Category: Life
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I’m The One That I Want
2018 is the 40th anniversary of the movie Grease (the cheesy musical starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John). I remember going to see this movie at the cinema when it came out. It was a huge phenomena at my school – people were brylcreme-ing their hair, and buying flick-combs, and trying to act all cool with their collars up, and seemingly everyone had the soundtrack album (although no-one played disc 2 which was original songs from the era and not songs from the movie). If you’ve never seen it, the basic plot is that a guy and a girl have… Read more
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A Whale Of A Time
Last night I went to see The Decemberists in concert, again. They haven’t been to Houston for several years (usually choosing to confer their patronage on the more bohemian Austin) so I bought a ticket as soon as they were announced, and booked the day off work. The reason for the day off was because I splurged on the ‘VIP concert experience’ package. For about 4x the regular ticket price, this gives you some free merch, early entry to an ‘exclusive two-song set’ and a Q&A session with the band, all of which was set to kick off at 3pm,… Read more
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Live and let Live keep charging you
Several years ago, I bought my son an Xbox 360 for his birthday. Along with this, I got him a subscription to Xbox Live Gold. Because he was a minor at the time, getting him an account set up on Xbox was a complete pain in the ass, involving me providing a credit card to prove I was over 18 and could ‘vouch for’ him, then a bunch of iterations of logging in and out and providing various approvals/confirmations, and so on, which took the best part of an hour to do (all the while, the boy pacing around anxiously… Read more
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Falling foul of liable laws
A month or so back, my 16-year-old daughter had another car accident. This was her second within a six month period, as a consequence of which I tool her car away (for the second time) and this time also took her off my insurance (before the insurance company likely dropped her themselves) – which really did not go down well. The damage wasn’t actually too bad (compared to the first accident, where she totalled the other car – a BMW Z3), but as I only have basic insurance and my insurance company determined the accident was 100% my daughter’s fault,… Read more
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Death At One’s Elbow
A year ago today, my ex wife killed herself. At the time, we had been divorced for five or six years and I had custody of our three kids, so aside from the shock, there was little practical impact on our daily life – just a lot of mental goings on. Although I had a lot of conflicting feelings, grief was not one of them. I had grieved the loss of our relationship long before, and after a fairly bitter divorce that almost bankrupted me there was certainly no love lost. Most of what I felt was anger. Anger that… Read more