A lot of hot air!

September 12, 2009 9:51 PM

It's been a fairly quite day to day with little going on in the morning other than me going to the Gym for my fat burning session, which went well enough though I was trying to beat my "burn 100 calories in 10 minutes" goal on each machine I went on so in fact it was probably more Cardio than fat burn, but none the less, I got it down to about 12 minutes so a little improvement and I should be closer each time I visit.

When I get back we have a spot of lunch and then head out to Oxford. We visit the Bathstore that I had been to yesterday so that Phil could have a look at the suites and see what he thinks. It went ok, but by the time we priced everything up the bath, overhead shower, glass shower screen, toilet and sink were coming in at around £1800. Add labour on to that and tiling and flooring and I don't think we are going to be shy of around 5K for the entire thing which is a lot of money. I guess I wouldn't have minded if I thought that I'd picked out the most expensive of everything to go in there (ok, the limestone tiles might be excessive at 1K but that was a bit of a pipe dream really, we can always cut back a lot on that side of things) but just for the basics to come in at nearly 2K was a bit of a shock. I don't realistically think we'll get the labour costs below 2.5K (I had a quote a while back and it was that price, and the man at the bathstore said a similar figure) so I'm not sure where I will cut back on things to get the price more realistic. I mean we could go for one of these bog, bath and basin deals for like 500 quid or something, but the intention is that we don't end up with something falling apart and tatty in 5 years time, so a lot of thinking and planning to do.

We then head over to Maplin as Phil appears to have developed a bit of a soldering fetish and pick up a few more little projects for him to do. Note to self here that Maplin shelves slide, so in fact there is a lot more stuff on offer if you move the shelves around. The 2 projects Phil gets are a Mini Message Board and a Message In Space. They should be quite cool if they work.

When we get home it's not long before we are setting up the BBQ, Agnese had kindly donated one of the disposable types to us before she left so since the weather was so nice we thought we'd use it and slap some sausages on there for dinner.

Mid-cremation and overhead a very brightly coloured hot air balloon flies over so Phil busies himself taking some shots of it with the telephoto lens (one of the rare occasions that the camera has the right lens on it to start shooting straight away!). I've never been in one before, but it does look very serene and peaceful up there looking down on everyone else going about their daily lives.

We watch the end of Underworld: Rise of the Lycans which we'd started a while ago but never finished. It was Ok I guess, but for the entire movie I couldn't help but think that Bill Nighy was about to burst into song with jazz hands. No idea why, but for me he's not a convincing bad guy.