Plans and Schemes.

Days seem to pass by so quickly at the moment. It's a constant complaint in our house that there's not enough time to get everything done. Maybe we just take too much on, but just at the moment life seems to be a whirl of people to see, ironing to do (well for Steve anyway...), a dissertation, Doctor Who and so much more besides. We can't fit it all in, no matter how hard we try.
In the spirit of trying, however, Steve has headed back to Watford to rejoin the karate club. Having put off the Reading club as a bad idea (doing most things in Reading is a bad idea), this seemed like a slightly better one. I hope it works out for him. I think he's been at a bit of a loss without it... the plans for joining the gym stalled somewhat, possibly due to my complete lack of enthusiasm for ever being a gym member (I really enjoy the swimming, but I've always found the idea of going to the gym a really uninteresting one... I'd much rather be doing some exercise outside, like walking... I like walking and there's little that is actually better for you than that, but it's a matter of perspective generally) and I think he needs something like karate to focus on. Me, I'm happy ambling through life without beating myself up about what I'm not doing.

We had a packed and rather good weekend. After I'd finished work on Saturday we went up to Walthamstow to see Jonno. He's a lovely guy is Jonno, but it occurred to us recently that we've never really spent any time with him on his own... It's always been at PS meets or parties, and this was something we wanted to rectify. We had a great time, watching Doctor Who with him and going down the pub. Jonno is always good company and it was good to have a chance to get to know a bit more about him and to discover his love of the board game Talisman, which I played many times at university with Gaz... He's challenged us to a game sometime soon, which'll be good, as I haven't had the chance to play for a couple of years.
Doctor Who was great this week, though the reactions were puzzling in many ways... some choice comments included that it was too slow (despite most weeks people complaining that the show moves too fast and there's not enough time for characters to grow), there wasn't enough Cybermen (which was possibly fair, but in any story there has to be a build up the monster and in a creation story like this one, you want to build things up)... you just can't ever please the fans. I thought it was a very good episode overall, with a neat and logical progression. I think there'll be plenty of great Cyberman action this coming Saturday and that will hopefully change some of the reactions online.

On the way home we popped in to Ikea (if you can really do such a thing, it always takes a long time to get round, but that's no bad thing) and picked up a few bits and pieces we needed. It's easy to go overboard, but we were quite restrained this visit, mostly because they seem to have stopped stocking the DVD shelves we chose last September, which was very annoying.

And we even managed to do some gardening too! Mum and Dad kindly gave us their old lawnmower (the best guess at it's age is was 25 years... but it still works fine!) so Steve cut the grass at the front of the house (we don't have any at the back, thank goodness) and I did the sweeping up and a bit of weeding. I think this is something we're going to have to do more often than we've done so far, as the amount of dandelions I pulled up shows. It's not something either of us have really done much before, but I'm sure we'll get better the more we try. We've still got to do all those pots for the garden although with a draught order on the horizon, maybe we shouldn't bother, since we won't be able to water anything anyway...

Current Music: Neil Finn: Anytime
Current Doctor Who: Echoes of the Protii
Current shirt: checked like Davish Patel