Sheila’s Neighborhood

My dad passed away in the early hours of Monday morning. He'd been suffering for a long time with COPD and was prone to angina attacks and chest infections as a result. He had real trouble breathing and was on oxygen pretty much most of the time.

My brother called me at about 3am to tell me the news and to ask if I could come home. I got the first boat over at 8.20am and got to the house. My dad had been taken away by then and my brother and I began the process of Sorting Things Out. And in a strange kind of way it was an enjoyable time: just I, my brother and my mum in constant contact dealing with insurance policies and such like, as well as clearing out cupboards and cleaning.

There wasn't all that much to sort out in terms of material possessions; my folks moved from our family home about 10 years ago to a small one-bedroomed house, so most of the junk went during the move. And my mum is physically prepared for being on her own. She's paralysed almost completely from the neck down and has constant social care. My dad was there, but he wasn't really there in the last few months as he wasn't in good enough shape really to be of much help to my mum. Of course he was company and that's what she will miss the most.

Mum and dad were married in 1971 and my dad was 78 at the end.

The funeral was today. We didn't expect there to be a great turn out, given that my dad's family is quite small now and he wasn't really a great socialiser since moving house. But we were wrong: there was standing room only and even at that some people had to stand outside!

The service was really good, officiated by the same minister that married Brian and Lynn and me and Lorraine. He also christened all four of Brian's kids. So he's been dealing with the families births, deaths and marriages for a while and that's kind of comforting.

The service was followed by a trip to the cemetery where dad was buried and it was a nice service there too. The close family all threw a rose into the grave and I hope that Freya will remember. I think she will. Hamish probably won't though as he's only 3.

During my time at home, since Monday, I got to an AA meeting every night. It's weird to think that I spent a lot of my drinking time in Prestwick and Ayr but I'd never been to a meeting there. It was easy enough to find the meetings and it was a great help to me. It's a shame in a way that I didn't get to sit in the pub with my brother and the rest of the family after the service, but I know what that would have led to and it's not what dad would have wanted; of that I am certain. So I made up for that by getting a 32 gig iPhone. It's what dad would have done! He always was an early adopter and a gadget freak so it's the best way I can think to remember him. I also wore his cuff links at the service today and shall keep them special.

I'm not sure whether I'm grieving or not. I think being able to share at the AA meetings was a big help but whether it was letting out some of the grief I really can't say. I've never dealt with the death of a parent before. Time will tell.

I know that I am proud of my family, particularly my brother and his eldest for the way they've dealt with everything this week. And same goes for Lorraine; she's been there for me and has been a great help. And my children helped too. And so life goes on for us all.

I'd also like to thank all the friends and family who came along today. It was a great help to me to see my school friends there, even if I didn't get to talk to them for very long. If you're reading this its, thanks for coming!

Rest in Peace, Chipper.

The kids were at a Hallowe'en party at the school last night and had a great time. For some reason I can't get Lightroom to export the photos in their proper colour settings on the Macbook; their costumes were more vibrant than they look here. But you get the idea.

The kids were at a Hallowe'en party last night. Doesn't Freya make a great witch?

Overclockers shafted me. They wouldn't repair the motherboard. I just got it back from Gigabyte and they did repair it. But it took them so long that I ended up buying another system, this time from a decent reseller (Kustom PCs). I decided to go for the latest socket:

Asus P7P55D (socket 1156)
Intel i7-860
4GB G.Skill NQ Series DDR3 12800 (1600MHz)
Noctua NH-U12P CPU cooler

I also got a SATA DVD-RW drive, so I'm ditching IDE finally. No more floppy drive either.

I built it on Thursday night and it worked! So after about 3 months of having no computer, I've got a good one! I've got Windows 7 pre-ordered so I can't really build the new system yet. I've got Win7 64-bit RC1 on it just now, but I'm not sure if it's working. I'm having trouble copying data to the new hard drive and am getting a few hard drive errors. I'm a bit worried about corrupting my data so I should probably just leave it well alone until I get the retail version of Win7, either that or I should stick XP on it just for kicks, so I can see how much quicker it runs than it did on my old AMD64.

Lorraine and I were married on 9 October 2002 and I had my last drink of alcohol on 9 October 2005. If I had not stopped drinking, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be married 7 years!

It's been a great day. We got each other a woolly jumper from the sheepskin shop as 7 years is apparently the wool anniversary. And we got wood delivered for the fire and sat home and watched Burn After Reading, the Coen brothers' latest. it was very good indeed.

I also got to practice step 9 at work today (we continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it) on a customer who got me wound up. I apologised, unequivocally.

I also had a nice meringue cake made for me at last night's AA meeting. They're good people for sure.

So today I'm a grateful sober alcoholic and a happily married man. Oh, and I'm cosy and warm too!

I got the processor back from testing last week. The retailer had tested it for 48 hours and there were no issues. The new video card I bought didn't make a difference either, so I'm now down 30 quid for a video card that I didn't need. I asked Bill about it and whether he could test it for me. It's disappointing that I'm supposed to be offering a PC repair service and can't even get my own working without going to 'the other guy'. The only think I can think that it would be is the RAM, but it seems unlikely that I'd get four dodgy DIMMs. Maybe though; they are all the same brand (2 kits of 2 x 2GB DIMMs). It was Thursday I spoke to Bill and I've not heard back yet so I will phone OCUK on Monday and ask either if I can send the RAM back for testing (another two weeks) or if I can send the whole lot back and buy a bundle. Trouble is their bundles are all overclocked and I'm actually looking for stock or underclocked for reasons of cooling and quietness. If they agree, and I don't think they will because they are not nice to deal with, I suppose I could discuss component options at that stage. It's really driving me nuts though. How long has this been going on? I waited literally for years to get this upgrade and it's at least two months since I bought the new gear. If only OCUK were nicer to deal with and more helpful. I shan't go into an anti OCUK rant just yet; they've still got a chance to redeem themselves and get a glowing report from me. One can only hope. By the way, I'm quite enjoying MarsEdit as a blogging client. I shall post this straight to Vox and Sunbane then I'll be off for ice cream and a decision of which movie to watch: Quantum of Solace or The Boat that Rocked.

My good friend Arjun recommended to me The Count of Monte Christo. I listened to the version read by Richard Matthews, a British reader and he read it very well indeed. Of course the book was originally written in French and I know not who did the translation that I read, but it was as if the book were written in English. One choice they made that, to my mind was the right choice, was to keep names and titles in the French, for example the Procureur du Roi, monsieur de Procureur, and so on, rather than the Royal Prosecutor. Knowing a little French, I had no trouble with this, but I wonder how it would have read to someone with no knowledge of French? It reminds me of my reading A Clockwork Orange and being a Russian speaker; my experience of that novel was not the same as it would be for non Russian speakers. Anyway, enough of that. On the book. Arjun is of the opinion that it is the best book he's ever read. I wouldn't go quite that far, but it was very, very good. It's the first and only Dumas novel I've read, and may in fact be the first French literary novel I've read. The tale is a simple tale of revenge for a wrongful imprisonment. The Count himself becomes almost God-like in stature; he seems to be omnipotent and able to influence people to do his will. In fact, that aspect seems a little unbelievable, sort of like Jason Bourne of 18th century France, but with Jason Bourne you know you're reading make believe as it's so far fetched. The Count seems much more credible than Jason, but he loses some of that credibility as his powers and knowledge increase. How, for example, could he possibly learn to speak so many languages like a native in so short a time? Language is something that I know something about and I know how far-fetched that really is. But, once disbelief is suspended, the novel becomes great. At some 30-odd hours, you would think it would be a little dull in parts, and to be honest it is, but at the same time it is easy to listen to. I was a little worried at the morality of the Count and his taking revenge with such little humility and sympathy, but the ending assuaged that fear of mine and he redeemed himself admirably. I think I can say that without a spoiler alert. All in all, I'm very glad that I read this book and I would heartily recommend it. I give it four.

I just downloaded a 30-day trial of MarsEdit, a blogging client. It's hooked up to Vox and to sunbane.com so I can do dual posting without having to copy and paste. I'm not sure whether it will be all that useful, or at least useful enough to spend actual money on it, when I can copy and paste for free. It does have plenty of other features, so it may be that some of the other features will make it worth actual money. We shall see. Let's see how it handles the uploading of images.  Right, it uploaded to sunbane, but it doesn't do that neat little thumbnail thing that you can do in the browser when posting to a squarespace account (which sunbane is). I'll see what happens when I post this same post to Vox. It's put the image URL in so it should display fine. I suppose since it's data-loss and the locked-in nature of Vox that prompted me to get sunbane in the first place, it would make more sense to host images on sunbane too. So how would I do links? That's something I do a lot in blog posts. It must be achievable in MarsEdit. How about a link to Stephen Fry's blog (which I thoroughly enjoy reading). Ah, select text, right click and there's a neat little option called paste link. It seems to have worked.

I also spotted in the context menu several other mark-up options. For example, this paragraph should be a block quote.

I'm sure there must be shortcut keys too, but that's for another day. It's past 9 o'clock and I try to limit the learning of keyboard shortcuts to between the hours of 9 am and 12 noon. By the way, and just spent a tenner on the premium service for Spotify to see how it would work on the iPod touch. The most attractive feature for me, what with the iPod touch being an offline or wi-fi device, is offline playlists. I'm downloading some of my playlists to the device now, whilst listening to the Waterboys Dream Harder over wi-fi. The sound quality is mince. Maybe it was just a poor choice of album for the test. Let me try something else... Ah yes, Yello, Oh Yeah from my 'guid stuff' playlist. Quality is better. So how about something else over wi-fi? Revolting Cocks, Fire Engine (from Cocked and Loaded - I'm constantly surprised at what can actually be found on Spotify; that's another large part of its attractiveness). Yeah, this sounds all right quality wise, as well as content wise. It's a shame that a tenner a month is out of my realm of affordability right now. How come this service wasn't available when I had loadsa money to throw at tunes? Right, let's see how this looks on Sunbane, then a double post to Vox and then I'll try another post with an mp3 embedded and then a YouTube video.

It's now four years since I got serious about stopping drinking. My last unintended drunken journey into oblivion was in September 2005. I'd fixed a friend's printer and, as a thank you, he bought me a bottle of malt whisky. It sat in its box behind the kitchen door for a long time. As it was in a box, I was able to take swigs out of it without its being noticed, until eventually I'd have to buy a replacement bottle. It was always a fine line with drinking enough to get a buzz, but not too much that it would become obvious that I'd had more than we had agreed I would have. Of course, inevitably I'd hit black out. The time came when I hit one black out too many and got that close to losing Lorraine and Freya.

I did drink again, just the once, but not to blackout and I think I got away with it. It was enough for me to realise that the few weeks I'd been in the AA programme had already made their mark and that I really did not want to continue with that life.

I had a good meeting last Wednesday; one of those meetings that stays with you and changes you in some way for the better. I did the top table at that meeting and shared about how my life is right now, prompted by the first few pages of chapter 5 from the Big Book. I won't go into it hear -- I'm not even sure why I'm feeling so comfortable now about airing my alcoholism in public. Maybe I'm at that stage of growth where I'm no longer afraid or ashamed and maybe I'm even a little proud of what I've achieved? I know about pride before a fall and all that, so I shall try to remain humble and grateful.

It really is amazing how much the 12-step progamme can help with day-to-day life. Yes, really. I am a grateful alcoholic. It's rather strange to be saying that, but truly I sometimes wish that everyone, whether alcoholic or otherwise, had some sort of programme to follow; it really is that helpful.

And yes, I really do need AA. I'm still an alcoholic and that will never change. Going to meetings regularly is essential for me to stay well and improve. I missed meetings for about a month before last week's Wednesday meeting and I was getting close to climbing the walls. And it's weird how I felt well the entire time until I got desperate. It's the little things, like getting resentful at customers coming in to the Post Office when I'm busy with something else. If I didn't have customers, I wouldn't have a business. I need to remember how much Luxembourg's shopkeepers pissed me off with their rudeness. I'm sure you'll find one or two blog posts about that very topic if you look back through my catalogue of posts. And not being nice to the most important woman in my life, the woman with whom I have chosen to spend my life. Why can't I just be nice to her? I was talking to another alky about that tonight and he understood where I was coming from and mentioned a quote from Martin Sheen, something along the lines of his being mean to his wife to drive her away and validate his self hatred. Could that be it? I don't think so, but I suppose I shouldn't rule that out. And I was sharing about how I have so many opportunities during my working day and in my home life to work the programme, to change my first response from the selfish to the selfless. And that's hard my friends, so very hard.

I got my stitches out today. Left Arran on the 11:05, got to Ayr hospital for 14:15. My appointment was at 14:30 so my brother headed off and said he'd be back to get me after 16:00 (well, he said after 4, but I'll stick with the 24-hour clock for the sake of consistency :) )

The nurses fast-tracked me because I live on Arran and so I was back out on the pavement before my appointement time. Unbelievable. Of course my brother had gone so I got the bus into Ayr, thence to Prestwick. I took a look at the iPhone tariffs in the 02 shop (still to expensive: cheapest is £30 p/m or PAYG for whatever it is but it's unworkable as the price of data goes up after the first 12 months to too much), got a box of choc toffee from Thorntons and then got the bus to Prestwick to see my folks. My dad was away to hospital himself so I didn't get to see him.

I also visited Kustom PCs in Ayr to pick up a new video card. I had narrowed the non-working new computer down to the video card and was sure that a new one would be the answer. It wasn't. It must be the RAM. I'm getting rather sick of this whole debacle. Trouble is I don't have the means to test everything. One can't have spares of everything laying around, can one?

I read a bit of the newspaper on the way over and it got me thinking once again about my lack of knowledge on British politics. I took a look in Waterstones when I was in Ayr and they did have one book that might have worked for me,