Our garage is at the back of the house at the end of a long alley.  I have to back the car all the way up the alley, and in the winter time it’s rather muddy there, and for that reason plus to deter intruders, we have a security light on the corner of the garage.

However, although the security light comes on ok after it gets dark, it no sooner goes off than it comes back on again immediately, all through the night, which not only runs up the electric bill but annoys us and the neighbours as well.

So, on New Years Day, having purchased a new security light, I tried to fit it, which ought to have been a simple process, but unfortunately my luck never works out that way.

I went out to the garage mid-morning with good intentions, and began to disassemble the old light, having turned off the electricity to the garage.  I hadn’t spent more than 15 minutes on this, and had removed the light, when it began to drizzle.  So I put the lamps and tools in the garage, and went back into the house to wait for the rain to stop.

Instead of stopping, it just got heavier, and during a break I went out to the garage to retrieve the light and tools, since the garage roof, which is made of corrugated metal, was covered in condensation, and the constant drips were enough to ruin the light and to make everything rusty.

After that the heavens opened, and it rained continuously until well after dark.

The following day was bright and sunny, with no rain forecast, and so I endeavoured to try and complete the job. 

Where the wires came out from the concrete wall of the garage, I had noticed as soon as I had removed the old light the day before, that a horde of wood lice scurried into the hole and disappeared into the garage, and so prior to fixing the new light I thought it prudent to put some sealant in the hole to try and keep the electrics dry and free of bugs.

I had a tube of caulking that I had only part used a year before, but unfortunately the cap was full of dried up filler, and it took me a good 30 minutes to clean this out so that I could use it.   Into the hole the caulking went, but unfortunately the added pressure I needed to use because the caulking was old caused some of it to ooze out of the bottom of the container, and all over the caulking gun, which was virtually brand new.  

I tried to clean this, but  it was pretty evident that at best I could only do a bad job, and so with regret both the tube of caulking and the caulking gun went out into the trash.

Fortunately the new light looked like it was a newer model of the old one, and had the same shape, but were the holes to mount it in the same place?  Of course not!  The old light had holes in the top left and bottom right, the new one had them top right and bottom left.  So now I had to drill holes to fit the thing as well.

I have some good new masonry drill bits, but my drill is not an SDS one, and with the wall of the garage being made out of concrete blocks, it took me most of the drill battery to drill one hole, and the second one just didn’t want to co-operate, until such point where not only were my hands cramped, the battery went flat.   I changed battery, but guess what, the spare one was even flatter than the first, so I had to put that on charge, which takes about 24 hours.

So that was the end of that, and today after a long break for the holidays it’s back to work, with no light in the alley, and during the night and day terrific wind and rain.

The task is now going to have to wait until this coming weekend, when I will be armed with a couple of fresh batteries, and hope that my not so trusty drill will do the trick this time.

I don’t know why the simplest of tasks have to prove so complicated, but it’s the story of my life unfortunately.  Somewhere where has to be someone who has the opposite side of the coin, so I hope that they are grateful for my taking on more than my fair share of problems so that they can have an easier time of things.

Is this something that you can relate to?  If so, I would like to hear what you have to say, so please leave a comment.

Yes I’m English, but I moved to the USA in 1994 and lived there for 15 years, only returning to the UK in 2009, so as well as now being a dual American/British Citizen, I had 15 years to adopt the American lifestyle and to get used to spending the last weekend in November having a much earned break.

You would think that by being in the UK for over 2 years I would have got over this feeling by now, and I am sure that I would have, if it were not for having many friends and contacts who live in the USA, as well as my two daughters, whose Christmas presents I was shopping for Thanksgiving Day online to try and get some good deals.

In addition to this, I have been creating lenses (pages) on Squidoo that are related to the Black Friday sales, and reading lots of other pages about how people celebrate Thanksgiving, so it’s difficult to cut yourself off from everything that’s happening across the pond.

So here I am sitting in an office, on a day that’s not terribly busy, a lovely sunny day too, which is fairly rare for November in the UK, and I wish that I could have been at home so that Debbie and I could have gone for a lovely walk in The New Forest.

We are planning to do that tomorrow, but the weather man already said it’s going to be a chilly night tonight, and knowing our luck it will also be cloudy as well.  At this time of the year in the UK you have to pick your moments, you can’t always afford to put things off until tomorrow, because the weather might not be on your side.

Well those are my thoughts for this day after Thanksgiving.  I hope everyone that we know in the USA had a wonderful day yesterday.  Meantime instead of wishing that we too had a 4-day weekend, I am going to think ahead to next Easter, when we get our 4-day weekend, and in the USA it’s just another 2-day one.

There’s a history behind great clubs, a line of managers and players who’ve come, strived and departed. In years past they’ve been mainly from the same working class roots as the fans and indeed the players. There’s a tale from the early Sixties where a message was sent to the lodgings of the young Ian Callaghan – “you’re playing this afternoon”. Ian duly got his boots and kit and went out to the bus stop where LFC fans called him forward – “come on Callie, you’re playing, get to the front of the queue.”

It’s different these days: nowadays players are told to leave the really flash cars at home so most turn up in black 4x4s with tinted windows (illegally tinted but police allow it so as to avoid disturbances when the cars are not in motion). The only people richer than the players are the owners. American millionaires in today’s climate are overshadowed by Russian oligarchs with more security than the Libyan President. Fans on minimum wage have learned of leveraged buyouts and corporate governance and hedge funds and the rest of the financial gobbledegook that is used to hide the greed and malpractices of a shady few.

Over all of them hover the Sovereign Wealth Funds, the conjoined wealth of Arab clans and Maoist governments. Inbred regimes buying respectability and publicity by purchasing chunks of English history and planting golf courses in deserts. Ex Thai Prime Ministers with corruption charges against them and god knows what else sniff around: if Noriega was alive he’d probably be after Newcastle United. The financial chancers sniff around, as LFC found out to great cost in recent years. And quietly in the background Rupert Murdoch counts his billions, a fortune driven by Sky Sports, driven by The Premier League.

Look at a new stadium today: corporate boxes abound – business bigwigs on tax-deductible blowouts (our taxes that is). Tiered seat prices, carefully calculated by the demographics experts to extract the last penny from fans who’ll go short elsewhere to buy a ticket.

And do I go to games regularly? Of course I do, I’m a supporter. God help me.

The author has recently published a Squidoo lens detailing Liverpol FC sites on the web. Drop by and watch for the link to Alan Edge’s great article on Bob Paisley’s grandaughter.

Click on the picture for a larger version

I think we all have our favourite sad songs – songs that we turn to when we’re miserable and songs that make us even more miserable – but we can’t stop ourselves. It might be a chance playing on the radio, a snippet overheard as a car drives by, a random selection on the iPod. It might be a deliberate playing – curled up with a mug of hot chocolate or a glass of wine, the door still shaking after the row and the lover walking out – we have to put on music that suits our mood – misery needs feeding and a sad song is the best food for sadness.

Mind you, a song doesn’t have to be about lost love, it can be about anything going wrong. From Eric Clapton’s tears for his dead son to a lament for a lost cause, it’s sad if it makes us sad, it’s good if it makes us cry. Memories get stirred up, sometimes old hurts are brought back to be picked at until the blood runs. We’re daft to do it but the soul needs misery as well as joy.

I picked my ten favourite sad songs for a blog a while ago. I chose Janis Ian’s At Seventeen, I chose That’s No Way To Say Goodbye by Leonard Cohen. There’s Harry Chapin on a father’s neglect of his son and the loss of any relationship, there’s Neil Diamond and Barbra Streisand with a majestic You Don’t Bring Me Flowers Anymore. They’re all about loss and they’re all about self blame – we failed to control a bad situation or we just let it happen. Perhaps that’s why we like sad songs: they let us pretend we were steamrollered by life when really it was our own fault for not spotting the signs and acting.

Or perhaps we just like a good wallow: it reminds us that our lives aren’t too bad after all, that we can turn off the music and let the sadness end. For a time anyway. For a while we had a partner in our misery, someone who’d suffered like us, now we’re moving on. Until the next time.

Time to rack up Leonard Cohen and Dory Previn, time to put Tracy Chapman on endless repeat, or to play “our song” until the neighbours complain. Break out the booze or the ice cream, slob out on the couch – misery wears a ratty dressing gown and slippers – leave me alone, I have my sad songs.

I went out to do my weekend chore of picking up his mess in the garden, for which I keep a small trowel which is dug in a flower bed.

I began my “search and retrieve” mission, then realized the trowel handle was all slimy and wet.

On sniffing it, seems the dog has now decided to use it as a peeing spot, so I had to continue to pick up the rest of the mess, knowing my hand was covered in dog pee.

Back indoors I washed my hands at least 10 times, but that only gets rid of the pee.

I have no idea how many times more I have to wash them before I can touch food without being reminded of it.

YUCK!!!

I gave her some ideas for things to check, the Cable box, make sure the correct AV input was selected etc, but she still couldn’t get it working.

I came home from work, and it’s definitely the television, since the picture is all distorted even when you play a DVD.

“Just great” we thought, no money to buy a new television, certainly not the one that we would like, so we are hoping to “borrow” one from a friend, or get a second hand one.

The picture did come back on for several minutes earlier, and we got our hopes up, but then it went again and hasn’t been right since.

At least the sound is working, but it’s not the same watching your favourite shows with a picture that is so messed up you can’t see anything.

So we have been sitting for the past several hours, listening to the television, while working online on our laptops.

That is up to 45 minutes ago – when the internet decided to crash on us. Oh double joy

I rebooted the router, but it’s still showing no connection.

I then called our ISP, who had already put up a recorded message to say that they had outages in our area, so I guess we will have to just wait.

Well so much for writing articles tonight…  We went up to bed early – no television and no internet – it’s like living in the dark ages…

Actually since we found out at the weekend that the central heating isn’t working either – it was cold.  Yes definitely like living in the dark ages!  At least the electricity didn’t go off.

I write on a number of topics, usually it depends on what comes into my head on any given day, so it could be a travel story, memoirs from my life, something from the daily news, or even a poem inspired by something.

This is what I have published in the last week, enjoy:

• Mary Goes To The Beach – strange things happen down at the beach, like people taking photographs of statues on the rocks
• Flitter Flutter Losing Focus – as my ADD kicks in yet again my brain begins to wander and I struggle to figure out what to write about – so I write a poem about it
• What Movie Am I III?- a movie quiz with the clues set in rhyming form.  Can you unravel the cluse and guess which movies are being described in these clues
• Coverack – Lizard Peninsular – Cornwall- Coverack is a picturesque small town and harbour on the Lizard Peninsular in Southwestern Cornwall in England.
• Stuck In A Loop- the publishing process at Associated Content has been going around in circles and a number of people have been tearing their hair out trying to publish articles.  So as usual I end up publishing an articles about it.
• Pope Blames Sins Within Church For Minor Abuse – a commentary on the latest sex scandal that has rocked the Catholic Church and some reasons why members of the priesthood are placed in a position of temptation
• Offbeat News – where truth is often stranger than fiction.  This week featuring a marriage saving blanket that is designed to absorb farts
• Coverack – Lizard Peninsular – Cornwall- the second part of this photographic tour of Coverack in Southwestern Cornwall
• What Movie Am I IV? - the next edition of the movie quiz where the clues to the movies are set in rhyme
• My Travel Time Has Arrived At Last – the second part of my life travels which covers a trip to the Greek island of Corfu and various trips to the provinces of Normandy and Brittany in Northern France
• Coast Path – Lamorna Cove To Mousehole I – a photographic tour along the coast path from Lamorna Cove to Mousehole in southwest Cornwall

If you enjoy my writings, poetry and photographs, why not register with Associated Content, and then you can get an email every time I publish something.

Now that I am back writing I already have a number of additional articles published.  You can also Click Here to see my latest articles, rather than wait for the next summary posting.

I write on a number of topics, usually it depends on what comes into my head on any given day, so it could be a travel story, memoirs from my life, something from the daily news, or even a poem inspired by something.

This is what I have published in the last week, enjoy:

• International Star Wars Day – celebrated every year, May The Fourth Be With You
• Volcanic Ash Cloud Causes More Travel Chaos – the renewed volcanic activity in iceland is yet again causing disruption to air travel in Europe
• Sunset Over Lamorna Cove In Cornwall – photographs of a lovely sunset from the deck outside The Dovecote
• St. Ives In Cornwall – photographs of this quaint Cornish town with it’s narrow streets
• Life Lessons From Bill Gates – some tips for students everywhere
• Banning People With Pants Hanging Down Breaches Human Rights – what are your views on whether people should be allowed to walk (waddle) around with their underwear on show?
• Coverage Of Iceland Volcano And Tennessee Flooding Raises Newsworthy Questions – did you read about the volcano in the USA or about the Tennessee floods in the UK?  How effective is world news in different countries?
• Cornish Daffodils – photographs of fields full of Daffodils in Cornwall
• Offbeat News – this weeks highlights from the world where truth is stranger than fiction
• Seagulls – photographs of a posing seagull in Cornwall
• UK General Election Haiku – poetry and information related to the UK General Election
• What Movie Am I? – a short movie quiz in rhyme
• What Movie Am I II? – another short movie quiz in rhyme
• The Lizard – Cornwall – photographs of England’s southernmost point
• The Lizard – Cornwall II – conclusion of this series of photographs from Cornwall

If you enjoy my writings, poetry and photographs, why not register with Associated Content, and then you can get an email every time I publish something.

Now that I am back writing I already have a number of additional articles published.  You can also Click Here to see my latest articles, rather than wait for the next summary posting.

Firstly, life has just been very hectic lately, with Debbie’s daughter, husband, 9 month old baby and 2 dogs coming to live with us 3 months ago.  The extra people in the house, especially a baby and 2 dogs, just made it harder to focus on all the writing that I wanted to do.

They are headed out to South Africa (emigrating) in a few weeks, as soon as the visas have been sorted out, so soon we will have the house to ourselves again.  No doubt it will be then almost too quiet!   The dogs have gone to new homes, so no more barking or mud trodden into the carpets, however Debbie’s grandson is now in between the crawling and walking stage, and has discovered how to shriek at a pitch and loudness that is dangerous for your health.  It’s that “fun” stage where the word “NO” doesn’t seem to mean anything, so it keeps you on your toes, and nothing is safe!

Secondly, we only moved into the house at the end of October, and there are plenty of things that need doing, both inside and in the garden.  It’s taken a lot of our time, but again it’s been hard to get motivated to do some things.

Thirdly and most importantly, we finally got married in April, and went to Cornwall on honeymoon.  The preparations for the wedding took a lot of Debbie’s focus and time, and also mine to an extent.

Lastly, in an attempt to try and boost my online earnings, I have been writing a lot over at Associated Content.  This is a great site for authors wanting to get noticed, and if you are thinking of writing to earn some money, I definitely recommend it.  Click Here to register, and even if you don’t want to write, you can opt to be sent an email every time I publish a new article.

So what do I write about?

Pretty much anything really, from written articles to poetry to slideshows of our trips and local area.  Topics recently have included the UK General Election, the Icelandic volcanic ash cloud, movie quizes and a lot more.  Just visit my account at Associated Content and take a look.

I am hoping that as the year progresses both Debbie and I will be back writing here as well, but you can always see what we are up to, every Sunday there is a Twitter summary posted here, and on Mondays a summary of my new publications over at Associated Content.

I hope you have a chance to read some of what I have written there, and every page view counts towards my earnings total.  If you do visit, please be sure to leave a comment to let me know you were there.