Apparently we have a young poet in our midst!  Simon, together with a lot of other children from his school, took part in a competition earlier in the year to write a poem for a new local poetry book.  As they don’t expect 6 year olds to be able to come up with technical masterpieces, they asked them to write a specific type of poem called an Acrostic, which is basically a few lines where the first letter of each line spells a word, when read vertically.

Simon has been selected as one of those to be published:

Moon

Moon goes around Earth

Orbits the Earth

On the moon there are craters

Now the moon is gone.

Well Christmas went well .. the kids could open a toyshop and sweet shop combined with the amount of stuff they got, we're still ploughing through the chocolates (oh what a hard life!) and I've had a horrible cold for what feels like ages - last week was the worst and I ended up with a few days off work because of it - which would have been fine if I felt well enough to take advantage!  Needless to say, the fire got its first run out of the year due to my shiveryness!

Anyway, on the mend now - shame we can't say the same for our luck.  Our washing machine broke down (again) at the weekend, so I had to borrow dads for a few loads whilst waiting for the engineer to come out - hopefully he will fix it tomorrow, although what normally happens is he takes one look at it, says "he needs a part", and then he doesn't come back for a fornight.  Ever the optomist!

We thought we'd done really well tracking down a bargain for Andrew - been looking for a bunkbed for ages for him - one of these with the desk and single sofabed/futon underneath.  The one that we had seen that we liked (not that there is a lot of choice) was made by a company called Thuka, but unfortunately everywhere we looked the prices were always around £650 plus delivery (which was usually another £40 on top).  This is both in and out of the "sales".  Anyway, just by chance, saw one that looked very similar on the Tesco Direct website, but for almost half the price (strangely, at the time, they had two options - you could either buy the whole thing including mattress, or you could buy it without the mattress and buy that seperately - and buying it seperately was actually cheaper as the bunk without the mattress was in the "sale" - very odd).  So we ordered it, fast delivery time (about a week, compared to all other places quoting around 8 weeks), with £5 delivery.

It arrived on Friday, we spent ages putting up the "bunk" part of it, got to start the underneath bit - the shelves and such, and it turned out that they'd sent the wrong stuff.  The bed, and what we ordered, was a plain laquered wood, but the underneath bit was an unfinished stained wood (despite it stating it was part of the pine laquered set on the box label). 

So I rang up Tesco, spoke to a very helpful chap who found the item on his computer, saw it was in stock, ordered it, and told me it would arrive "next day", although explained that, as they didn't deliver on a Saturday, "next day" would actually mean Monday afternoon (or Tuesday at the latest).  They would even open up the box and check to make sure it was the right finish, before loading it onto the van!

Monday arrives (today), and I rang them back up just to check if it was getting delivered today or tomorrow - and they had no idea what I was on about.  The guy I had spoken to hadn't ordered anything, hadn't put a note on the system, couldn't "possibly" have checked on that part as there was no way of doing so, and it was out of stock anyway, and no idea when, if ever, they were getting more in.

They only had two choices for me ... either wait indefinately for the part to arrive in stock, at which time they would have to send the entire order again, so that I could select which box I needed, and send the rest back (and no, they couldn't check the finish before bringing it out to me), or get a refund, take the entire thing back down, and send it back.

Needless to say, I am a very unhappy bunny.

I even suggested to them that as the item was obviously incorrectly packed at the manufacturers, they should ask for a replacement from them, but they said they could only do that if they had one in stock to exchange with me ... as they couldn't take "part" of it off me, without exchanging it, and couldn't get a replacement from the manufacturer until they had an exchange item as well .... and "it comes all the way from Denmark, you know"....!  I believe he heard my *shrug* over the phone.

Okay .. so first off, as I always found it difficult to find my own bit of "space" in hyperspace, I've done two things - I've downloaded some weird little bit of software that seems to be a sort of offline blog writer called Windows Live Writer, where you write down your blog entries on your computer and it then uploads them to your blog (hopefully!).  Secondly, I've created a new sub-domain so I (and anyone else I guess, if they feel the urge) can find it .. its now at www.blog.lowesfamily.net - which I may change at some time in the future, but at the moment, when there is really only me here *shrugs* no need to pay for an extra domain name.

Right .. to explain the title.  Yesterday, I "dinged" to 80.  yup.  Not the first and certainly not the last, but I did definitely ding.  I'm talking about World of Warcraft of course.  And "Dinging" for some very strange reason, is what you call it when you go up a level. 

In the game, when you go up a level, you get a kind of yellowy gold swirl around you, and a "boing" noise, together with a nice message telling you you have levelled and gained extra points in various bit n bobs like stamina (which adds to the amount of health/hit points you have), strength (which adds to the amount of damage you can do when you wallop something), etc.  I have no idea why they call it "dinging" and not "boinging" ... perhaps its just easier to spell!

Since the last expansion pack came out a good few weeks ago, all those people who had characters stuck at level 70 could now advance another 10 levels - along the way experiencing more quests, dungeons, people, monsters, etc.  And I've just got my first character, my "main" character, to level 80 .. capped again.  Now comes the long hard slog (but enjoyable all the same!) of levelling all the other characters I have, some of which are sitting ready and raring at level 70, others ranging right down to level 7 - a looong way to go! 

And what happens with a character when they get to level 80?  Well, then a whole new game opens up - more rewards, more dungeons, bigger, harder dungeons that require more people to do them, a HUGE range of achievements that have just been brought out with the last expansion - and all the time Blizzard (the guys who run World of Warcraft) are working on the next patch, the next update, the next batch of additional content and changes.

As I've just decided to enable access for all, so to speak, I decided to put a link to this blog from my main website (www.lowesfamily.net). But very strangely, I've just tried it both in Internet Explorer and Firefox and it looks different in each! Well, I suppose you would expect a few very minor layout differences, but the strange thing is that, despite the blog refusing to work correctly when I was putting it together in Firefox, it actually works how it should when viewing it with Firefox (and not with IE6)?! So if you see a few things missing (mainly the RSS feeds I think - the news headlines, etc), it's down to the browser and Microsoft's inability to make everything compatible with their own software! Of course, it may improve with the new IE7, we'll have to wait and see.

Ramble over ...!

I've been delving into the family tree again and had a breakthrough last night!

My grandad, Charlie Sigsworth, is rumoured to have had 3 wives (not all at the same time!).  Now - I had info on two of them - Olive Bulman and Lena (Leenock!) Simpson.  They were complicated enough - as both had been married before and had children from previous marriages, but I was trying to trace the mysterious first wife.

I went about it quite methodically - I knew his second wife, Olive, had been born in 1914, their marriage date about 1934, her first and only child, Derrick, born 1935 and died only 8 years later in 1943.  So first things first - as I knew when he married Olive, and I knew his birth date and could therefore work out approximately the EARLIEST he could get married, I had a start and end date during which he could have possibly married the first time.

In theory.

Anyhoo .... I have been searching for ages for his marriage to Olive, couldn't find it.  So then I tried looking for Derricks birth (working on the assumption that the marriage would have been before that).  Couldn't find that either.  THEN I tried to find Derricks death - no luck there either!  Well blimey - they can't have fallen off the map completely for all that time? 

Well, I had a bit of a brainwave last night - or it could have been the glass of wine! - and looked for Derrick under his mothers maiden name - and found both his birth and death!!  So I've now ordered the certificates and it is just a matter of sitting back and waiting, to see what information they can provide.  It is now possible that they weren't married, yet my mum was adopted by them from grandad's sister, and I can't see that really happening unless they had been married.  The mystery continues .....

I originally started this because I got some cashback through quidco (I'll try to work out how to stick some decent links on later!) - but then discovered that I needed to have "signed up" with my Messenger/passport address to make it work properly.  And then, after several e-mails, I discovered that once you've created a space with a certain e-mail address, you can't change it.  Which means I'm going to have problems when I change internet provider!!  Heyhum.

Anyway, got it sorted in the end (had to delete the old one and start from scratch, and now MSN's servers don't appear to be working very well!).

So this is all just one big experiment - I'll let you know how it goes!

Well, I'm sat here, after a couple glasses of wine, surrounded by the stink of wet dog. No idea why. I don't have a dog, never had a dog, don't intend to have a dog.

Actually that's not completely true (not the bit about the dog) - I've got an inkling it's something to do with the wet carpet. I never realised carpets were made of dog hair, but it certainly smells that way!

What I'm trying to say is, we had a chap clean the carpets today - they're in the process of drying out, but smell something rotten. Although I'm impressed with how clean they look - got plenty of stains out that I thought were now permenent features (Marton Cleaning Services if anyone is interested!). Unfortunately it meant that we have been moving furniture backwards and forwards all day and I've suddenly apparently aged 50 years!

Anyway, obviously the carpets needed doing, but could never get round to doing them - but this is all paid for courtesy of Asda - after they managed to deliver my online shopping in lots of nice, dripping wet bags, covered in old beer and splinters of glass - obviously some problem in the van that the delivery guy had either not noticed, or not cared about. So I've got the bill (she says, suddenly thinking "eeek , where 'n hell is it!") and I'll be off in the next couple of days to Asda (once I've found all the stuff that was nicely piled up but has now been moved in a frantic attempt to give the carpet cleaning guy a "clean sweep") to claim my money back.

Right - I think that will do for now - I'll add more when I'm slightly more "with it" (and have worked out how to work this "blogging" thingy!).