Mike Power's Personal Blog

Will works on the car

2008-10-07T20:17:40Z

Will is making great headway on the MR2. He has completely stripped out the interior and repaired everything that needed repairing, including a very dodgy driver's window mechanism.

Well done son!

Five weeks to go

2008-07-24T21:48:53Z

Everything is moving along nicely and we are due to move on the 28th August. I just hope the good weather keeps up for a while after we move in. I think some of the horror stories about the bad winters are slightly exaggerated but I still expect to get snowed in at some point, in fact I'll be dissapointed if we don't!

Got the new car to collect tomorrow. It's not a Subaru, an Audi or a Golf, which are the cars my son wanted. It's a boring Ford Focus. But it's brand new, it was a good price and they are damn good cars so....tough! To be fair to Will, once he had a good look at it and approved of the low profile tyres and the alloy wheels and the entertainment centre (you know the really important stuff!) he was really quite pleased with it.

The old MR2 is getting rested for the winter. Will is going to start stripping it down and we will be doing a full refurb over the next six months or so (money allowing, of course). Steering rack, track rods, reinforcing bars, brakes, bodywork, respray, new wheels, new steering wheel and some interior refurb and plenty of other things that we haven't even thought of yet. That's about £2.5k so far but, as all MR2 owners will tell you, the paying out never ends....

We're moving!

2008-07-09T07:32:38Z

Tired of life amongst the piss-heads, pukers and car wing-mirror vandals of Aberdeen City as well as the diesel fumes and traffic, we've decided to move to somewhere a little more, ahem, isolated. I think the images below sum up the change of scenery quite well. I just hope the postman can find us.

The picture is slightly misleading. There is a road and there are other properties close by...two houses and a farm! No mains water (we've got our own supply) and no mains drainage (it all goes into a septic tank).

Check out some pictures of the house and views HERE

On The Beach

2008-04-27T15:39:13Z

Will and I at the beach.

Off to the smoke

2008-04-26T21:37:26Z

Sandra's off to London tomorrow. She's going to stay with my daughter in Surrey for Sunday night and then travel into central London for her interview on Monday morning. The interview will take about 90 minutes and getting to it will have involved a round trip of over 800 miles and about 18 hours travelling in trains at a cost of around £130. If she gets through this one there are two more interviews and a whole day of assessments lined up. They don't fuck about at this level.

There will be plenty of top notch candidates for this job so, realistically, the odds are against her but she'll give it a damn good shot and we'll see what happens.

Prepare for boarding

2008-04-03T23:23:12Z

Will's friends are coming up from Kent for a fortnight. Only three of them this time. They are great lads and I enjoy having them here. The energy levels in the house rocket! They arrive by plane (ooh, how awful, end of the world, doom, warming, CO2 etc. blah, blah, bollocks) on Saturday afternoon.

Will has spent the week washing bedding, shampooing carpets and cushions and generally cleaning and tidying prior to their arrival. Anything that gets a 17 year old doing that can't be bad.

The local shop keeper will be happy. They spent a fortune in his shop last time they were here, mostly on sweets, crisps and Irn Brew.

I'm hoping another one of Will's friends, now living in the north of England, will pop up for a few days. He was one of the gang until he moved up north to live with his father. His mother died last year and we haven't seen him since then. He's a nice lad and it would be great to see him again.

Sandra and I have been lucky with our children's friends. They have all been really great lads and the older ones have grown into good, decent men.

It's much easier for young people to stay in contact today than it was when I was growing up. Typically, you lost touch after leaving school and your friends went on to marry, have children and, often, move away from the area. Now they can stay in touch from every corner of the world and can follow each other's antics on social networks. That aspect of the new technology is incredibly positive and only those, like me,who are old enough to remember the days before the internet, mobile phones and digital cameras can really appreciate that.

Well done son!

2008-03-17T17:47:56Z

Will built his latest computer this afternoon. The bits arrived by courier at 3pm and he had it up and running by 4-45pm. He hasn't installed any OS yet. He's going to load Windows XP (NOT Vista!) and Mac OS X Leopard (Developer) later. It's not as high spec as his main machine but then this is really just a spare which we hope Sandra will use rather than hogging my Mac. She has a laptop but, she 'doesn't like using it' - more waste of taxpayer's money (together with her new Blackberry, which never leaves the house).

Using our old keyboard and mouse, a £12 monitor bought on eBay and a free case he got from a fellow student in exchange for sorting out his network, the total costs came in at under £200 - including new fans. We should get a few quid back for the old spare parts so, all in all, a pretty inexpensive deal for a well specced (no crap parts) computer. Well done son!

Beam me up

2008-03-13T11:35:17Z

We are in a holding pattern at the moment. Sandra is applying for jobs in England and we are praying that we will be able to get out of this damn place before the year is out.

Aberdeen City Council is in crisis. It was dominated by unbroken Labour control for 63 years, up until the elections last year. It is mired in debt and facing bancruptcy. This state of affairs hasn't developed overnight, as you can imagine, but successive councils have refused to bite the bullet and do anything about it. Now Labour has the chutzpah to berate the SNP and Lid-dems for cutting services in order to avoid complete financial collapse, a collapse that Labour must have seen coming for years. Tossers!

Whatever happens shit will hit fan. And we want to be well away from this dysfunctional city when it does. But the stress of waiting for an exit plan is a bloody pain. I've got bubbly and a big fuck-off Cuban cigar for the moment we know for certain that we are out of here. I can't wait.

Valentine's Day

2008-02-14T14:13:50Z

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Man's best friend

2008-02-13T02:54:36Z

This is the little Parsons Jack Russell that befriended us at Cruden Bay yesterday afternoon (yes, I know it looks nothing like a JR but the owner assured me that is what it is!). Will and I went for a drive at lunchtime and ended up at this delightful little village on the coast. I love going there. The sandy beaches are almost always deserted and there is something wonderfully relaxing about listening to the waves crashing against the harbour wall. The little dog ran over to us before we could even get out of the car and stuck around for the hour or so we were there. He was a bundle of energy and a great little fellow. His owner is a regular there, so I'm sure we'll meet up again.