Staples and things....

Hello everybody, I haven’t written in my blog for a while, so it’s time for an update I guess. It’s been very busy recently, but I’ve been given the day off today, due to injuries. So, the good news is I have time to attend to my blog. I’m sitting here with three staples in my scalp having walked into a road-sign. It makes a bit of a change, normally I bang my head on “Mind Your Head” signs, which is remarkably stupid of me. So, I guess that you’re intrigued now? I was out with the boss (Alex Copland) checking the Laois County bridges for use by nesting “Dippers” and wagtails, etc. Having finished at one bridge, I believe it was due to be the last one of the day, although we might have pulled one more in, we were scaling the bank, returning to the road. Alex reminded me to to be careful where I was putting my feet as there was an open drain hidden in the grass, and I was being so careful that I missed the 8 foot road-sign and smashed my head into the very corner of it. Luckily I was wearing my Donegal Tweed Flat-hat, otherwise I’d have needed a few more staples, and yes they are real staples just like the ones used in offices, only bigger and stronger!

Whilst waiting for the staples, Alex and I were able to watch most of the Seville V Espanol match on the TV in the hospital waiting room. This was a bit of a coincidence as I had left Seville Airport the previous day, with the plane full of Seville FC fans who were unable to fly to Glasgow due to the thousands that were attending the match. It was an exciting match, with two cracking goals and a lot of cracking strikes and saves.

Hopefully this will bring this weeks round of bad luck to an end. I spent the morning at the opticians replacing my specs which had broken whilst in Spain and in the afternoon my Leitz binoculars broke, (the focus wheel has decided to free-wheel). I’m told the bad luck comes in threes, so hopefully that’s that. My two latest eBay purchases (an MP3 player and radio transmitter) both work, so that’s a good sign, although the two of them don’t yet function as a pair because the jack-plugs are different sizes, but what the hell, that’s a lot better than the 80GB hard-drive which arrived broken and I’ve never been compensated for by eBay, the seller, (digits_n_numbers),the carrier or PAYPAL who have really let me and another colleague, Jamie, down. The carrier have promised to try and sort it out for me, whereas PAYPAL, the seller, (digits_n_numbers), and eBay no-longer respond to my mail. I did mention to those three in my last mail that I would enter a web-page naming and shaming them in blogspots and MySpace, if they didn’t sort it out. I might even add one to Bebo as well. So, if anyone else has been dissatisfied with any of these service providers…. Please add your comments and let’s go public.