Boy on Top

Breaking the summer silence for a mo. My identity was stolen! Well, a small part of it anyway, just a credit card number. It is rather disturbing all the same.

I got an email from a particular bank I use for the card I restrict to use on the interweb. Appearently my online password had been change. I certainly hadn't changed it. A quick call to said bank showed that a whole host of charges had just been rung up. Large items for big amounts of money, other than a pizza, had been spent using my name and credit card. The total was a large number of thousands. Thankfully the bank is honouring their fraud protection promise and I won't have to pay for it. But... blimey...

Now, being in the business I guard my web presense very carefully. This is also a card that I had only recently been sent a new one. I can not, for the life of me, figure out how they got my details. To order they would have had to have had my name and address, the card number and the little security digits on the back. It must have been hacked from somewhere I had bought something from.

Very disturbing.

Hi, I haven't been doing well at blogging lately, have I? So, a couple of pictures. These are "life", our garden. One of the timesinks at the moment, albeit a very worthwhile one. We lost our gardener at the start of the year. He'd been with us for ages, but at the fine age of 72 had a heart attack and decided it was time to retire.

LL loves her gardening, so it didn't feel like a hardship, but a garden like this, it takes time! A lot of time. Thankfully I've now found someone to at least do the mowing, so it should return to acceptible levels. But... there will be other things to take up time.

Lots of things. Kids take time, a joyful time, but time. Keeping up with my lovely and sexy if sometimes moody dear wife takes time. Work in particular is taking a lot of time. I used to be able to better blog during the commute and at odd spare moments during the day, but the train has become very crowded of late and blogging then just doesn't work. Work doesn't work either. I'm really enjoying myself at the moment, and feel like I'm making great progress, but boy does it take time.

Thing is, I've rather enjoyed blogging. The funny bit, I've started to not to need to post. I don't miss it so much. Yet I've been feeling guilty about not posting. You see, there's a lot of you out there, that in a very real way have become friends. There's the Count, the lovely Z, the wonderful Lady in the Smoke, that Angry guy, one who was a bug, the irrascible Punk, a very peaceful empress, that boy, the man with the abreviated life, she who commented first, and many others. There's a whole lot of you out there I really like. I don't want to loose touch.

Yet feeling guilty and doing crap posts doesn't make sense. So, I'm not going to close down exactly, but the posts will likely become few and far between. There's things I still want to say, but I'll say them when the mood and time allows. I want to spend more time posting recipes, for example. Bizarelly some of the ones I've posted have had thousands of hits. People seem to like the way I describe cooking, so I'll keep that up. I'll still try to stop by and comment at yours, but even that won't happen as much as it should.

Yet I do want to stay in touch. So, for those in London, or passing through London, those that I've met or not, there's a drink and a meal on offer. You can find the email on the page, and that's open for just chatting too. Friendships should be able to survive the virtual world.

So, its not good bye, but it is adieu

Peach and a gang of bloggers have done a fine fine thing. A book has been put together, one of posts from a wide range of people. Different backgrounds, different issues, humour, seriousness, love, loss. Its all there in a wonderful compendium.

Best thing? Buy it and most of the cash goes to charity.

So, go here, go now and buy. I have.

I don't do well with hot, especially humid hot. Its upper 30's in New York at the moment, and very very humid. Leaving an air conditioned building is like hitting a brick wall. They've had to tune down the air conditioning because the power company has restricted power to avoid an outage there's so much aircon pumping away. There is something quite perverse about cooling rooms down so much I've even seen people wearing sweaters when its that hot outside.

Anyway, a worthwhile visit. Much important things done, a couple of nice meals had. Another day of meetings today, then its back to the airport for the red eye home. I am, as usual, very tired, but such is life.

A bit of a stream of consciosness post this, but better to post something than nothing. It was such a lovely weekend, hard not to enjoy oneself. Yet there were lots of other bits of niceness in the weekend. I seem to have my wife back, which is such a relief. I've learned to live with her moods, but its quite something the way they can hit and retreat like that. That time of the month has decended, which is clearly part of it. Yet this wasn't just the normal pms. I shall gently probe and see what else there was.

I've also had excellent news in that a former boss, one who shall remain nameless but was, frankly, a sadistic son of a female dog, has been fired. For gross misconduct, which is even better, as it means he won't get the usual polite pay off to disappear. I had lost count of the number of lives that man had darkened or even ruined. It was a lot, and though this isn't karmic justice, he'd have to live a life of a snail to deal with that, it is small justice.

Our builder is now confirmed to start with only a short delay. I'm quite excited about that. Not so much about the building, that will inevitably be a pain, but about the finished product. It will be great. We have also found a new gardener, so I don't have to spend 3 hours every weekend dealing with the lawn.

Then, we just had a nice weekend. Saturday we had our old now retired gardener over for lunch. It was just a really nice visit. Then Sunday we went over to visit some dear friends. They have kids the same age, and a swimming pool. So with that fine weather it couldn't help but be a lovely day.

And so I fly off to New York for the week. I'll stay in touch, promise!

Here I am, a few spare minutes in the day, and I can't think of anything to say. I'm sure there's a million things to say, heaven knows a day seldom goes by when I think to myself "That would be good to blog about", but not today.

I'm oddly tired, a combination of lots of work, hayfever and a wife in an odd mood (borderline depressed and I can't think why or how to help, I've even asked, but I'm not sure she's sure, or wanting to tell me anyway).

So, not much else to say really. I'm sure I'll think up something clever or interesting soon, just not today.