My Squiggly Black hangover

Hello readers and welcome to my birthday blog. Indeed my birthday was on Saturday, and so begins a new era.

I might just do a quick run down of the weeks events so that I can get to the party...

Monday: Work went quickly and in the evening Adam and John came over to my house for the evening.

Tuesday: Work was great, and the evening was better! Me, Jason and Gemma went to see Korn in Wolverhampton! We arrived early and had a bite to eat in subway and a drink in the Little Civic before going in to the big Civic to watch the warm-up acts before Korn came on! The gig was awsome and part-way through Jo and her sister, michelle turned up. I knew they were going to be there, but they were delayed due to train errors. I have some rather good photo's of Johnathan Davis... Bless his cotton socks... Here we go with the photos...

One of the whole stage. Jonathan is the little black triangle with legs. It's the kilt, you see...

A close up of JD and the infamous microphone that appeared in most of the later videos.

And ol' JD playing the bagpipes! I was hoping he would play them, and I nearly missed it because I was in the loo when he started!

After a good two hour set they encored with....

...NO! not freak on a leash, they played that half way through! They encored with one of the newer ones and afterwards we left and Gemma bought me a Korn Tshirt as an early birthday present (bless her cotton socks!)

We decided to catch a tram back to Brum and we had 10 minutes wait before the last one of the night left...

...Or so we thought! You see the info' displayed on the electronic board was the old timetable, which finished the day before. The new timetable was very different and we had in fact missed the final tram to birmingham. The one tram that did arrive was only going back to the depot as Wenesbury! The driver told us about the old/new timetable changeover so we shouted at him for being employed by wankers....

Anyway, we eventually got a taxi from Wolverhampton to Wythall. It was going to cost £60 but Jason, looking mean and gothy, managed to "haggle" (and by "haggle" I mean "threaten") a taxi driver to do it for £35. So we got in at roughly 2:00am and I went to bed.

Wednesday: Work was rather good and in the evening I went down to Fathers to watch Torchwood and Ice Road Truckers.

Thursday: Work went well and in the evening I went down to the Packhorse. Lank arrived late due to being at a works shindig but it was a good night.

Friday: Work went quickly and in the evening I went with some of the TA's to a quiz on at the Coppice primary school. We took our own drinks and had a really good time. We wee leading at one stage but dropped to 7th place by the end because of a disasterous music round where 30 points were available (10 questions: one point each for artist, title, and year!) we left in good spirits though and I came home to play about on t'internet before going to bed.

Ok, Saturday... My Birthday. I was up early because we were having new carpet fitted. I moved the furniture outside and covered it with large plastic sheets. The guy turned up at 11:00am and got started. After he had laid the new stuff (mmm.... soft) I started getting furniture back in, the TV back in, and the PC back together. This took me until about 2:00pm. I then decided to go to Kings heath with Selena as I could upgrade my phone! I love my K800 but the K850 was beckoning to me... I went in to 02 and started chatting with the sales girl (mainly because they pounce on you like vultures) but she was very nice and allowed me to have a free k850, a half price 4Gb memory card, and a free bolt-on, so now I have free 02 to 02 calls... Thats just about all of my family and a couple of my friends! suits me! I came home to discover that the phone is very cool, but is sold under some rather dubious advertising... Allow me to explain. Please consider the following image:

Now you would think, wouldn't you, that the sides of the phone light up? I would think that because it has been highlited in this photo to be the same colour as the navigation key light...


WELL IT DOESN'T! it's just a bit of plastic that adds a dab of colour to the handset but does, in no way, light up. Now this wouldn't be a major selling point for me and it's not like I'm going to hate the phone just because the sides aren't illuminated. What does annoy me is the rather lax attitude to advertising on Sony Ericssons behalf. There is, however, a feature available on the '800 that they have removed from the '850 that I think was a good idea... They have removed the file manager.

Now I used to love that system because you could add folders to your memory and organise photos and music as you wanted them. This has now been scrapped and music is only available through the media player which is sometimes a pain because other than going in to the main "tracks" tab you cant search for a track on the keypad, you have to manually scroll through them... I have over 300 tracks of music on my phone! Do you realise how long it takes me to scroll through them? I have countered the problem by making playlists but it isn't the same as the good old file manager. I would prefer it if I could somehow load K800 software onto the K850 and keep the look of the media player but have it operate in the same way as the K800, and bring back the file manager... Sony Ericsson, you have been told!

Anyway, other than that it works great and the 5Mp camera is excellent.


After all that me, mum, selena, and Kieron went to the Packhorse for a bite to eat. We only stayed an hour as I needed to get back to be changed for when Lank, Jason, and Gemma arrived to jump in the taxi I had ordered. It came and we left at about 8:00pm. We got in to Solihull and dived in to Wetherspoons. People started to arrive and by 9:30pm I had a full contingent of followers. Dad turned up for a quick bevvy' before going home and we went in to Reflex. A call-out for my birthday was made by the DJ (who kept making references to me throughout the evening)

I took some photo's but Marcus has a lot more. Mine are as follows.



Lank, trying to clean Jennys' ears with his tongue, as Jenny strangles him and Jo. (I like Jo, she should come out more often.)

marcus having a good time but Bobby looks like he isn't fully warmed up yet...

Ah! there we are! Throw Adam in to the mix and things get frisky! Bobby loks happy now!

lank, trying to stretch Gemmas arms out (and succeeding, by the looks of it!)

hee-hee! Well after a time people started making a move and at 2:20am the last of us rolled out (except for Adam who stayed because he found his friend Becky, but thats another story.)

Me and lank caught a taxi from the highstreet and we were home for 3:00am. I went to bed because I needed to be awake fairly early...Sunday morning and I had to shrug off my squiggly black hangover. I was going clay shooting with father. We used to go quite regularly but haven't been in over 12 months. We headed off to Long marston at about 10:00am. We got there for 10:40am-ish and were shooting for 11:00am. We had 50 clays each. I could talk about cross-pairs, rising birds, low skeet and pairs on report, but I wont because it's not very interesting, and just refers to different clays. I hit roughly 30-or-so with about 5 more "wounds" (clays that break, but doesn't get hit with a direct shot)

After an hour or so we left. I came home and lounged in front of the PC for a few hours before being picked up by Donna who was coming with me to my dads house for tea, along with my nan, aunt and selena. He cooked spag-bol and put a few songs on the jukebox (I swear, he is trying to marry me off to Donna) which was nice and we all had a round of laughs before coming home for about 10:20pm.

Right. Thats about it readers. I have to cut it short there as Dan has come round and we are going for a curry at Millenium at the Maypole.

TTFN readers.