wow, my house is half empty!

Ira (aka the “X2B”) has moved out and is taking the last of her share of our stuff with her tomorrow, so my house is a little empty.

I also spent most of last weekend (easter bank holiday) filling up a skip with all the stuff that seems to have accumulated over the last 4 years, it’s amazing how much crap you can end up with in such a short period of time and how good it feels to get rid of so much useless “clutter”.

I took the kids to check out the new place tonight and it has their officiall stamp of approval, so I guess I’ve not lost my touch.

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well it looks like after four years of living on the outskirts of Cheltenham I’m finally going to live a bit closer in to town and not have to pay £7 each way for a taxi whenever I want to go for a beer!

I’ve started hunting for a new flat/house to live in and one of the main criteria is that it HAS to be within walking distance of a good pub, or three..

Before I moved out of Hay-on-Wye I always said that I’d never live anywhere that wasn’t within a short walk of a pub, but when I got married for the second time and moved to Cheltenham I ended up doing exactly that.

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13, unlucky for some, or so they say..

Well, I just signed my second divorce petition and returned it to my solicitor today, dated 13th of Feb, on a leap year too, another date that will be easy for me to remember.

Isn’t it strange how numbers are sometimes.

I suspect it’s because the Universe knows that I’m just plain crap at remembering dates, so it’s gone out of the way to try and make things easy for me..

My birthdate is 6/9/69

My wedding anniversay with my first wife (Rach) was the 16th of september, easy to remember as it’s 10 days after my birthday, and then Rach’s birthday is on the 18th, just two days later, even I couldn’t mess that one up.

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This may seem a strange thing to post about here, but there is a reason..

My dad is taking my sister on holiday with him in a couple of months to visit Las Vegas, and it looks like they should choose a hotel other than the Monte Carlo to stay in, as it’s currently on fire!!!

So if Dad’s taking my sister to Vegas, what are me and mum going to do?
well, it’s currently “under discussion”, skiing or scuba..

and if you’re wondering why we don’t all go on a “family” holiday together, let’s just go with “family politics”, or my favorite, “it’s complicated”.

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I was back in my home town of Hay-on-Wye on Friday night to watch my Son Sam turn on the town’s Christmas lights.

He won a competition in school to design a new flag for the town and this was the prize, so there was a big turn out of “clan Garrett” to watch.

Unfortunately I wasn’t quite standing in the right place when the deed was done and ended up getting two photos with the microphone right in the way of Sam’s face…

I think the second photo was worse than the first..

I did manage to get one of him with the Mayor of Hay afterwards,so not a total loss…

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it seems like Gemma, my daughter, has inherited the family traight for enjoying, and possibly even being reasonably good at, art.

When she was staying with me last weekend I caught her “doodling” whilst watching TV and she was generous enough not only to let me see what she’d drawn but give me the original to keep.

I realize that I’m bound to think this, as aproud dad, but I reckon it’s pretty cool…

what do you think?

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I’m a very proud dad tonight.

My son, Sam, Skyped me earlier tongith to tell me he had got some good news today.

There was a competition in his school a little while back for who could design the best flag.

He found out today that he’d won!

and the prize..?

The prize is to turn on the Xmas lights for his home town/village, how cool is that!?!

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Apparently Layla Cox, who did the Conversational Traits Video I posted yesterday, missed one, so here it is: -

are you a “one upper”?

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Well I managed to sneak away for my traditional few days camping with my kids and parents this weekend and, apart from the night we arrived, the weather was perfect, real hot sunny summer weather, at long last…

Here’s a couple of photos of Rhosilli beach to prove it, the quality’s not that good as they were taken on my mobile phone and I had it on the wrong quality setting… (doh!)

as you can see, it wasn’t exactly busy either…

The only downside was that as I’ve not been out in the sun much this year, I went and got myself nice and burnt!

so I ended up spending two days hiding under a towel like a real plonker…

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while I was tidying up some photos on my phone today I found this one of the local Liesure centre under water during the recent floods, it’s a bit dark as I took it on my phone as the light was going, but I think you can see how much water there was…

If you know the liesure center, then you’ll also realise that the swimming pool is on a lower level than the front door that you can see in the photo.

There’s no news yet as to when they will re-open, the damage done must have been pretty bad, and the centre only had a major overhaul last year.

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so much water and no water to use…

If you’ve seen the news you’ve probably seen something about the little bit of water we’ve had here the last few days.

Here’s a photo of what it was like when I as heading home on friday afternoon, before it got really bad:

and it did get quite bad.

We were ok as our house isn’t in a low area, although Ira was stuck in her office until almost midnight as where she works was totally cut off for hours.

There’s a lot of poeple and businesses who have been totally flooded out and have got real problems, so I’m very glad I work from home and didn’t get flooded out.

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