For the last two days I’ve been working from home as the weather has made it too dangerous to attempt the 45 mile trip to work, some of which is along “non-main” roads.  However, due to limitations on our VPN I’ve not actually been able to do much other than keep on top of emails and other work which doesn’t require access to the resources based in the office.

The reality of this is that there really isn’t much that can be done from home, so I’ve been taken the opportunity to start the spring cleaning in the house.  Following the holiday period when our house is filled with loads of people the place is still yet to get back to its normal order (which is actually not that neat anyway), so it has been a welcome opportunity to clean up a bit.

In line with our desire to move house this year we’ve also began the process of downsizing our estate – getting rid of things that we just don’t need anymore but have hung onto for reasons unknown.  It’s a difficult job for me because I’m a bit of a hoarder but now comes the time to be ruthless – we don’t have the room for the stuff anyway, so it just needs to go.  My problem is that I feel guilty about just slinging stuff out and it ending up in landfill, I want it to go to someone who will use it, or if its broken then recycle it properly.  This does however take a bit of effort.

Freegle is a website which helps you recycle stuff that may be of use to someone else.  It’s built around Yahoo! Groups and if essentially a mailing list – people post stuff to the list and people that want it offer to take it.  You can also post “wanted” notices too.  I’ve used it in the past in its former incarnation of Freecycle (which I still think is a better name) and it has been useful for helping to get rid of things, and also to help others who might actually want the stuff you no longer do.

Having realised through re-reading this that I am turning into Adem, I will now get on with checking work emails and a bit more cleaning up.  Good day.

Having played golf, tennis and a football match yesterday, as well as attending Adem’s housewarming party last night, then playing another football match this morning, I feel a little tired.

I had a good day yesterday.  It’s not often Chris is up for playing golf, or Ben is available to come out to play so I took advantage of both.  We played Stonelees executive course in the morning, (where I did mostly badly) and then headed off to the tennis courts right next to Ben’s house in Westgate (technically Margate, but Ben likes to thinks he doesn’t live in Margate).

A couple of hours tennis later I was off to my football match where although I didn’t start I played most of the game because of an injury to another player, and did pretty well thank you very much.

Adem’s party was quite a late one last night, so after not a huge amount of sleep, being a little hungover, we had another match this morning for Preston, who I’ve re-signed for after around a 6 year absence.  And we won and everything.

All that good fun appears to take its toll though.  My legs are now all stiff and achy, and I find myself contemplating an ice bath, as per this lady’s recommendations.  Harking back to a previous post, perhaps I am just a little too old for all this youthful larking about!

Myself and Mrs Tom are due to get married later this year, making things official after seven years together.  An exact date however is not known, which is possibly a little unusual at this stage – we are hoping to get married in October.

Our main reason for this late arrangement is cost.  We will be able to make things a heck of a lot cheaper for ourselves if we leave the booking late, and as we are paying for everything ourselves (no donating parents here I’m afraid) this is pretty much a must.  We’ll be heavily dipping into an ISA that Mrs Tom has been keeping for around ten years, as well as a maturity fund which I have which pays out next year (essentially I’ll be borrowing money from Mrs Tom’s savings and giving her back what I get when my fund pays out).

It’s not as difficult as you might imagine.  We will have things like suits, dresses, invitations, flowers, favours, cake etc all taken care of, so when we do finally know the date it should hopefully just be a case of popping the invites in the post and taking care of some final arrangements.

Now we’re getting down to booking a venue, we’ve found a couple that we like and now we just have to negotiate with them to make it affordable for us.  This may or may not be successful, but we have to give it a go, anything we can save will help us hugely.  Hopefully we’re not too far away now.  I’d post links to the possible venues, but I’m scared my one reader might book it before we have a chance!  Perhaps I’ll report back when it’s all sorted!

Hopefully my nominated best men (plus helper) will sort me out a nice stag do to preface the big day.  I’ve been holding my breath, but I’m starting to turn blue!

Attending a student comedy gig tonight at my chum Adem’s place of work, the Thanet branch of Canterbury Christ Church University has reminded me of when I used to see a lot more comedy when I was younger.  A local pub used to have gigs on and we would go to watch in the room upstairs and have a great time.  It was there I first saw people like Ross Noble, Andrew Maxwell and many others, some of which have gone on to much better things.

I would also visit Jongleurs and other comedy clubs and have a really good time.  I used to watch comedy videos all the time, stand up, TV series, sketch shows I loved it all.  Actually I still do love it all and wish I got out to more live gigs and had the opportunity to watch more comedy on TV.

Perhaps I should finally bite the bullet and buy a new TV to put into my ‘attic room’ and hook a DVD player up to it so that I can watch funny stuff whilst Mrs Tom watches programmes about murders on obscure satellite TV channels.