Today was the unmissable trip to the statue of liberty. The plan was to get up real early and try and
beat the queues. The plan only partially succeeded. There wasn't a queue to buy the tickets but still over an hour once the ticket had been purchased before embarkation on the boat. My Top Tip:
Get to Battery Park and buy your ticket - make sure you get the ticket that gives you access to the monument base - GET THERE for around 0800. You can be on the first boat, and then when you get to the island go straight to the queue to go the monument base. Security is very tight. Don't take anything that you don't need to because you can only take camera's onto the monument, everything else has to go into a locker - $1 bill and your finger print required. I got heartily fed up of taking my trouser belt off and even my camera bag was deemed too big to go onto the monument!

TOP TIP number 2. Take a helicopter ride around New York - the New York New York trip from Liberty Helicopters was the trip that we did and Top Tip 2A is go from the WEST HELIPORT. The queues are smaller, they are less booked up. We managed to book and fly within the hour.

I suppose I ought to say 'guess where I am', but most of you will recognise the Wall Street bull immediately/ Yup. I am in the Big Apple, New York, New York. Apparently they needed to name it twice for some strange reason. Was it in case people didn't get the location the first time?
Lordy is it ever cold here. The air temp is around 40 degrees F, but the effects of the canyoning round the buildings makes the air feel a hell of a lot colder. I am wearing a coat that usually I can't wear in the UK as all it does, even on cold days, is make me sweat. Not so in New York. I am wearing it, my body is not sweating and only my exposed skin is cold. Cracking good coat - came into its own for the first time in ten years. And we used to think that we have cold weather in Gloucester !! Here I am styling the coat in times square - hands firmly stuffed into pockets.
Another odd effect of the canyoning is the NYPD and NYFD sirens. At ground level, you hardly notice them except when they are right on top of you, up in our hotel room on the 40th floor, we can here them all for miles around, and they never seem to stop.
Got slightly alarmed a few minutes ago, the lights went out on the empire state building, followed a few minutes later hordes of NYDB and NYFD cars and trucks screamed by sirens and blaring and driving against the traffic in the direction of the Empire State.
I guess that it was unconnected, the police and fire departments seem to go everywhere mob handed with lights blazing and sirens blaring. A quick search of New York websites revealed that the lights had gone out as part of Earth Hour. As far as I could see, most of the rest of New York didn't bother, but I could be wrong.

I took the ebay shop thing out. It slowed the computer down about 100 times when the page was loaded. On closer inspection the software, or rather the coding, is hosted at paypal labs. Obviously still experimental and probably on a slow server. I shall look elsewhere.

What a few days. Something, I don't know exactly what, keeps tripping the electrics. It just trips the Earth Leakage, so all the sockets go. Hannah gets p155ed off because her alarm loses the time and she has to reset it. My alarm just adds 3 minutes everytime the leccy trips. Much more of this and I'll be on tomorrow's time, today.

My fault. Complete up cock. Yvonne told me last week I needed more tablets. Well, I didn't go and get them. So today, well, you can guess. So. scrawled letter to the docs and then a quick plea over the phone and then up the chemist. Few, panic over, but, all entirely my own fault. If you can think of someone else for me to blame, please let me know, it'll help me feel much better. email me or leave me a comment.

Off to the hospital on Wednesday as a day patient for some treatment to my back. Hope it works, and hope it takes away some of this lingering, nagging, haunting agony that I am in. The gabapentin helps, but only just.

If you look at my blog, you will see that a shop front has appeared. I am trying to work out how to sell the massive accumulation of stamps that I have that I don't want. I only collect Gibraltar, and I only want one of each, so all the extra's and the swaps must go. Looking at all the options at the moment, and a shop front on my blog is just one option that may be worth using. AT the moment the shop is closed, that is because I haven't loaded any stock into it yet!!

Dreading the hospital and it's only just over a day away.

Happy days.


Trip


There goes the leccy again. Thank goodness for the UPS on the computer.

I can't believe I never told you the saga of my new car.

No, I haven't got it. They cocked up. Big time. When it arrived, they discovered that they had forgotten to order the extra's, that I had paid for up front weeks ago, the extra's that are factory fitted, you know, things like the full length panoramic glass sunroof. Can't exactly get the jig saw out and cut out a hole yourself. ( I did in around 1981 with my TR7 but that is another story).

So complete cock up. Tough, they had to order another one, another 6 - 8 week delay. Oh, they offered me an old wreck of a rover Y reg in the meantime. Big deal. I had no choice, I had an interview to go to (didn't get the job), and so I had to accept. When I went to pick that up, surprise surprise (as cilla would say), it had proved unroadworthy, and so they, and get this, are HIRING me a car in the interim.

My God, I couldn't invent this for one of my novels, I'm not joking.

Too busy doing tidying in the house to play with the cam corder today, oh, and also multi tasking (me, a bloke.....) and trying to get the network printer to work on the old XP base PC so that H could print off her 20th birthday photo's. Yes, another milestone passed this week - the last of fledglings are no longer teens, any way, back to the printer. Windows Firewall just refused to let it through, and in the end after interminal sessions of install and de-install (where is the BOFH when you need him?) I gave up with the windows firewall and installed Zone Alarm instead. Bingo, all working and 20 odd photo's suddenly burst into life.

Changed the PSU for the security camera's too, and so we are all seeing once more, thank goodness. So, too hectic a day to play with the camcorder I am afraid. Tomorrow I have to change at least one of the CDRW drives in the old XP unit - couldn't read Die Hard 4 today, and that is a real bummer. ( Did I mention I was multi tasking today? at least 4 things at once !!)

Must get back to the writing this week- too much time spent on other things recently, but at least we now have a tidy office and a spare bedroom that a guest can sleep in.

Off to play poker now

G'night

Quite a busy day. I had my six monthly foot checkup at the clinic today. Seem to have lost some sensitivity in the left foot, the right is the same, more or less, as it was six months ago. Clinician was somewhat concerned at my 'ice cold' feet, but she did manage to find a pulse in my little toes, so all cannot be particularly bad. She advised that I took some photo's of my feet, so that if they changed, I could show the doctor what they should look like.

Satnav played up today, took 15 mins to find the satelites, and then kept telling me to turn around when possible. 'Dort' fixed it when she popped round this evening with a magical reset. She stuffed a pin up its reset orifice. Nice one Dort.

I shall hopefully be doing a review of the new addition to the family, the Sony HVR-A1E, thanks to a really good price from Prestons of Malvern. Great price, knocked spots of anything I could get of the internet, and an authorised Sony UK dealer, so no dodgy imports. Fingers crossed.

Thing is, we have a bit of a jaunt coming up, and I really wanted to record it in the best possible way, and this semi professional HiDef unit seems the answer, so, I have to learn to use it, and in doing so, I will blog my thoughts.

First thing to note is how small the unit actually is. I will get the ruler and camera out tomorrow and show you. But for today, I am off to read the manual.