ORIGINALLY POSTED 20th April 2008

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After a few hectic months, I’d booked a week or so off work so that we could take the kids up to see their grand-parents. I originally hale from Glasgow and my parents still live there. My sister works in Edinburgh as a special-needs teacher and recently had a baby girl, so the plan was during the (rather late) Easter school holidays, to make the 400 mile trip back home to catch up and meet my niece. The best laid plans and all that. My son was off school the week before the holidays with, what I can only describe as full blown flu. The next week my wife caught it, so we postponed the trip a week, and yes a few days later our daughter came down with it. I felt like I was getting it and guzzled some vitamin C and other such remedies and managed to escape with a few days of rusty throat. Anyway the long and the short of it is that we’ve had to put off the Scotland trip till the next school holidays and I am eventually taking my break as a 6 day weekend. The old car seat, baby clothes and my old PC (my Dad gets a good deal with my old machines as I upgrade – hi Dad if you are reading 🙂 ) will have to wait a few more weeks before they find their new homes.

After our daughter (3) had drawn an almost perfect outline map of the Isle of Arran (including The Holy Isle) at the top landing of the stairs, we’d been talking about re-decorating. So this weekend we’ve had the painters in – a.k.a me and the Mrs!

So far I’ve replaced the carpet at the bottom of the stairs with wood flooring, blending that into the living room. Double coated the entire hall space, ending up with that nice “spray-spotted” paint-roller look on my hands and arms. Meanwhile last week we sold our old living room aquarium (20 gallon). The wall behind which were still the previous wall colour (the thing was just too heavy to move when full). So I dug out the remainder of the wall paint and covered it up. Going over some other patches where out daughter had shown her artistic talents too 😎 . The next morning my wife pointed out that she thought the colour we had in the living room was a bit dark, and “look how its changed since we painted it” – there was now several very much lighter patches where I’ve covered up the artwork! So the living room has a new “light stone” covering (Dulux Once) at least, and it really is one-coat stuff.

Oh yeah and on Thursday while the Sun was shining I made it out and hacked down the Japanese Rowan (thorny bugger) and next doors ever encroaching hedges.

These programmers hands are shot! Sitting behind a desk or rack all day really is an easy life when it comes to hard physical work! I’m beat!

Now I just have all that white gloss woodwork on 10 doors and doorways to look forward too!

Meanwhile back to the reality (of work) the Diligent acquisition has been announced, like Tony much of what goes on in my daily work I am not at liberty to talk about here until such time as its made public, and over the next few months I will make time to comment on whats coming, a lot of which will explain why I’ve been so quiet recently. Anyway, deduplication has been of interest for a while, and as always SVC is perfectly placed to integrate with the latest and greatest functions and products, yet again proving the fundamental value of an in-band appliance. I’m off to rub moisturiser into my hands, and could do with a good old massage for my legs and back! A few more days of holiday left…