and I have agreed to get engaged. No date set yet, but its time to go out and buy a new hat

Yep, its a bit early. Her birthday isn’t until the 31st of May but she wanted a new Kitchen Table for her birthday (how rock’n'roll is that!) so we went to Ikea and picked a nice table and chair set. So today I dismantled the old table, and the chairs and took them to the council tip at Woolston. I was setting up the table tonight with the football on in the other room (liverpool - arsenal) and my friend Cliff came round. He used to be a Joiner so he’s used to working with wood and screws etc so he joined in … result. Cheers Cliff.

We got the table and chairs built in doublequick time. They look great as they match the other unit we bought for the kitchen last week. We have picked Oak for both units and they look great.

The kitchen looks really nice now. Well happy with it. We have Mike and Thecko round on monday so they will be the first people to test drive the table

I need something to do on this day, Laura is having a girly shopping day with (strangely enough) the girls so I need something to do.

Suggestions in the comments please… Might go and watch a film, or just go for a mooch in the trafford centre or something … dunno.

Update went well… everything works… Sweet.

“Wow, an update” I hear both my readers say in unison…

Well it’s true. An update indeed is forthcoming.

It’s all going well with me and Laura, the house is so/so at the moment as we *should* have heard back from them by now but we have not. I’ll be giving them a call on Monday to see where we are with that.

So, what have I been up to? Not an awful lot to be honest. I’ve been working, coming home and doing some painting for a while, that was finished last week thankfully. We’ve just done the doors and the sills but it makes such a difference.

I’m close to breaking below the 16st mark, i’m 16st 0.5lb’s this morning .. not bad going for a tubby lad

We’ve sold some of our CD’s and DVD’s on ebay recently, which was good. Our Sky+ box broke last weekend so we had to buy a replacement one from Ebay as Sky wanted £160 for a replacement, and we got ours from a Chap in Wigan for £65, result. Its a newer box as well and has more features etc so its win win really.

Erm, what else has happened …. Oh, the holiday to Norfolk.

We went to Norfolk for a week in a lovely cottage in the sleepy village of Heydon. Laura’s parents and Sister and Future Hubby came down for the weekend and we had a fab time. Laura and I stayed for the rest of the week and went to Norwich, Sheringham, Cromer, Barnham Zoo and Hunstanton. All lovely places and we had a great time. It was nice to have a relax for a week and escape from work. I’ll upload the photo’s from the holiday to the Gallery at some point.

I’ll be updating my blog to Wordpress 2.5 later, it adds in lots of new features and stuff so I look forward to that … no doubt it will break something as usual so i’ll have to fix it but hey ho, it needs doing.

I’ll do the upgrade now …. Watching the footy at the moment so thats all good. Wish me luck.

Day One.

It’s 6.30am on a cold Saturday morning, Myself and Ste awake to a very crisp February morning, we make sure we have packed all our essentials for London. We decided to travel light and try and survive on just a small backpack each as we were going on the train and intended to see a lot of the sights and did not want to lug around a hefty suitcase.

It is just starting to get light as we set off on the first leg of our journey to London at 7:05am. We walk to Birchwood station I never realised how beautiful Birchwood can sound first thing in the morning, the bird chorus was something else. We catch the 7.35 train to Warrington Central and then walked the short distance across Warrington to Bank Quay.

We arrived at Bank Quay with plenty of time and sat down in one of the waiting rooms which had the heating on until our train journey at 8.07 the train arrived on time. The last time I caught the train to London was Helens’ hen do back in January 2007 and this train was pretty empty. I said to Ste that the train should be quiet so we could have a quick kip and arrive in London a little more awake – That was the plan anyway. We found our seats behind the luggage rack in a set of two so we had nobody behind us as such and had a set of four seats in front of us with a table in the middle, on this table were three middle aged women. Now I am a woman but even I from time to time enjoy a good natter but I kid you not, these three women did not shut up all the way to London!! I think we put up with it for about half an hour before we put on our Ipods just to get some peace.

The train arrived on time, in-fact it was a few minutes early. On my way home from work on Friday I decided to nip into Warrington to buy “an Essential Guide to London” this little book proved very helpful and even at £5.99 proved to be money well spent. We left the station and headed into London, the weather was lovely although cold. Even Ste had a woolly hat on. It was sunny and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Perfect!

We decided to walk to the Tower of London as we both had been to London before and it was one of the places that we had both never been. As the weather was so nice we decided we would walk everywhere so off we went to visit the crown jewels. We arrived at the Tower of London just after lunch and decided we should eat something considering we hadn’t eaten since earlier in the morning. I spotted a Subway just facing the tower, now we decided that we wouldn’t carry cash around London we would just use our cards as and when. So we ordered an Italian BMT foot long to share. As our sandwich was being made the card machine broke so we had no way of paying for the food. We asked where the nearest cash machine was which was just round the corner, so I stayed in Subway while Ste went to get some cash out. There must have been something wrong with the phone/data lines in that area because the cash machine wasn’t working either. So Ste walked back in to Subway to tell me the bad news and we both looked at each other and said ‘what can we do’ we went to apologies to the people behind the counter and to tell them that the cash machine wasn’t working, only for them to hand over the food for FREE!!! Get in free food!!!

After eating our FREE subway we headed into the Tower of London where we listened to the Beefeaters tell stories of the tower and the famous executions that happened there, and what do you have to do to become a beefeater. We went into the chapel where Henry VIII many wives and pretty much anyone else who jeopardised the King’s good name or was a threat to the sovereign was executed. We then went into the tower known as the ‘white tower’ viewed past kings’ armour and other weaponry used in days gone by. The queue to see the crown jewels was huge but it’s what we came to see so we joined the queue, and it was really worth the wait they sparkle in such a way its every girls dream to wear such beautiful gems. I even think some of the men were impressed.

We left the Tower at about 15:30 we toyed with the idea of catching the tube to our hotel but decided that we were up for the walk, so we walked across Tower Bridge and along the Themes back towards the centre of London. I am really glad that we walked along the Themes as we saw so much that we would have missed if we had caught the tube. We walked passed the London Dungeons, Tate Modern, OXO Building, Jubilee Gardens, London eye, the Namco Centre, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. Our hotel was about 2 minutes walk away from the Houses of Parliament. We arrived at our hotel at about 16:30 just as Liverpool was losing to Barnsley 2-0. Poor Ste. We checked in and our room was lovely had a quick shower and changed and headed back out into the big smoke.

18:15. We walked back passed the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben and Westminster Abbey they light them up really well during the night and look spectacular. We walked passed Nelsons column and into the Theatre district. We picked up our tickets, but it was still a little early so we went to see what food we could get every where was pretty busy but we found a Pizza Express which was busy and a Pret a Manager so we decided to get a coffee and a cake in Pret and have dinner after the show.

Phantom of the opera was truly amazing and we had really good seats in the stalls. We were about 12 rows back in the aisle so we had a really good view. Ste had never been to the Theatre before and he really enjoyed it as did I it’s a very emotional play and seeing it performed there in front of you, it just make your heart jump and in some places make you heart skip a beat its was wonderful the best play I have ever seen even better than Grease.

We left the Palace Theatre at about 22:30 and headed for pizza express by this time me and Ste were flagging and the left hand side didn’t really know what the right was doing having been awake since 6:30 and walked about 15 miles in one day we decided to get Pizza Express to take away back to the hotel, so mission impossible sneak the pizza back in to the hotel room under Ste’s coat. We crashed out on the bed with pizza and the end of match of the day.

Day Two

The hotel was a nice 4* hotel and a nice surprise was the Full English breakfast which was delivered fairly quickly. Although we did get bubble & squeak with our full English? Which I thought was pretty strange but Ste cleared his plate plus my sausage so it can’t have been that bad. We timed Breakfast just right as the queue to get a table by the time we had finished was huge. We went back to our room to plan our day and to let our humongous breakfast settle before setting out on another walkathon around London.

We took a closer look at the Houses of parliament and Big Ben and stood in front of Westminster Abbey. We then took a walk through St James Park where we found a whole group of Pelican’s which were a bit of a surprise, the park was full of daffodils which were beautiful and really made it look like spring had arrived, even though the lakes were frozen. We walked up to Buckingham Palace just after 11am and it looked like the whole of London had the same idea as it was the change of the guard we managed to see them walk out in there uniform well timed we thought.

We then walked towards Harrods and bought some cakes for lunch. After Harrods we then walked to the Natural History Museum and looked at the Dinosaurs. London Fashion week was due to start the next day so it was really busy, but we didn’t get to see anyone famous. We headed to the Royal Albert Hall and had our cakes on the stairs outside the hall and on the stairs of the Albert Memorial and then walked through Hyde park and around the Princess Diana Fountain. After the fountain we then walked through the other half of the park and out past Marble Arch and on to Oxford Street and then down Regent St to Hamleys Toy Shop, after all the walking and the shopping we needed a hot chocolate so we dived into Marks & Spencer. We slowly drank our chocolate to rest our tired feet. We decided to buy some dinner that we could eat on the train, then slowly made our way to the Station to catch the train home…..