Category: just-plain-life

Meet BBC North – 5th April

Myself on poster

Yes that is me before my bleed on the brain. Wow how scary did I look… Can’t imagine why they would want to use me to advertise BBC North?

Anyway things are going great at the BBC and we’re not far from moving into to Salford Quays. I got the chance to see the floor below where we are going to move to today and I was impressed. The space I thought would be like the broadcast centre or media centre in white city but it felt nothing like that. It actually felt very warm and cozy even with the huge amount of glass.

Can’t wait to get in to the space and make it ours.

Gotta love slow cooking

Slow Cooker

I finally bought a slow cooker after recommendation from multiple people I’ve only used it a couple times but every time so far its turned out really good food.

To be fair its almost the total opposite of the way I usually cook. I’m more of a 20mins and I’m done in the kitchen kind of guy. The wok is my friend, hence why I have about 8 of them (all different sizes ranging from 8 inches to 16 inches)

My lovely mum sent me a slow cooking cook book which has been handy for working out roughly what I can or can not do. Generally it seems most of the time, you can throw stuff into the pot, add a ton of vegetables, spices and a bit of meat, then leave it to cook.

The other day I left it cooking while I went out and then by the time I got back it was very late and so I left it cooking over night. So maybe left it cooking for about 18 hours in total. I was a little worried if it was ok to leave it on for so long, you know wake up to a massive fire or a burned out slow cooker but I woke up to a lovely smell of cooked onions and veg. The beef was extremely tender and like the chicken I’d had before almost flaked apart when forked.

The weird part is, I’ve found you don’t need so much meat, so my intake of meat is greatly reduced by the slow cooking process.

I’m catching the slow cooking vibe…as my boss said, its kind of addictive in a funny way. Although I do tend have my wok ready when I just want something quick.

HTC Incredible is incredible

The story is simply crazy, a man (Garber) takes a stray bullet outside a club in illinois and instead of it hitting him, his phone takes the bullet. Believe it or not its a HTC incredible.

According to the Associated Press, Garber was working at Club Halo when two men were thrown out of the club. Police say that the men allegedly ventured over to a car, grabbed some weapons and began to shoot indiscriminately in the direction of the club.

One of the bullets went through Garber’s coat and was about to do him severe damage. Suddenly, it was intercepted by his HTC phone (yes, it was a Droid Incredible), which he had put into the chest pocket of his jacket.

Garber’s coat is now adorned with a bullet hole. The top left corner of his red cell phone battery now enjoys a dent that signifies it wouldn’t let the bullet through.

No one was injured in this shooting and police happened to be near the club and managed to chase down the alleged shooters, from whose car they reportedly recovered two handguns.

Garber told the AP: "It’s just one of those crazy things in life."

A step towards achiving one of my new years resolutions

My new mini (8 inch) Woks

Number 9 on the long list of new years resolutions included living a healthy lifestyle.

As part of this I’ve item, I ended up buying 3 new woks. The difference is being they are little mini 8 inch wok’s. There so sweet and mini! The other woks I owned ranged from a middle of the road 12 inch to a massive 15 inch. Hopefully with a smaller wok to cook in, i’ll cook a lot less and end up with smaller portions to eat.

My new Skateboard

My new Skateboard

Theres a strange divide in my friends, most won’t connect me with a skateboard but in actual fact in Bristol I was known as the kid with the skateboard.

Ross and Carly decided to buy me a skateboard for Christmas and I’ve finally had a little ride around my flat (the wooden floors make it perfect for doing so).

The next step is to take it out for a ride outdoors, and to be fair Central Manchester is great for skateboarding because its mainly quite flat and everythings not that far on a skateboard. I can also hop on and off the free buses (yes Manchester has a few free buses) if I get tired of skating.

Before you start thinking about ole kickflips and all that. I only really used the skateboard to get around town. I use to travel a total of about 4/5 miles a day going to work in showcase cinema. Then sometimes I would travel back up hill late at night on the skateboard.

Yeah I was pretty much tied to the skateboard and although hanging the skateboard off a wall in my flat was the original idea. I’m getting tempted to go for a quick spin and maybe use it to go to work on.

New Years Resolutions 2011

So after reviewing my 2010 resolutions its time for my 2011 resolutions

  1. Ski on real snow
    Yes every year I say this but seriously this coming year, I’m going to do it at that indoor snow place (Chill Factor) in the Trafford Centre.
  2. Organise a Trance night in Manchester
    Not only can I dj but i’ve found 2 djs from work and 2 other geek djs who are interested in djing out. Enough to surely put together my own night. Ok no one would get paid at the start but heck we’re all doing it for the fun of it.
    On top of that, I’m also hoping to get more involved with music and maybe do a few live broadcasts via the pacemaker. Either on my own station as such or else where. Of course you’ll certainly see more mixes on mixcloud.
  3. Read more non-news stuff
    Since I bought my ebook reader (the sony one) I’ve honestly read more that ever more. Even when I had my ipaq and use to take 3 hours to cross South London. But I seem to be reading lots of news and blogs rather that books. This isn’t necessarily bad but there are lots of books I would like to read. So now I got the Kindle, I’m hoping to slow down a little more and read more non-news.
  4. Live even more in the public
    I’ve come around to the fact that I’m a very public person and although there are certain things I won’t reveal to the public (isn’t a person able to keep a few secrets) I’m generally going to be more open and public that before. I know some of my friends will be saying heck no, please no more but I don’t really see a seriously bad side to all this. i’m already considering making my dating profile public, right now it links to my online persona in parts which might be why I’m getting the type of woman reply that I do.
  5. Document more online (including films, books, photos, etc)
    Luckily this should be much easier this time. I did microblog (twitter/identi.ca) every film using the hash tag #film but then I noticed Twitter was cutting off my entries past a certain date. Identica fairs much better going right back to Jan 09, but I only really post to identica when I’m at my laptop (really need to find a identica/statusnet client for android). Anyway, now I’m using Trakt, things should be easier. Although I got to say having my film collection online does raise lots of questions.
    On the photo front, the Nikon D40x (DSLR) is helping a lot, but I’ve still not picked up the courage to shoot people on the street like pebaline (susanna’s great work). I’ve also got first dibs on shooting our work area at Media City for Wovox. Of course Dataportability is still high in priority as always.
  6. Meet more young, progressive, single and central located people
    My boss (adrian) made the point a while ago when he took me to hospital with Tim (my ex-flat mate) I know lots of people from all over the world but I don’t know many people in Manchester or the North. I live in one of the party central locations of england and I should be out all the time but alas I don’t really have many people to go out with (yes cue the violins). So its time to change that and get to know more people. I say single but thats only because I already know lots of couples and its nice to go out with people with a similar status, be them male or female.
  7. Consider going out with woman who have kids
    I’m 32 this year and its becoming more and more difficult to meet women who don’t have kid(s). Although I’m not really bothered either way about single parent families, I’ve tried to only date women who have no kids to date. I spoke to my ex-wife (Sarah) and she gave me some advise (thats how we originally got talking online, she was giving me advice about a girlfriend I was having trouble with at the time) regards to meeting woman who have a kid. So I’m not going to rule it out like I was before.
  8. Get my finances in order
    Now I got a mortgage again, its time to be a little stricter about my spending. I earn quite a nice salary and heck I live in quite a reasonable place for going out. So I should be paying off more that I currently am. I was actually doing ok then I blew up my scooter engine and spent the good part of a grand buying a another one. I also think this might be the last motorbike regrettably
  9. Work more on my healthy lifestyle
    Although I had the bleed on my brain back in May/June, I’m certainly a lot more healthy that I ever was before. I had no idea I had high blood pressure and a lot of the small things were tied to that. So now I have that under control (thanks mum & dad for the blood pressure monitor for Christmas). I generally eat healthy but I do eat quite a bit. So hopefully little things like buying smaller woks will help aid with this.
  10. Play much more
    I have a feeling that play is going to be massive. Its going to be weaved into almost everything around us. I would go as far as to say play will be as big as social was in the late 2000’s. I say play because it doesn’t mean we’ll be playing more Xbox games, no the concepts and mechanics of gaming will make it into more and more things. So its time to get a lot more serious about my own playtime.
  11. Spend more time thinking deeper and focusing
    After the life/death experience I’ve had this year, I’ve done a number of things to improve myself but what still amazes me is our brains. Between hypnotherapy, mydreamscape and a few other things I’ve observed. I’ve come to realize that our brains are extremely powerful and even the idea of positive thought can do amazing things. My social worker (yeah they assigned one to me when I came out of hospital) said these type of life or death experiences makes you question your religious outlook. Although this hasn’t happen for me (although I am thankful to everyone who prayed for me) it has certainly made more interested in what can be done when you really focus hard.
  12. Take Geek Culture to new heights
    This is a bit of a aspirational one (not that there is nothing wrong with that), along side running a full barcamp at Media City UK and putting effort into the BarCamp WikiBook. I’ve been thinking, I’m really interested in what happened to the girl geekdinners, Sarah Blow and the other ladies worked very hard to make it the success that its has become. I feel there might be something with the geeks talk sexy series. We’ve only done one so far but there is something surprisingly compelling about geek culture right now and I think now the general public has the taste. So hopefully the rest of series will be even more successful and the chance to do run at the green room will really kick off something extra interesting.

A review of last years resolutions 2010

Its that time of the year, so first up the review of last year.

  1. Go skiing on real snow
    Yes this has been on going and to be honest, with all the spare time I had this year I could have but it would have been against the doctors advice. Anyway this coming year it will happen for sure.
  2. Blog more
    Yep achieved
  3. A better routine and live more healthy
    Yeah this is certainly in effect, never guessed I would have ended up in hospital midway through the year. Crazy stuff.
  4. Kick off Manchester werewolf night again
    We did kick off another werewolf night but its always at the wrong days, so I need to do more about this.
  5. Find my perfect development stack
    Yeah to be fair I still need to work on this but I did end up buying XML Oxygen editor and played with PHP and Xquery. With mydreamscape I got into the type of development I rather liked. Stitching together things which work like lego bricks
  6. Playout live more
    Yeah I didn’t quite achieve this one but I have plans for 2011. I certainly like to play Trance out live.
  7. Use even more graphics
    This didn’t quite happen, but hopefully this will change
  8. Upgrade sooner if it makes a noticeable difference
    Yes this is working for me
  9. Be involved in a regular podcast
    Indeed this worked out great. Techgrumps is fantastic and hopefully we can develop this even further.
  10. Buy a flat in Central Manchester
    Yes I finally this year bought a 2 bedroom flat in Islington Wharf, just on the east edge of central Manchester. I owe my sister and Billie my amazing mortgage advisor greatly for this whole thing
  11. Avoid all online services which don’t perform to my acceptable levels of data portability
    I’ve done this but I certainly could do more in this area.
  12. Play more games
    This is certainly something I am still not doing enough of. I did buy a Xbox 360 a while ago and to be fair I did buy a whole selection of games when I was recovering from my bleed on the brain, thinking I would now finally have the time to invest in them.

A new hope, a new blog

Me

During Christmas I thought I’d do some maintenance to blog because I’ve been meaning to clean up a few things for a while. I’m hosting with GoDaddy.com mainly because there cheap and there pretty hassle free.

I had my /wordpress blog which you might have seen stuff like this at. Then I also had storytlr at the root of the cubicgarden domain and a couple other blogs which I was testing things on like mydreamscape. So I deleted the couple of test wordpress blogs and started putting a axe through storytlr (which is a real shame but I could never get the cron to work). Then I noticed there was no blog in the management option for /wordpress. Which meant yes it was either lost somewhere in the management interface or it was gone….

I was generally pissed off with Godaddy for not making it clear which blog I was deleting. Worst of all, its all happening on bloody Christmas day, when I should be relaxing not wondering what happen to my bloody blog. I almost canceled my contract with Godaddy right there and then, I got a message from the Godaddy twitter account with some somewhat useful information.

So anyway although I wasn’t able to recover everything back to how it was before, I now have a new blog and lifestream.

I had a backup of my blog from Mid December and I’ve been using Disqus for comments so pretty much everything up till then was safe. All the blog entries I usually write in Blogilo, and I had a backup of all the recent entries. So it was just a matter of digging them out and publishing them again with the correct date stamp.

The first thing you will notice is that the /wordpress is now gone (yeh!) and the lifestream is now finally working (double yeh!).

But….

There is still a lot of work to do. I still need to design the bloody thing and this time I’m hoping to do a proper job. On top of that I’m going to sort out all the external links to my life all over the web, so there all linked here in some logical fashion.

I also need to link up ianforrester.org to my lifestream and add in lots of lovely embedded goodness into my pages.

It was certainly quite hairy at one point but it kind of worked out… Happy Christmas everyone…

Burning the midnight hour

Doc Searls writes about intelligence on his blog. But he talks about sleep too…

Smart people SLEEP LATE yells the headline of this opinion piece in the Winnipeg Free Press. It begins,

Sleep is a fundamental component of animal biology. New evidence confirms that, in humans, its timing reflects intelligence. People with higher IQs (intelligence quotients) tend to be more active nocturnally, going to bed later, whereas those with lower IQs usually retire to bed sooner after nightfall.

After that Doc Searls launches into a discussion about what is IQ and how silly the whole notion of a IQ really is… But what got me was the idea of sleeping late and waking up late.

Since #mybrushwithdeath, back in May/June I’ve been changing my lifestyle around. One of those changes is to do with my time I go to bed. Before I would generally go to bed about 2-3am and wake up about 10am on a week day and on a weekend sometimes go to bed about 9am and wake up about 2pm. Yeah quite shocking… But now I’m going to bed about 12am and getting up about 9am everyday (even weekends).

However things are starting slip, not purposely. Although I’m sticking to the new routine, I’m finding once again that I’m much more productive late evening and at night. I don’t know why, I just am.

I got a feeling I’m fighting nature/biology on this one.

A halloween party for my fellow residences

Halloween Party

Islington wharf where I now live now has a fantastic communal garden (which I’ve been using to read my kindle and play with my pacemaker) and I thought it would be a grand idea to have a party in the garden for all the residences of islington wharf.

So the plan is to have the party and allow people to bring a couple of friends with them. I will lay on a bit of party snacks (I got plenty left over from my flat warming party back in September) and everyone will bring there own drinks. On top of that, there will be two contests, one for the best carved pumpkin and another for the best fancy dress on the day. I’ve roped ISIS’s hollie into supplying the pumpkins and maybe supplying some really nice prizes on the night to the winners.

Finally I thought it might be nice to have a organised trick or treat for the kids of islington wharf. Get everyone ready with treats and go around the flats with a couple of adults to supervise the whole thing. I’m not sure how many kids there are in the flats but I’ve seen a couple playing in the garden since I’ve been here. Its slightly ambitious but even if we get 10% of the residents down on Sunday night, thats still over 20 people.

So why am I doing this?

Well when I first saw the location the garden was certainly a selling point. I really wanted a balcony but I gladly gave it up for a communal garden which I could relax in and share with others. I’ve seen a few people using the garden but not nearly as many as I would have thought. The thing about flats is they have a rep for being impersonal and loney places where people tend to not talk to each other as they leave there flats. In actual fact Tracey Langford said it in her recent interview for east manchester.

Tracey, who runs her own business, says the idea of a community appealed to them too: “We didn’t want to live in an soulless place where nobody spoke in the lift.” She adds, “We also wanted a high proportion of owner occupiers so that people really cared about the building. There is a mix of properties here with houses that face on to the communal garden, which are ideal for younger families.”

And that communal aspect prevails. Says Tracey, “In fact, the first Islintgon Wharf baby was born here a couple of months ago and the whole building was invited to the first birthday party of one of our residents!”

Its all about Community

Community, yep the big C word. Its one of those things which is very hard to just do, it needs to be organic. But fear not, this is just one of the ideas I have to bring people together. ISIS haven’t done a bad job so far but theres certainly some room for improvement. The next logical step I think is to sort out the community forum which is currently hosted on a external site somewhere. I signed up to join the forum ages ago and my membership is still pending (even after months).

My neighbor across the hallway is talking about setting up another better supported forum but I’m wondering why we don’t just setup a facebook group? Although to be fair it seems I’m not the only one who thought about this. The tricky part in a community is getting everyone on the same page (or getting the word out about the site), this requires actual physical work like putting up posters and speaking to people, something which seems to be sadly missing it seems.

ISIS should be involved in the community process too, but not be the driver of the process. It needs to come from the community/residents its self.

So I’m hoping to improve on the community building which has already started. I can’t say it will translate into sales for ISIS but for me this isn’t about that. Its about building a lovely place to live. I already live in a amazing place with some great views and great architecture but in this case, theres nothing wrong with wanting more. A rich vibrant community of caring people who I can share a wine with in the garden? I’m working on it one step at a time…

Lowry and Ebay turn it around

Ebay

When I left the hospital after my bleed on my brain (Subarachnoid haemorrhage). I tried to pick up where I left off in many things including ebay selling and got really ignited me when I found out that one of the sellers i was meant to send a pc to had given me negative feedback. That was ok but then ebay changed my 100% positive score to something like 75%. I tried to get them to change it in multiple ways but nothing worked. However have a talk with a friend who works at ebay/skype I was able to talk to someone who actually understood what i was saying.

It looks like it worked because I can’t seem to find the negative feedback and my general score on ebay is back to 100%.

I just sold my Sony Ereader for £100+ and there were 51 people watching the auction. While when I sold my phone just after I came out of hospital, I got all of 5 people watching it.

Not only that…

The Lowry

I booked tickets to see Malcolm Gladwell before I went into hospital (of course I never knew I was going to be in hospital) of course the day of Malcolm Gladwell was on the week I was lying in bed almost dying. I booked 5 tickets mainly for people at work. Anyway I missed it but my friend Emily did go even though I had the tickets (she bought a full ticket on the day).

Anyway I spoke to the Lowry box office afterwards and they said theres little they can do because the tickets were non-refundable. Anyhow I wrote to the Lowry and they sent me a letter back saying how sorry they were to hear about my bleed on the brain and here’s 5 tickets to any performance in the next year (as long as its not Saturday).

Amazing and Thanks to the Lowry…

They didn’t have to do this but they did. How’s that for customer service?!

Mind over the matter

My bleeding finger after a small blood test

Some of you know I have a couple of great fears in my life.

  • dogs
  • needles and/or injections

I’ve been bitten by dogs many times, the last time I was walking along a quiet street and a little yappy dog came out of the front garden where the owner was cutting the hedge. Walked across the road and came up behind me, then bite me on my lower right leg! Then ran off back inside. The owner instantly ran over and took me to hospital in a car.

But for my fear of dogs, living with one for over a year was one heck of a challenge. Yep after marrying my ex-wife, she brought her dog (jack) over to the UK. I got use to him after a while, and although I’m still fearful of them I’m not so bad now. However my fear of needles has never been damped in actual fact it maybe gotten worst over time.

So why the fear?

  • Well I’ve had a few negative experiences which I still remember
  • When I was about 2, my mother took me to have my vaccinations and when the needle was going in to my arm I felt the pain. I reached out and made a grab for the needle, therefore prolonging the whole experience.
  • When I was at school, someone had TB so of course everyone had to have a injection, just in case. I find ways to put the whole thing off for about a year! In the end they got me and the nurses told me I almost crushed there hands when having the injection.
  • I had a volleyball injury and went to see the doctor to get my finger sorted out. It was going slightly green from all the puss in my finger. Anyway, the doctor looked at it, turned around and asked me to hold my hand out. When he turned back around, he held my arm and whipped out a needle from his other hand. He then quickly pierced/stabbed my finger with the needle and let the puss drip out along with some blood. It was so quick and caught me by such a surprise I was in total shock and threaten to call the police.
  • Every time I go to have anything done at a hospital, they want to do a Sickle cell test before anything else. So a while ago I had surgery on my arm and they did a test. This time they put some pads of creams on the back of my hand to "relax the skin" left it there for about 45mins. Then proceeded to give me a very very painful blood tests in the back of my hand (hence the antiseptic pads don’t work). However I had hidden in the bathroom for the 2nd round. It took 3 doctors to drag me kicking and screaming to get me out and and ready for the 2nd injection.

So yep I’m seriously terrified, and trust me I got more storys/experiences.

Blood testing kit

Hypnotherapy

I’ve been carrying this fear for ages and well frankly I was willing to try anything to get over it. I even considered taking drugs to numb the effects of the needle. So I decided before I go to such extremes I should try hypnotherapy.

I asked the team of physiotherapist at Manchester Hospital and they suggested I check out a portal site for hypnotherapy. Having found a couple in central Manchester, I sent out emails and Shannon douglas from Mind body balance studio, replied with a nice email suggesting I come in for a free session to discuss everything. So I did and thats where it all started.

Shannon is a interesting ex-pat Australian, shes relatively young, very thin, some would say attractive and quite charming. When I say charming, I don’t mean in a creepy, social engineering type of way. Actually shes more innocent and caring that I imagined. My natural barrier were very high when I first stepped in the room but I started to relax with everything that she said. What really got me was the fact that she was newly registered on the NHS referral index and that she could do it in 3 sessions (each session being 1 hour long).

After the first session, Shannon put me under for about 20mins. It seemed like 5mins. (when I say put me under, I really mean put me in a very relaxed state where I’m more receptive to external ideas, it not like how you imagine hypnosis to be (stage hypnosis for example) its quite relaxing and your mind won’t do anything you don’t want to do. Its like giving up smoking, you can only really do it if you REALLY want to) The great thing is that the sessions are recorded and Shannon puts them on Cd for you to listen to later in your own home. She recommends listening to them everyday between the sessions. Its works well because you can really relax in your own home and listen carefully to Shannons voice.

Funny enough Shannon uses a dj app (Virtual dj) to mix between tunes when your under as she reads aloud the pre-paired personalised script. Shannon’s great at what she does but shes not very technically savvy, We did talk about ways to improve her web profile but thats for another day. Back to the therapy and I’ll skip to the last session.

The last session

In the last session (the bridge session, as I’ll call it) Shannon asked me to look around the room afterwards. I noticed the sharps bin (yellow) behind her massive microscope. I also started wondering why she had the sharps bin and the massive microscope. Anyway she explained she does Blood analysis too and showed me what was in the bin. There were these little grey cartridges which Shannon showed me had a needle in it. They were small and very compact. I played with one for a while and Shannon showed me how it works by pushing the orange stick in and twisting it off. Then she pricked her finger by pressing the button and put the blood on a slide which went under the microscope.

It was amazing to see the blood cells so close up, I’ve never seen them like that before and Shannon pointed out certain things in her own blood. You could see tons of red blood cells, white blood cells and many more parts (I wasn’t that bothered what was there, just seeing them so close up, got me going). Anyway, I started wondering what my own blood looks like. My curiosity has just over taken my fear and I think Shannon knew this or at least identified this. The only thing was that I would need to give myself a blood test if I was going to find out.

So after a long long time, I plucked up enough courage to do it. I was almost crying before I did it but I did it!

The relief of doing it was almost unbearable, it was like something had been lifted off of me. Shannon was amazed and was close to tears herself, as she said,

"You’ve come such a long way, in such a short time. Carrying around all that fear for decades must have been debilitating… I’m so proud of you"

And honestly I believe she really meant it.

Blood testing kit

My Fear is gone?

So is it gone? Well not exactly… But I feel much more at ease with the idea of injections. I can now also watch a blood test on the TV without turning away like I use to. I still don’t like it but in my mind everything seems a lot clearer that before. Its like the grey cloud has been broken up into small manageable chunks. Its all very impressive and I’m sure the Cds will come in useful for future events.

The power of the mind is unmeasurable, this is part of the reason why I’m so interested in the flickr for dreams startup, mydreamscape. As Cob
b in inception says,

"planting a seed in someone’s mind could define a man; change him"

Shannon’s hyponotherapy certainly has helped me change my perspective on this fear I’ve been living with for decades. I wish I had it done it years ago. Thank you Shannon, I hope things pick up for you, but doing some of the things I suggested might help too. This is a giant step forward and my life will change for ever more because of this…

Window Cleaning Islington Wharf

Window cleaners

We got a note in our letter boxes on Thursday that the window cleaners would be doing our block on the weekend. I did wonder how they were going to do it because the top of Islington Wharf is not level or very friendly for window cleaners. Actually after a talk with the window cleaning team, they are actually using the penthouse gardens on the top floor to tie there ropes, hardly ideal. The building is also a weird shape, making cleaning it even more of a challenge that say something like Beetham Tower. Although they did point out that the over hang certainly makes things tricky. Islington Wharf has lots of overhangs and angles, so it requires many “drops” according to the window cleaners.

I took a load of shots with my new Nikon d40x. Nice guys and what a job, I certainly wouldn’t do it, my fear of heights would be a killer.

My new home in New Islington

The stunning view from my new flat (islington wharf)

So I’ve finally got the new flat about right, there was plenty of unpacking and even more putting together of furniture thanks to my great parents and lovely friends Sheila and Glyn (who traveled all the way up from London to see me and help me move in, I will never forget that)

I just last Friday put up the last piece of Ikea furniture (the Lack coffee table) and shifted things around in the flat. I expect theres plenty more shifting needed for everything to fit and work in the spaces I have put them in. I still have a ton of flatten Cardboxes in my main bathroom because the recycling is totally filled up and there too large to take somewhere else for recycling.

One of the best parts about the new flat is the amazing view I have in the main room. There is 2 walls of double glazed glass so you really get a fantastic view of North East Manchester (including the New Islington area aka Ancoats). I can easily see the Manchester City stadium, Chips (the weird shaped urban splash flats), 3Towers (another urbansplash set of buildings), Tutti Furti (the self build scheme), Royal Mills flats, the new east Manchester tram line and lots more. On a clear day, you can see the mountains/hills which are the start of the pennines which split Leeds from Manchester. The clouds are also pretty amazing at this height. You can almost see the rain clouds coming in slowly and the thunder storm we recently had was pretty impressive. You could almost see the lightning hit the ground in some places. Wish I had found my camera earlier, as it was simply stunning.

So if you didn’t know already, I bought this place. So I’m now a home owner again. I won’t say how much I got the flat for but its a very reasonable deal with the old governments homebuy scheme. Unfortunately I can’t recommend it much because the new government got rid of it on the 1st August. Its a good scheme no wonder they killed it off. Either way, my monthly mortgage is well below my rent for the other place, I’m actually quite shocked how low it is. Of course its fixed for the next few years, which should give me plenty of time to re-morgage at a lower rate in the future.

All in all, I’m really enjoying the new pad at islington wharf and friends of me look out for the flatwarming party which will most likely take place in the secret garden instead of my flat. If the weather keeps up, I might turn it into a massive bbq instead….

This is what £1800+ worth of IKEA shopping looks like

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The sad thing is although it was quite stressful getting the boxes neatly on to the 6 shopping carts (maximizes space otherwise I would need even more) I actually quite enjoyed it till I saw the bill at the end! By that point I was beyond caring…

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All that shopping was just the big stuff that I couldn’t carry home on my scooter. Tomorrow i’ll get the stuff which I can easily fit in a car, such as rugs, bins etc. I don’t expect it to be anywhere near the amount I spent today

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