Month: December 2006

Xmas is here

This weekend we have mostly been finishing off our Xmas shopping (almost done, almost), carting boxes of stuff into and out of the loft, and converting our living room into Santa’s Grotto. Sort of.

I even postponed my Sunday morning run so we could hit B&Q early.

Well, that’s not true. I HAD planned to go for a run but, halfway down the road, I realised I’d left my running shoes in the house. I normally wear them to drive down to the park, taking a spare pair with me but, as I’d been for a run on Saturday (can anyone say 5.4k!!) they were a bit muddy, so I thought I’d wear my spare pair and change when I got there. I’m a diddy.

Still, it did mean that we got round B&Q and Au Naturale and were home again by 1.30pm. That gave me time to cut four pieces of wood (batons for shelves in the kitchen), cut a piece of hardboard to go down the back of the TV to hide the cables, paint two shelves, four batons, one piece of hardboard, hang up three set of lights, and generally return the house to some sort of order.

The main reason we were in B&Q was to buy a set of outdoor Xmas lights. Louise would LOVE to do the house up like something out of an American movie (think Home Alone), but thankfully common sense prevails… or at least I roll my eyes and refuse to buy 100m of rope light. However we did both spot, separately, a set we liked. If you’ve seen the B&Q advert on telly you’ll know what ones – a small set of Xmas pressies that would sit nicely under the tree in the front garden. Not flashy, TOO tacky or ‘gaudy’. Ideal.

Except B&Q don’t sell them. What the feck is the point of that!! So far my google-fu is failing me but I’ll find ’em!

Plenty to do though… I’ve still to move the elliptical trainer into the garage, move the reindeer into the front garden, install an outside power junction and get the Xmas decorations up in the hall. However that’ll all have to wait as, and I’d kinda forgot about this, tomorrow we get a new front and back door!

Currently, and it’s especially telling on days like today where it’s blowing a gale, we get a bad draft coming from the hall. This is likely because you can see daylight between the door and the frame. Not good. So we’ve splashed out some savings to get a new front door and, while we were at it, we’ll get a new back door too. Why not.

So, that was pretty much my weekend. We’re ALMOST all Christmas’d up, and I’m ALMOST able to forget about it until after the 5K fun run next week. Almost.

How was yours?

Questions Answered #9

In a desperate effort to gain some weird form of validation, I stole an idea for a blog post and begged my readers to ask me a question. And they did. The buggers. Now I have to answer them.

Lesley asks “Why I will never be cool enough to own a Mac”. To which I can only answer, how the hell should I know? How cool ARE you Lesley? Ahh, but then I realised she trying to imply that *I* wasn’t cool enough to own a Mac… as if..

Why I will never be cool enough to own a Mac
I’m a liberal. I’m a free spirit. I believe in an open mind. I wear t-shirts, a lot. I don’t wear a suit. In my head I am still a carefree young man, who knows that cutting edge cool isn’t *cool*. I’m laidback, I care about design, I care about quality. I like the best of things.

But I’m most definitely NOT cool.

Cool is a state of mind (man), and I’m just a little TOO conservative, a little TOO “middle-class” (ohh you know what I mean), a little TOO snooty to be cool. I mean, yeah, I’m a great guy. I’m pretty sure if you met me you’d think “yeah, he’s alright”.

But you wouldn’t think “whoa, he’s cool” (possibly because you are NOT in a Bill and Ted movie and no-one really talks like that, um, do they?).

Of course owning a Mac, and let me just clarify at this point that we are discussing the ownership of an Apple Macintosh home computer, not a plastic garment that is usually yellow and comes with a matching hat… did anyone have one of these as a kid? Yeah, I’ve got the embarassing photos too.. that and sandals. SANDALS! Honestly mother, what WERE you thinking?

Where was I?

Apple have a series of adverts which pitch a ‘Mac’ against a ‘PC’. The Mac is represented by a young, trendy guy, the PC by the staid ‘office worker’ in a suit. The adverts are clever, witty, but are starting to grate. You see, I get the whole “iLife your life” pitch but I think these adverts are over playing things. Quite considerably. This is one of the reasons I don’t think I’m cool enough to own a Mac.

You see I ‘get’ that owning a Mac is largely down to the experience, ease of use, etc etc. That’s all good as far as I’m concerned, and without getting into ANOTHER Mac vs PC debate, let’s just leave it at that. Mac owners, I get it. I really really do.

But I can’t own a Mac because I’m not cool enough. I AM that PC guy, as much as I want to be that Mac guy. Well, I’m kinda halfway in-between, and that’s the problem. It’s not so much that I don’t think I’m cool ENOUGH to own a Mac, it’s more like I don’t think OTHER PEOPLE will think I’m cool enough, they’ll snigger under their breath, talk about me behind my back and it’ll be like that time in the sauna, all over again.

In a way I blame Apple for this, and I wonder if they’ll lose the sales of other ‘on the cusp of cool’ people through the message they use to promote their wares. Owning a Mac means joining a club, a clique, a culture. Not everyone wants that, nor would feel comfortable with that, but hey what do Apple care? iPod sales continue to be strong (owning an iPod is NOT cool) so they can afford to be picky, they can afford to be the COOL guy, but maybe they should worry a little about that guy near the end of the line, the one that is always picked second last. He knows he’s not cool, but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t be…